Warrior's Gate

“It’ll be All White on the Night”, “Tossers”, “Doctor Who and the Cheap Set”

“The One with the Lion Faced Man” (USA), “Doktor Wer Und Der Weisse Backen Droppen” (Holland)

Doctor Who and Romana stop some men from breaking a mirror because that would be seven years bad luck.

*** - I understand it because I’m clever. Maybe.

Romana: “I’m not coming with you”
Doctor: “I believe that is traditional with wives”

"One good solid pant's worth a cart-load of lingeries"

Lalla Ward marked her departure by encouraging her fellow cast members to give blood. She never explained what she wanted the blood for.

K9’s departure was caused by his incessant demands. By the time the E Space trilogy came along he was requesting that his dressing room contain two vacuum cleaners and a new fangled VCR (for alleged sexual purposes) and that the BBC buy him genuine WD40 rather than a substitute that cost two pence per gallon less.

Matthew Waterhouse’s new nickname was “the god forsaken midget”

John Leeson is the father of convicted fraudster Nick “Hugh Grant” Leeson and regularly amused his cellmates with K9 impressions.

JNT notes in his memoirs that he found the idea behind Warrior’s Gate appealed to his artistic side and the limited sets appealed to his accountant side. He didn’t mention what side the guards wielding huge choppers appealed to.

The plot of this story was leaked on the Internet a week before transmission but the only people who noticed were two American generals (who preferred Lost in Space) and Al Gore (who used the political undertones as the basis of his Presidential campaign).

Tom Baker was asked to leave Television Centre after an incident where he told the hosts of Pebble Mill to “Kiss my bollocks” when he wandered into the wrong studio. The BBC Director of Daytime Standards apologised to the Pebble Mill viewers in a scene eerily similar to Lorraine Heggessey apologising for Blue Peter star Richard Baker’s drug fuelled hell.

...is that stories which are more moral than story aren't very good.

Si Hunt

A lot of people often want to ask me whether I consider the “departure” scene from the final act of Story 5S to be an accurate portrayal of the loss of a fully qualified friend. Thus far they have been too awestruck to actually ask me the question but I can see it in their eyes as they flee in floods of tears. Well, speaking as an authority on both “emotion” and “friends”, I have concluded that it is a reasonable summary of the list one feels at such a moment. Some years ago I was joint equal co-manager of “Outpost Bendaton” with a thoroughly sensible fellow called Cresswell (it still causes a strange feeling in my stomach acid to mention his first name – Brian. There goes another chunk of my gastric lining).

Having worked together for some time, we had formed a mutual bond of professional admiration – I considered him more than able to sort “New Adventures” novels by their ISBN without taking his blindfold off and he trusted me to make him coffee eight times a day without forgetting the formula. On occasions we even slept “over” in the shop to prevent burglars from breaking in and stealing all the valuable products even though we only owned one sleeping bag between us and the zip was notoriously prone to sticking when the bag exceeded its weight limit.

So it came as something of a disappointment when I got to work one day and Cresswell told me – face to face in a letter – that he was leaving to do something else somewhere else. It was literally the same scenario as Story 5S but with the added value of not being scripted television set in a scientifically impossible mini universe. Cresswell even took the rather battered K9 birthday cake I had given him a few days earlier with him to add verisimilitude to my subsequent comparison. Francois Devine was responsible for the battering as he somehow managed to overcome the exclusion order I’d obtained (a magistrate kindly ruling he couldn’t got within ten yards of the cake on pain of gaol) by learning how to operate a tea spoon telekinetically.

The "E-Space Void" did an entire issue about Warriors Gate which, as a clever joke, was printed in white ink on white paper. The subscriber's laughed heartily at this wonderful conceit and, after a series of bitter and angry letters, played a similar joke on the editor by completing their subscription renewal forms in white ink. A rumour circulated that DWB had tried something similar but it turned out they'd simply decided to use a 4pt font that month.