Countdown to 60: Back to the Future

It's the end, but the moment was always prepared for. Finally reached No.60...

I had assumed when I started these that the first of the Specials would have fallen on 23/11/2023. It won't be screened until Saturday, but tomorrow is still "Doctor Who Day".

(I also never thought that these posts would be so big, as the theme of each triggered a more substantial essay nine times out of ten).

This one is mercifully brief. 

In October last year, the BBC celebrated its centenary, and we were presented with the final story from Jodie Whittaker and from Chris Chibnall. The Power of the Doctor was an opportunity to look back as well as forward. We had appearances from two ex-companions in significant roles, with cameos from several others. We also got to see a number of old Doctors.

The regeneration was a mix of forward and backward looking, as the Thirteenth became the Fourteenth - but the latter looked and sounded just like the Tenth...

The previous anniversary story had also seen a mix of nostalgia and forward looking. It was another "Three Doctors", which looked back to another earlier incarnation (the War Doctor), and included an ex-companion (or at least the Bad Wolf version of Rose). Day of the Doctor also saw the eventual return of the Zygons, not seen since 1975. As far as the future was concerned, we had Gallifrey reinstated (albeit briefly) and our first glimpse of the Twelfth Doctor.

The Five Doctors was designed to be nostalgic, with first Robert Holmes then Terrance Dicks being handed a lengthy "shopping list" of elements to include. It was more about reminding the audience about the journey already taken

But the real The Three Doctors had also mixed the past with the future - in that the current Doctor was granted his freedom from exile at the conclusion.

Anniversaries are primarily about nostalgia and celebrating the history of the series. But they are also, for the most part, about looking forward to the future...

Can't wait for Countdown to 70...

Countdown to 60: (Dis)Continuity

A double one this - the 58th and 59th items in the Countdown to 60. I've decided to join them together as the first leads inexorably into the second...

As we mentioned the last time, Chris Chibnall had steered clear of continuity throughout his first series in charge. The series concluded with a lukewarm finale which was a real let-down. One of his failings throughout had been "tell, don't show" and an episode with a battle in the title, which opens after said battle is finished, is guaranteed to be anti-climactic (not the thing you want for an event episode). Stealing ideas from Douglas Adams didn't help either...

Coming only a few week's after The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos, a lot of fans prefer to think of Resolution as the real series finale. This brought the Daleks back - or at least a single specimen of the race. Chibnall manged to do something new with them, by having this one forced to construct a temporary casing out of scrap metal. 

Unfortunately we then had a year long gap in production, but when the series returned it was with a regenerated Master in its opening story, and a visit to Gallifrey - destroyed by the Master for some reason. Publicity images had already revealed that the Judoon would be back later in the series, and Cybermen were spotted on location by some fans. 

After a dearth of familiar elements, Series 12 was going to include lots of returning elements.

Unfortunately, Chibnall would stick with the Daleks for all three of his New Year stories, and they and the Cybermen would be back in Flux, along with Weeping Angels, and an Ood.

Chibnall went further with redesigned Sontarans and Sea Devils. Unlike Moffat, Chibnall respected their original designs and refused to make major changes.

His final story featured the very first Master-Dalek-Cyberman get-together.

Considering that he only ran two and a bit seasons, one of which featured zero continuity, by the time he departed Chibnall had given us the Master, Daleks - with their own mini-continuity - Cybermen, Sontarans, Weeping Angels, Ood, and Sea Devils.

It should have been a golden age - but one of these stories triggered the most divisive concept in the series' history...

Mention The Timeless Child and the vast majority of fans will scowl and prefer you didn't. I use the term "vast majority" advisedly, as - if the internet is anything to go by - the haters outnumber the likers.

True, haters might be more vocal and only appear to be in the majority, but I've done my homework and have found that far more people disliked it than loved it.

Even the accepters would rather Chibnall hadn't done it.

The sad fact is that there was never any need for it. We all love the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, but they made a few cock-ups between them. Holmes thought that the Time Lords had been behind all of the Doctor's adventures to date, for instance. The pair also thought that there had been Doctors before the Hartnell incarnation, and this was written into The Brain of Morbius.

The Three Doctors had already made it explicit that there had only ever been those three.

The faces seen in the mental duel between the Doctor and Morbius could easily be explained away as incarnations of the latter. They are the last thing we see just before he loses, so as far as fans were concerned these were earlier incarnations of Morbius.

Fugitive of the Judoon, whilst adding to continuity with a returning monster, begins to mess with it in a major way. We had already seen a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor in The Name / Day of the Doctor - but he had derived from within the Doctor's established timeline - between what we knew of as the Eighth and Ninth Doctors. Holmes and Saward had also given us the Valeyard back in 1986 - a future incarnation, so again one that could be contained within the established timeline.

At first glance, the Fugitive Doctor appears to be another such incarnation. She has a TARDIS in the shape of a Police Box for instance, and it only got stuck in that form after Totter's Lane.

The problem was, the Doctor clearly couldn't fit this incarnation into her timeline as she remembered it...

The resolution came in The Timeless Children, where it was revealed that the Doctor wasn't even a Time Lord. She was an immortal orphan from another universe who had fallen into this one, and been found by a Gallifreyan who then reverse-engineered her, genetically, to give her people the ability to regenerate. Her life since she looked like William Hartnell was simply that which she recalled. 

Prior to that there had been innumerable incarnations, who each had their memory wiped. She had also been a soldier / security officer - a member of some Black Ops Gallifreyan agency known as The Division.

Part of Chibnall's reasoning was that any child, of any ethnicity or gender, could be just like the Doctor. He also felt that he was opening up the format - suggesting that he found the established set-up as being constrictive in some way. No-one before him had ever thought this way.

Things could have been worse. A lot of people who would have hated all this had already stopped watching...

In the aftermath of the "Davros Controversy", here's something (by Jonathan Morris) I just read in the new DWM special 60 Moments in Time, pertaining to continuity:

"It's about maintaining the world of the series, making sure that the stuff the audience has been told to care about doesn't get contradicted or forgotten. Because when it is, it breaks the bond of trust between the writer and viewer".

"They (the showrunner) know it inside out - and know to check if not sure. Because if they start changing things that have already been established, they risk breaking the entire universe".

Someone tell RTD2...

Countdown to 60: The Tedium of the Daleks

Series 11 proved to be great disappointment to fans for a number of reasons, one of which was the lack of continuity to the series' past which, if handled properly, was always popular.

Television from the 1990's, especially in the US, had favoured the story-arc approach. A long running series would have an over-arching narrative, but individual seasons might have their own self-contained arcs, with the villain(s) being defeated in the season finale but with the overall story still to be fully told. Often, a cliff-hanger ending would set up the next individual season arc, or the next stage of the overall narrative.

One major problem with this was the mercenary attitude of the TV networks, for whom viewer numbers and advertising were paramount (no pun intended). If a series wasn't performing as well as hoped, it would be axed with no opportunity for its makers to devise a satisfactory conclusion. Personally, I used never to even start watching a genre series if I already knew that the season would end on an unresolved cliff-hanger.

Some series like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the first three new Star Trek iterations were allowed to run to a natural conclusion. Babylon 5 only managed this by compressing its ending when it looked like it was going to be axed. All of the Star Trek shows had run to seven seasons, but Enterprise was ended after only four, with a much derided final episode.

Doctor Who had had run for 26 years, but had never been beholden to continuity other than the basics of the series - a Time Lord travelling through space and time with a selection of (mostly) human companions, fighting alien threats.

It had some recurring characters and monsters, but precious few proper sequels.

RTD was a self-confessed Buffy-phile, and made it clear that he favoured this type of series structure.

The revived series would see the 45 minute, mostly self-contained episodes, with the odd two-parter and a season-long story arc. RTD also had an eye to a longer arc - that which would see the return of the Master and the eventual regeneration of the Tenth Doctor.

Steven Moffat followed with a similar structure - individual season arcs, forming part of a longer overall narrative. Things introduced in The Eleventh Hour would not see their final resolution until Time of the Doctor.

When Chibnall took over, he seemed to turn his back on story arcs. It looked like one might be developing with the Stenza appearing in his first episode, then getting a mention in the second, but this came to nothing. We only had a return appearance by T'zim Sha in the lukewarm finale, and they never made any other appearance.

It was only with his first festive special - now shifted to New Year - that we saw a returning element from the past. This was a Dalek.

They were the most famous returnees of all iterations of the series, and had helped to launch the series in the first place - in terms of popularising it.

They featured in Season 1, returned twice in Season 2, and their two appearances in Season 3 were combined to form one big story. Season 4 saw them back for two separate stories. Had it not been for Terry Nation's obsession with America, and the rapacity of his agent, we would probably have seen at least one Dalek story in Seasons 5 - 8.

It was only when Hinchcliffe and Holmes took over that we had a conscious move away from old enemies. Towards the end of the original run, the Daleks were used more sparingly, with the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors encountering them just the once each.

Daleks were so synonymous with Doctor Who that everyone assumed they would feature when the series returned in 2005. The BBC even announced it without checking with the Nation estate, which almost scuppered things for the first series. Jane Tranter assumed that they would be featured in the opening episode, but RTD insisted they be held back in case the series struggled to launch and a mid-season reboot was necessary.

Each of his series had a Dalek story, and he would have continued this up to his departure had Moffat not informed him he wanted to use them in his first season. This is why they are absent from the 2009 specials, other than for a cameo appearance. Following the adverse reaction to the radical Teletubby redesign, they were confined to just another cameo in Series 6, but were back for Series 7 and the concluding stories of the Matt Smith era (which were tied closely to the Time War).

As mentioned, we had to wait until the first New Year Special for the return of any classic monster in the Chibnall era. Rather predictably it was the Dalek. He did at least try to do something original with them by having an especially powerful lone Dalek, with a new makeshift, scrap metal, design.

Chibnall then had several returnees in his second series - the Master, Judoon and Cybermen all making an appearance.

The Daleks were reserved for the next New Year Special. And the next...

The festive specials attract a different sort of audience, and should see non-fans tuning in - but the audience figures slid. It had become predictable, and we saw the law of diminishing returns in action.

With the arrival of RTD2, we have all been hoping for a series renaissance. He's starting off with the diamond anniversary episodes which are bringing back David Tennant and Catherine Tate's Donna Noble, albeit for three nights only, adapting a classic DWW comic strip, and reviving the Celestial Toymaker.

He has also agreed with the majority of us that the Daleks have been overused of late, and has announced that he has no plans to have them return unless he has a very good reason for doing so.

We're promised a return to Skaro for Children in Need, but just for 5 minutes or so. After that, there's no plans for a Dalek story for Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor as far as we know, and certainly none have been seen during filming, which is now well into the 2025 series.

Unless they've been involved in some all-studio story, it looks like we will be having some respite from them, which can only make their eventual return something a little more special...

Countdown to 60: For "he" write "she"...

I find myself sharing thoughts with Russell T Davies this last week, which is nice. A day after I wrote about the jumping-off points for those who might not like the way the programme is going, I received the latest DWM. In his regular column, there was RTD2 writing along similar lines. He refers to "seismic shifts", which I've covered before in these anniversary posts. Like me, he suggests that you don't allow yourself to get too worked up about changes, as something new - hopefully more palatable - will be along shortly to replace them.

Without doubt, the biggest seismic shifts in the history of the series to date fall in the Chibnall era. (It could have been the half-human reveal of the TV Movie, but by failing to go to series to build on this notion we were simply able to ignore it). Chibnall's first upheaval is obviously the casting of the programme's first ever female Doctor after 55 years or so.

As we've said when considering the arrival of Missy, Chibnall's big move wasn't as radical as he'd have liked. He may not have given us the first lady Doctor but Steven Moffat had carried out all the groundwork with the female incarnation of the Master, and later the regeneration of the Time Lord General.

We could go back over the arguments about the nature and semantics of gender - but we won't, for that way madness lies. (Being female for five minutes doesn't necessarily make you a woman as you're devoid of the life experiences, prejudices and socio-political history which accompanies this. A lot of the pro- and anti-trans arguments revolve around this).

The Woman Who Fell To Earth does more than just change the gender of the Doctor. Chibnall elected to move the series away from its natural home on a Saturday evening; he decided not to feature the TARDIS at all, saving the reveal of the new design until the following week; and he also deferred the debut of the new opening titles.

The episode began a shorter season, but one with longer episodes, and there was much talk about the new camera equipment that was being deployed.

We also had the introduction of three new companions, supposedly reflecting the original TARDIS line-up - but ignoring the fact that Lambert and Whitaker had 48 episodes per season to play with, and even then characters like Susan went undeveloped.

In actual fact, when you look at it closely, The Woman Who Fell To Earth was not all that radical. A female Doctor attracted high audience figures - but they rapidly fell away over the next few weeks (disastrously so over the course of the season, week by week). Other than a female actor in the lead role, little else had really changed. Much bigger "seismic shifts" would follow soon enough...

Countdown to 60: Full Circle

The Doctor Falls ended not with a regeneration as planned, but with two imminent regenerations - as we were to see culminate a few weeks later in Twice Upon A Time. 

Series 10 ended with a regenerating Doctor refusing to die. He's in a frozen, icy landscape and someone approaches through the mist - none other than his first incarnation. We'll then discover that this is Antarctica, December 1986, and we're seeing the current Doctor interact with his predecessor immediately prior to his own regeneration. Neither Doctors wish to go through with it - the current because he hasn't lived long enough and is getting a bit fed up with these relatively short incarnations, and the First because it's his first time, and he's basically a stubborn old goat in this incarnation.

If the series' opener - The Pilot - was supposed to be jumping-on point for new viewers, then you could argue that Twice Upon A Time was an ideal jumping-off point for those who might be resistant to the changes which were afoot from Chris Chibnall (and there were many).

The current Doctor meeting the First Doctor does offer the opportunity to close the series, as it turns full circle.

I suspect that quite a few people stop their DVD / Blu-ray just at the point when the regeneration takes place and elect to draw a line under the series.

Whether they've left for good, or if they'll start their discs back up again with the moment David Tennant emerges from the shiny yellow CGI effect for the second time, who knows...

Twice before we've had 'natural' endings to the series - points where you could allow it to end in a fairly satisfactory manner. The first would be when we all thought it genuinely was the ending - the Doctor and Ace wandering off into the distance at the close of Survival. The other was the Doctor setting off for adventures new at the end of the 1996 TV movie.

In both cases, the series is left open-ended, so it can be picked up again at some future time (which is exactly what did happen).

Maybe because we knew there would be another season in a few months' time (because a BBC continuity announcer told us so) previous season endings didn't have quite the same potential for finality about them.

For me, who sat through The Twin Dilemma, Timelash, The Tsuranga Conundrum and Orphan 55, there never will be a jumping-off point. I take the programme good or bad. No change of lead actor or showrunner will deter me from following the series. The thing about it is that it is forever changing. If it hits a bad patch, just be patient and something different will come along before too long. I've already heard rumours that Ncuti Gatwa might only want to play the Doctor for a couple of years, and he's already lining up future work. People take the rush to film two whole series before he's even debuted as proof of this. I suspect that, because he's such an in-demand actor at the moment, they simply want to have a series in the can for when he wants to take time off to do a theatre run and thus avoid a gap year - something RTD2 has promised won't happen.

We're promised at least two full seasons, plus spin-offs, so I think the future looks secure for now.

No need to jump ship.

Countdown to 60: One Doctor, Two Masters...

We'd seen multi-Doctor stories before, but for his and Peter Capaldi's intended swansong Steven Moffat gave us the first multi-Master story. It's more like The Two Doctors than The Three or Five Doctors, in that it only features certain incarnations, rather than trying to cram them all in, and they feature in a conventional story as opposed to a big anniversary special - albeit a season finale.

The choice of Masters is a purely practical one. Other than Eric Roberts, who is never out of work if the number of movies he makes every year is anything to go by, all but one of the classic era actors is dead - and that is the only briefly seen interim Master from The Keeper of Traken, Geoffrey Beevers.

He's done quite a few audios, but his incarnation has only very limited potential for TV appearances.

There were only ever two significant Master actors, and they were Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley.

Here we have Missy (Michelle Gomez), the current incarnation, encountering the Saxon (John Simm) version. It wasn't immediately obvious that this was her previous incarnation, but this was confirmed towards the end of The Doctor Falls.

The story simply wouldn't have worked had Missy retained memories of this other self, because the pair will fall out of love with each other after their initial spell of self-adoration.

When Doctors get together, the dynamic is always mildly antagonistic - they're jealous of, and want to outdo, each other. They always come across as individual characters, though. It can be difficult to see them as aspects of the same person.

When the two 'Masters' get together, it's an entirely different dynamic. At times they flirt with each other, but mostly the impression we're given is of a pair of malevolent siblings.

Each brings out the worst in the other. Missy's rehabilitation is apparently undone within seconds of meeting her earlier self.

It's only fitting that the two come to dislike each other - it's in their nature not to trust anyone, and that includes themself. 

For her, he symbolises everything that she has come to see as wrong about herself, having taken on board the Doctor's rehabilitation. For him, she is a traitor to his true nature - an aberration which must be wiped from his own personal history, even if it's his future history.

So, when it comes to their parting in the forest it comes as no surprise that they kill each other. Ironically, her actions are the very thing which will bring her into being. She is inevitable.

What is odd is that the Master had, from the very beginning, a powerful sense of self-preservation. Suicide is never in his nature, so he will rapidly join forces with his oldest enemy if it means his survival when warned that the Nestene etc. will turn on him as soon as they conquer the Earth.

Later we'll see him cling to life after his regenerations have been used up, quite prepared to destroy Gallifrey just to extend his lifespan. 

In Last of the Time Lords he wills his own death, but we'll later discover that's he's prepared a resurrection for himself.

In The Doctor Falls, he puts his own particular incarnation first and endeavours to kill Missy in such a way that she can never regenerate again - which is a form of suicide.

It doesn't fit his usual frame of mind.

As it will later transpire, he fails in his efforts as we've now had a new incarnation (presumably the one which followed Missy, though that's never made explicit). He may have failed to kill himself, but at least his most recent incarnation is a Time Lord after his own hearts - a crazed genocidal maniac, shorn of the Doctor's "improvements". 

He won after all. Heck, he even finally got round to destroying Gallifrey, but that's another story...

Countdown to 60: Heaven and Hell

David Tennant may be a hugely popular performer, with considerable range (compare his performance in the Fright Night remake with his depiction of serial killer Dennis Nielson). Christopher Eccleston is one of the country's great contemporary actors. But for me, the most accomplished actor to have portrayed the Doctor is Peter Capaldi.

I've already mentioned some of Capaldi's "hero" moments in another post in this series - "Hello Stonehenge" - but it's worth looking at Heaven Sent in its own right as one of the programme's finest episodes, ever.

It's not typical of the series. It's not even typical of the Moffat era. It's not typical of the Capaldi era. It's not even typical of Series 10.

We are promised an episode unlike any other on 2nd December 2023, with the broadcast of Wild Blue Yonder. Rumour has it, it's a two-hander with just a robot character keeping the Doctor and Donna company as they're trapped on a spaceship for an hour.

If that's the case, it can't really be all that novel as Moffat and Capaldi gave us a single-hander back in 2018.

Heaven Sent follows directly on from Face the Raven, in which the Doctor has just seen Clara killed, and he manoeuvred into a trap by some unknown enemy.

In the next episode, he's trapped in a bizarre castle - a deserted Gormenghast. Whilst he struggles with his grief, he has to contend with working out the mystery of this place, which isn't as empty as he first thought. There's a monstrous shrouded figure inexorably hunting him down. It only relents when he says something which is true, when the castle resets itself and the hunt commences all over again.

The thing following him, he identifies as a horrible childhood memory embodied.

Events climax when the Doctor reaches a wall of crystal, harder than diamond. Whatever his goal is, it lies beyond this wall.

Watching this for the first time, ignorant of the plot, we expect the story to move forward from here, but the Doctor is caught and apparently killed by the figure - only to reappear back where he started at the beginning of the episode.

It really throws the viewer, who might have been starting to gather what was going on. Not only does the sequence repeat itself, but we then see the same thing happen over and over again. 

Things start to fall into place. The change in the stars, and the ever increasing mound of skulls in the ocean surrounding the castle.

The Doctor takes short breaks in his "mind palace", as Sherlock had already termed it. For him it's the TARDIS, where he sees Clara who seems to give him hints.

I won't say any more about the plot. Reading Facebook comments about the recent uploading of the back catalogue to the BBC i-Player, it is clear that a great many "fans" have rather large gaps in their viewing of the series. (To have not felt the need to seek out and watch every single episode of Doctor Who is unthinkable to me).

Throughout Heaven Sent we have only Capaldi's remarkable performance, accompanied by Murray Gold's music. One piece in particular stands out - The Shepherd Boy, which is his masterpiece.

I've always liked Gold's scores, ever since RTD's Queer as Folk, and own the soundtracks up to Series 9. 

The combination of Capaldi's performance, Moffat's writing, and Gold's score make Heaven Sent a brilliant Doctor Who story. 

Atypical, and not the sort of thing you could do very often, it deserved to be one of the top two stories of this Doctor's era in the recent DWM 60th Anniversary polling - which means that it will go forward to the final poll to determine the very best. I gave it a 10. 

Unfortunately, the episode led onto probably the worst of the Capaldi stories - but it can't be blamed for that. Only Moffat can.

Wild Blue Yonder will have to pull a few rabbits out of a few hats if it's to challenge Heaven Sent as a truly remarkable and unique instalment of Doctor Who...

Countdown to 60: Monster Men

It's time now to pay homage to the men behind the monsters, for what would Doctor Who be without its monsters?

This post was inspired by the remarkable performance by Julian Bleach as Davros in The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar. He was a guest artist, performing a significant role in the story, following in the footsteps of the likes of Stephen Dartnell who played Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord - the series' first ever individual alien character - and Peter Glaze, who was the villainous City Administrator of The Sensorites. Later we had Bernard Bresslaw's Varga, quite literally head and shoulders above his Ice Warrior minions, or Michael Kilgarriff's Cyber-Controller or K1 Robot.

When Hinchcliffe and Holmes took over the series, they made a conscious move away from the ranks of generic monsters, usually seen battling UNIT, to feature only a single individual of the species - a representative character with whom the Doctor could interact.

Names like Michael Wisher, Peter Pratt, Gabriel Woolf, Kevin Lindsay, Christopher Robbie, Michael Spice, Stephen Thorne, Martin Friend, Judith Parris are all well-known to fans, despite the rubber and latex.

But what of the unsung monster performers, who often backed up these "hero" monsters?

Just for a change, this is a photo-essay, focussing on the earliest years of the series - images of the likes of Jack Pitt, Tony Harwood and John Scott Martin, bringing the monsters to life...

From the top: The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Web Planet (Jack Pitt on the right), The Chase (Robert Jewell), Power of the Daleks (John Scott Martin - the real "Dalek Supreme"), Tomb of the Cybermen (including Gregg Palmer and John Maxim), The Abominable Snowmen (Tony Harwood on right), The Invasion, and The War Games (Pat Gorman as the Cyberman and Tony Harwood as the Ice Warrior):

Countdown to 60: You so fine

Both showrunners had sown the seeds with the odd comment that implied the Doctor had once been female - despite other occasions in which it was confirmed that we'd seen all the Doctors there were to see - but it was only with The Doctor's Wife that we learned that a Time Lord could have both male and female incarnations. This was in the form of references to one known as the Corsair. Whilst the Doctors often made flippant remarks about their past, designed to provoke a reaction, it certainly sounded as if it was a simple statement of fact that the Corsair had changed gender.

The revived series had stated that the Time Lords were gone, and the Doctor was last of his kind - until RTD introduced the concept of the Chameleon Arch, which could mask a Time Lord's biological identity by rewriting it to make them physically and psychologically human. Thus, it was possible to have the Master survive.

John Simm played the role opposite David Tennant, and pretty much ruled himself out of further appearances by claiming he was associated with Tennant and when he left, so would he. (He would change his mind by 2013, as he was a little upset not to be asked to participate in the 50th).

Meanwhile, fans were continually clamouring for the return of other Time Lords, now it had been shown how it could be done without messing up post-Time War continuity.

Top of the list, for some unfathomable reason, was the Rani.

Personally, I've never understood this. She only featured in two stories - an okay one with Colin Baker in which she was rather side-lined by the pointless addition of the Master, and then the debut story for Sylvester McCoy, which is rubbish.

The character had worked in Mark of the Rani as she was clearly more than just a female Master figure. She had no designs on ruling the universe, but was instead an amoral scientist whose villainy derived from her low opinion of human beings. We were just lab rats to be experimented on and exploited.

Time and the Rani, despite being written by her creators, changed her character for the worse. Whilst still engaged in unethical experiments and treating lower orders as lab rats, she was presented as just another megalomaniacal super-villain. She had become the very thing which the Bakers had avoided last time - a female Master.

When he decided to bring the Master back in 2014, Steven Moffat knew he had carte blanche to do something new with the character. He could have considered bringing back the Rani - using the old Chameleon Arch trick or some weird science of her own. He could also have created an entirely new female villain character, but he elected instead to have the first female incarnation of a major Time Lord figure.

In Dark Water, he actually toyed with us first by having her use the acronym RANI when pretending to be an AI construct to the Doctor - Random Access Neural Integrator.

It had previously been claimed that Time Lords were supposed to recognise each other, but this rule seems to have been set aside. The Doctor clearly doesn't recognise that this is his old enemy. She has to point it out to him, stating that she could no longer call herself "Master" - hence Missy.

(Actually, as an academic title she could have continued to use her old nom-de-guerre, but the word has other usages relating to the ownership or control over people, where it is very much a male title).

The Rani would never have been as mad as Missy, so the characters would never have been interchangeable - so she doesn't necessarily preclude the Rani from making a return some day.

If RTD2 chooses to do this, then he really needs to make sure she isn't simple a clone of Missy - otherwise what would be the point? Besides, Michelle Gomez has had a break from the character for a few years. It would be interesting to see how she reacted to a new Doctor (a pity Chibnall never had her meet a female Doctor, but then I really liked Dhawan's incarnation). Imagine what a Thirteenth Doctor, River Song, Missy story would have looked like?

If the Saxon Master can make a comeback years after his departure, then so might Missy.

Countdown to 60: Many Happy Returns

During the making of An Unearthly Child actress Eileen Way had a bet with William Hartnell that Doctor Who wouldn't last more than a few months. The star was insistent that it would last 5 years. He was right, though he would no longer be working on the series when that landmark was reached - and he never did get his money as he and Way never worked together again. 

The Fifth Anniversary wasn't marked by the series (it fell halfway through The Invasion). It wasn't until the Tenth Anniversary that any big celebration was held, with the first multi-Doctor story opening the tenth season and an attempt made to replicate the longest ever story. Director Douglas Camfield talked Barry Letts out of that attempt, due to his experiences in 1965/6, so they went for two connected six-part stories instead. 

Radio Times produced a special edition, and Blue Peter inadvertently saved some clips from now lost episodes. Other TV programmes like Pebble Mill and Nationwide covered the event.

The next landmark was the fifteenth year, which just happened to coincide with the 100th story. These were marked during the Key to Time season in 1978 with a number of TV appearances. A jokey birthday scene in the TARDIS at the beginning of The Stones of Blood was vetoed at the last minute by then producer Graham Williams. They'd got as far as buying a cake and blocking out the scene when the axe fell. The cake was eaten anyway. A party was held at the BBC (below), but the programme itself failed to acknowledge the event.

The Twentieth Anniversary was the next big public celebration, with another multi-Doctor story, and another Radio Times Special. A huge, chaotic, event was held at Longleat House, with an equally chaotic convention in Chicago for US fans on the weekend of the anniversary itself. As well as being badly organised, this convention - and the decision to broadcast The Five Doctors in America before we got to see it in Britain - led fans to complain about JNT's US bias.

The final significant anniversary of the classic era was the 25th, which was more of a low key event. The season running order was rigged to allow Silver Nemesis to commence its run on 23rd November 1988, but there was little acknowledgement beyond the series itself. 

By the time the 30th rolled round, the series had been off the air for four years, with the BBC refusing to say it had been cancelled. It was simply resting whilst an independent partner could be found to produce it. Another multi-Doctor special was attempted - "The Dark Dimension" - but the people behind it hadn't done their sums properly, and the surviving Doctors whose initials weren't TB complained about how little they had to do in the script. We did get something, however, but most of us would rather we hadn't. Dimensions in Time was a bit of a disaster, but it was all done for charity, and it was stressed that it would never be broadcast again, or released on video. It never has, though it can still be found on YouTube. 

The 40th Anniversary was marked only with a themed night on BBC2, and a Royal Mail stamp.

Since the revival, we've had a couple of landmarks which have been acknowledged subtly within the programme. The 50th new episode saw the story's vehicle named the Crusader 50, and the London bus which is transported to the planet of San Helios in the 200th story is a number 200 service.

The big celebration came in 2013, with the 50th Anniversary. Lots of TV coverage, but sadly no Radio Times special... Once again we were given a multi-Doctor adventure, but with a difference. Instead of all surviving Doctors we had a new The Three Doctors, but with just the trio of the revival. Christopher Eccleston opted not to return, however, so a hitherto unknown incarnation - the War Doctor - was devised to replace him. This at least allowed for a big name cameo in John Hurt.

If The Day of the Doctor was intended to celebrate fifty years of Doctor Who then it didn't actually achieve that. It was far more a celebration of the revived series. It was only in the final scenes that we got the earlier incarnations involved,  with their coming together to save Gallifrey, plus that final image which I chose to illustrate this post.

We're currently on the eve of the next big anniversary, but before that we had another birthday to celebrate - that of the BBC itself. Despite the shoddy way in which the Corporation has often treated the series over the years, Doctor Who was selected to form a significant part of this event. Chris Chibnall, having been apparently given the heave-ho before he could get to the 60th, used the opportunity to make The Power of the Doctor a diamond anniversary story a year early. We had all the top villains battle old companions and there were appearances from several previous incarnations of the Doctor. There was no reference to the BBC centenary whatsoever. 

It looks like that is more likely to be acknowledged in one of RTD2's forthcoming specials.

9th December 2023 sees the return of the Celestial Toymaker in The Giggle, and in some of the clips we've seen a creepy looking puppet. That's 'Stooky Bill', which John Logie Baird used to test his experimental television equipment.

The other thing to say about the 60th Specials is that, so far at least, there's no sign of any  multi-Doctor set up. Instead, like Moffat for the 50th, we're revisiting the highlights of the revived series, with the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

Whilst much is known of the new Specials (like the plot of the first one, for anyone who remembers the original DWW comic strip), the second is still a bit of a mystery, and who knows what surprises RTD2 might yet spring for the third one...

Countdown to 60: 'Er Indoors

Companions may come and go (and come back again, and go away again...) but the TARDIS is the one true constant through 60 years of Doctor Who, after the Doctor of course.

Some guidebooks have included it in the list of companions, since it isn't simply a machine that gets the Doctor from A to B.

The decision to make the TARDIS something more than just a mode of transport goes right back to the very beginning. David Whitaker, the first Story Editor, had to come up with a two-part story to bring the series up to 13 episodes - a marketable amount - in the likelihood that Doctor Who was to be cancelled on the orders of Donald Baverstock, who had been alarmed at the cost of the programme.

In the end, Verity Lambert was able to show how the costs of the TARDIS set were budgeted to be spread over the year, so the budget concerns were unfounded. The Edge of Destruction could therefore fulfil another role.

With no money for new sets, monster costumes or guest artists, Whitaker elected to focus on the ship as a means to bring the four regulars together and realign their inter-relationships for adventures yet to come. The first ever broadcast episode had already reconfigured the characters of Susan and the Doctor, making the first a bit more down to Earth and the latter less brittle and unlikeable than they had come across in the untelevised pilot.

We already knew that the Doctor couldn't operate the ship properly, even though he may have actually built the thing (implied in dialogue). The Edge of Destruction sees odd things happen within the ship, and it is up to the occupants to work out what is going on. The ship is giving them clues, and it is Barbara who first figures this out. Clocks and watches melt, to make them aware of Time. The scanner images coincide with the doors opening and closing - nice picture, door open = safe; bad picture, doors close = danger. It's all very cryptic, but the Doctor and companions work it out in the end. It's just a pity that the mystery turns out to be a stuck switch, which was going to send them hurtling back to the explosive birth of a solar system (with some early guidebooks claiming it was to the Big Bang).

Ian asks the Doctor if the TARDIS can think, and he responds "not as we do" but points out that it has a big bank of computers. The phrase hasn't been coined yet, but he's referring to some form of AI.

The Time Meddler lays to rest the idea that the TARDIS is unique and was built by the Doctor. They are standard craft that have been used by his people for at least 50 years. (It is still possible that the Doctor was involved in the development of the first TARDIS, as he did claim to have been a pioneer among his people, and Susan did claim to have devised the name).

By the time we get to Tomb of the Cybermen, the Doctor is telling his companions that the TARDIS is his home, or at least has been for a very long time.

The ship's bizarre way of warning its occupants is demonstrated once again in The Wheel in Space, when the scanner once again shows images of danger prior to another technical fault. Need we say that this story was also written by David Whitaker?

It is during the Pertwee era that focus is placed on the TARDIS once again - ironic, as this was the era in which the Doctor used it least.

Even before his exile was lifted by the Time Lords, we had an entire episode set within the TARDIS (or rather TARDISes, as the Doctor's is sitting within the Master's, and his within the Doctor's).

The Time Monster introduced us to the Telepathic Circuits - the first indication that the ship had a form of sentience beyond the mechanical / electronic. The TARDIS can read the Doctor's mind - allowing Jo to hear his subconscious thoughts. The Master is able to use his ship to intercept the Doctor's speech to render it backwards before he says it.

Later, in Planet of the Spiders, the Doctor has the following conversation with Mike Yates, regarding getting to Metebelis III -

    Mike: "Yes, but Doctor, a planet's a big place".

    Doctor: "Yes, well, I always leave the actual landing to the TARDIS herself. She's no fool you know".

    Mike: You speak as if she were alive".

    Doctor: "Yes. Yes, I do, don't I?..."

Note how the Doctor refers to the ship as "she", something his predecessors never did. Pertwee was a real petrol-head, and it has always been traditional to use feminine terms for most modes of transport. He and Barry Letts had both been in the Royal Navy, and all ships are called "she". 

The Fourth Doctor will also refer to the TARDIS as a "she", in the same way he called K-9 a "he".

Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead had a fascination with the TARDIS, but he saw it in computer terms, likening its functions to his home PC. Not for him imbuing it with any form of personality.

In Trial of a Time Lord, we see evidence from the Matrix which is said to have been gathered by the TARDIS. That it can show scenes from locations where it wasn't even present is due to them being within the range of its telepathic field.

The TARDIS was eventually side-lined in the series. In the final season, there is only a single console room scene (in Battlefield) and even here we only see it dimly, as the main set had already been broken up.

The ship plays a significant role in the 1996 Movie, but in this it contains the Eye of Harmony, which appears to have all the strange powers - rather than the ship itself.

In The Masque of Mandragora, the Doctor told Sarah that her ability to understand foreign, or alien, languages was a "Time Lord gift" he shared with her. It wasn't until The End of the World in 2005 that this was confirmed as another attribute of the TARDIS' telepathic field.

As of Series 6 in 2012, the TARDIS was unique in the universe. The only other Time Lord to have survived the Time War was the Master, and he did not appear to have kept his TARDIS. He must have had one, in order to use its Chameleon Arch, but there was no sign of it. 

In the 1980's JNT had used the story title "The Doctor's Wife", written up on his planning board, to root out spies in the Doctor Who production office.

In 2012 Neil Gaiman gave us a story using that title - and it didn't refer to River Song, who was all over the series at this time. The Doctor's Wife proved to be the TARDIS.

All the hints of previous decades as to the ship's sentience were personified in Idris, a young woman who has the TARDIS' matrix - its 'soul' - implanted into her body.

The story was a love letter to the series in general, and to the TARDIS in particular. Some of those old "Matrix Databank" questions from DWM - its version of Notes & Queries - were finally addressed. The main one concerned how the TARDIS could keep landing the Doctor in trouble every 4 - 6 weeks. Why did it not land somewhere nice and peaceful for a change? Apart from being dramatically boring, we learned that the ship took the Doctor not where he wanted to go, but where he needed to go.

We also learned that, whilst the Doctor was bored and craved adventure, so did the TARDIS herself.

It stole him, as much as he borrowed her.

For a few hours the Doctor was able to communicate directly with his oldest companion - the one true partner who doesn't move on after a while.

Sadly the TARDIS hasn't been explored much in recent years, but here's hoping that RTD2 gives it some of the attention it deserves.

Countdown to 60: Hello Stonehenge!

Ever since the series returned in 2005, each new Doctor has been given at least one "Hero Moment".

It's a scene in which the Doctor gives a speech - usually directed at his enemies - wherein they define the character of this particular incarnation of the Doctor, or of the character in general.

For Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor, it came at the end of his first series. With only his three companions - Amy, Rory and River - and a squad of Roman soldiers to help him, he was facing an armada of alien spaceships which were massing above Stonehenge. The visuals certainly add to the moment. 

Unaware of its true nature, he's trying to defend the Pandorica. Rather than run away and hide, he elects to challenge them to come down and take it from him - basically saying "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough".

These Hero Moments are generally boosted by the VFX and music and, as such, are very much an intrinsic part of the revived series. The Doctors of the classic era had their Hero Moments, for which they are rightly remembered, but they could struggle to pack the emotional punch of the more recent ones thanks to the more basic visual and aural components. Until 1989 Doctor Who relied predominantly on the drama over the visuals, so speeches tended to be more theatrical in nature - sometimes soliloquising.

Hartnell had a number of memorable speeches. Best remembered are his farewell to Susan in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and his solitary musings in the TARDIS at the end of The Massacre - though there's also his lament over the fallen Katarina and his final realisation of events in The Edge of Destruction.

Troughton's best known quote is the "They must be fought..." one from The Moonbase.

Pertwee specifically asked Terrance Dicks to give him "moments of charm" in his stories, and two of note can be found in Planet of the Daleks - his talk about bravery with Codal in the cell, and that with Taron on a similar theme at the conclusion of the story.

Tom Baker's first defining moment comes in only his fifth episode - the "Indomitable" speech from The Ark in Space. Despite his lengthy tenure, he's better known for his funny one-liners.

Davison wasn't well served in this department. The quote usually associated with him is his speech to the Cyber-Leader in Earthshock - but some people actually find this silly rather than stirring thanks to that "well-prepared meal" line.

Colin Baker wasn't there long, but he got that furious tirade against the corruption of the Time Lords in before he left.

McCoy walked out of the series on a moving little speech, of cities made of smoke and tea getting cold - added specifically when it appeared that the series wasn't going to be renewed any time soon.

Julie Gardner claimed that she really only "got" RTD's vision for Doctor Who when she read the "chips" scene in the coda to The End of the World. For him, it had been the "feel the Earth turning" speech in Rose. For fans, however, Eccleston's defining moments come in Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways. The first is his "I'm coming to get you!" declaration to Rose after verbally abusing the Daleks, and the latter is the hologram scene - "Have a fantastic life". And let's not forget the joyous "Just this once, everybody lives!" moment earlier in the series.

All subsequent Doctors had to have scenes of similar impact.

Like Tom Baker, Tennant was in the role for a longer period of time, but also tended to be better known for witty one-liners. He doesn't have many stirring speeches - mainly because his Doctor had a habit of deflating them with a wisecrack. But then simply stating who he is and where he comes from in Voyage of the Damned was elevated to one of his Hero Moments.

Series 3 gave us his reminiscences of Gallifrey in a couple of stories (Gridlock and The Sound of Drums), which are well remembered (thanks in part to their musical accompaniment).

For Capaldi, the Hero Moment finally arrived with his "I'm the man who fights the monsters" speech to the Boneless in Flatline, and it's quickly followed by his words to Missy in the graveyard at the end of Death in Heaven, when he declares himself just an idiot in a box and nothing more - this after all his worries about being a "Good Man". In the end, Capaldi had many great moments - the final breaking of the wall in Heaven Sent (accompanied by the gorgeous The Shepherd Boy piece by Murray Gold, one of his finest compositions) and his efforts to get the two Masters on board in The Doctor Falls.

And no-one's ever going to forget the speech in The Zygon Inversion.

Sadly, I'm struggling to think of comparable scenes for the Thirteenth Doctor. She certainly had several written for her, but unfortunately they came across as lectures, as opposed to evolving out of a particular scene. Others came across as platitudinal or, worse, condescending - as though she were patting we humans on the head like pets.

If I had to choose a moment, it would be her speech to her companions in the cellars of the Villa Diodati, where she points out that they don't do things by committee. Sometimes she has to take sole responsibility, which is a refreshing counterpoint to the usual "Fam" nonsense.

Of course, there's one point where every Doctor has a chance to shine, and that's when they bow out. Regeneration moments are a real mixed bag, however. It's a pity Hartnell added that "keep warm" comment, as "It's far from being all over" would have been a fantastic line to go out on. 

Troughton simply got to his "oh my giddy aunt" schtick when he departed, deprived of a great last word. Pertwee's final words might have carried more weight if he hadn't used almost the exact same phrases in the previous story - "A tear, Sarah Jane?" and "Where there's life there's...".

Tom's "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for..." is now rightly iconic. There can't be many fans who haven't found an occasion to quote this phrase, without having had to fall off a radio-telescope dish.

Davison's "Feels different this time" proved to be a warning for some of us, and again this is often quoted by fans in other contexts. His last word is actually "Adric".

Sadly, circumstances denied Colin a memorable departure. He had to make do much later with something on audio, but on TV he was heard to mutter something about carrot juice before falling off his exercise bike thanks to the Rani's "tremendous buffeting".

McCoy's departure really ought to have been that speech to Ace at the end of Survival. Bringing him back just to get gunned down by a gang 10 minutes into an Americanised TV Movie was a massive error in judgement.

It looked like McGann would be another one deprived of a proper regeneration, but he finally got his moment in Night of the Doctor. A pity it only appeared on-line or on the DVD, so the general public remain blissfully unaware of it.

Since 2005, regenerations have become really big moments in the life of the series. (Remember that the very first changeover happened at the end of the second story of a season, treated almost as if it was no big deal).

Eccleston led the way with his "fantastic" regeneration. This saw the arrival of a standardised process for the event, and all subsequent ones will build towards it - so they don't just turn up out of nowhere, like a poorly plotted companion departure. Only some of the classic regenerations had any sort of effective foreshadowing.

Tennant's is thought by many to be a little overblown, thanks to that extended farewell tour of his old companions. However, the actual event itself - "I don't want to go" - is probably the best of the recent ones.

Smith also got an extended departure - a whole Christmas Special. His was different in that we believed that this was the final incarnation, as set out by Robert Holmes in The Deadly Assassin. (We knew the next one was lined up, but how were they going to get round this?).

Despite Clara being the current companion, it's Amy's appearance that really makes this regeneration. Oddly, the actual event is more of a hiccup than an explosion. Capaldi just appears in a flash.

His own demise was another prolonged one, since it was supposed to have happened in the previous episode. Twice Upon A Time allows us to go full circle and witness the First Doctor's regeneration as well as the Twelfth's. My second favourite regeneration of the revived series.

Thirteen's is another oddity. For the first time since 2005 it takes place outside the TARDIS, and the Doctor takes on a body he's used before. For some, it will have been the reappearance of Tennant which made this particular regeneration special.

We currently have two new Doctors in quick succession to look forward to. Whether the Fourteenth will be around long enough to have an iconic moment or two we don't know, but he is featuring in three 60th Anniversary Specials so there is certainly scope for one. And then, in late November or early December, there's the next regeneration as Gatwa arrives. Let's see how long it takes for him to get his first defining moment.

Countdown to 60: Change my dear - and not a moment too soon...

It's one of those coincidences I sometimes complain of in the "What's Wrong With..." posts, but when I plotted out 60 Doctor Who moments to consider as we counted down to the anniversary, I didn't know that I'd have been looking at the inspirations behind The Eleventh Hour within the same week or so as this one... 

Because this one's about the rare occasions when we have a virtual reboot, with big changes both in front of and behind the cameras. 

Some are obvious, but others are more subtle.

When the first ever regular cast change arrived in 1964, Carole Ann Ford dissatisfied with the way her character of Susan was developing (it wasn't), William Russell and Jacqueline Hill were content to stay on as Ian and Barbara. By the time they left, in the next Dalek story, Vicki was there to provide continuity and their final episode overlapped with the first appearance of Steven Taylor - even if he didn't actually join the TARDIS until the following week.

Companions continued to overlap until we arrived at the first Doctor changeover. Rather than take the opportunity to reboot the series, companions Ben and Polly were on hand, and the new Doctor's first monsters were the Daleks. They had been used for the majority of significant changes in the regular cast so far - Susan, Ian, Barbara, Katarina, Sara Kingdom all leaving, and Steven arriving. Now they were seeing in Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor.

Ben and Polly were due to depart after a couple of episodes of Evil of the Daleks (presumably left behind when the Doctor and Jamie get transported to 19th Century Kent), but producer Innes Lloyd elected to release them early. However, a Dalek story once again saw the arrival of a new companion - Victoria.

The Evil of the Daleks was followed by a summer break, and when the series returned it was for a visit to The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Take a look at the opening section and you'll see that we're being given a refresher on what this series is all about. The TARDIS interior is filmed at Ealing, and is the biggest and most impressive we've seen it since the early Hartnell days. Why? There is really no reason to include this scene and go to all this bother. The TARDIS plays no further part once it gets the crew to Telos, so why is this here?

It's an opportunity to remind existing viewers about the basics of the series, and act as an entry point for new viewers. The Doctor tells new girl Victoria all about the ship and what it can do, and speaks of the sort of adventures they will have. He goes further to talk about his own alien nature. Even old hand Jamie is clearly hearing some things for the first time.

It is at the end of the Troughton era that the biggest shake-up until then occurred. Frazer Hines had been due to depart halfway through Season Six, in the story which was ultimately replaced by The Krotons. He would have been replaced by a new male character named Nik, and had this happened then we might have seen at least one of the companions bridge the changeover to the Third Doctor - the argument being that a new arrival might not want to give up a regular role in a long-running series five minutes after winning it. We also know that Wendy Padbury was asked to stay on as Zoe, but she wanted to find other work and decided that leaving alongside Troughton and Hines was the right thing to do. Perhaps had whoever was playing Nik stayed on, she may have agreed to do another season herself.

All of this coincided with the move to colour, and a BBC strike which meant the first story of a new decade being made entirely on film. We also have the longest gap between seasons in the series' history to date.

Despite having the same producer and script editor as The War Games, Spearhead From Space looks and sounds so different to what went before that it can be construed as a reboot of the series. It is all brand new save for the inclusion of the Brigadier and UNIT, but it should be remembered that he and the organisation had only featured together in a single story a whole year before. The changes aren't just cosmetic. The whole format has changed. The Doctor is now confined to contemporary Earth, with no more TARDIS jaunts to alien planets or periods of Earth's past or future (at least not yet).

The programme settled down under Pertwee / Letts and Dicks, with companions coming and going. Sarah Jane Smith was there with the Brigadier to oversee the next regeneration, which took place in the familiar surroundings of the Doctor's lab at UNIT HQ.

The next big change was not down to a Doctor or companion departure /arrival but a new producer. 

However, JNT's changes were once again primarily cosmetic. He retained the same Doctor and companions, only replacing them bit by bit over the course of his first season in charge. 

As well as new titles, with an updated image of Tom Baker, the theme and incidental music were changed - supposedly to make the stories more contemporary (but simply dated them a lot quicker). 

Story-wise, new script editor Christopher H Bidmead did make more significant changes, removing a lot of the humour and "magic" which he felt had crept into the series, especially under Douglas Adams' brief stint as his predecessor.

JNT specifically went out of his way to ensure continuity when Baker left - worried that he had been in the role so long that the audience might resist his replacement. He tried to get either Lis Sladen or Louise Jameson to return, but went with a new Master trilogy instead.

Whilst the turnover in Doctors speeded up, continuity of companions was maintained until the series was brought to an end just before Christmas 1989.

Fans then embarked on the seemingly never-ending quest to see the series make a comeback. Books and audios filled the Wilderness Years. Here was an ideal opportunity to go for a complete change - a new Doctor / companion for new media, but Virgin, Big Finish and BBC Books opted instead to play safe and stick with the Seventh Doctor.

One of the early plans for a revived series, when it did finally get the green light, was a proper reboot - not just starting afresh from where the series had left off, but a root and branch relaunch. The Doctor would be seen to leave Gallifrey for the first time to seek out his missing dad (Ulysses), sent by his grandfather (Borusa), whilst his brother (the Master) tried to get in his way. There was talk of old stories being remade - especially ones with "Web" in their title. It would have been as though the original 26 years had never existed.

Luckily these ideas were dropped, and come May 1996 we simply got a new story picking up where the old series had left off. This ought to have had a new Doctor and new companion from the off, but they decided to establish continuity by having the Seventh Doctor appear - just to show a regeneration. The plan was that this would actually help new viewers understand the basics of the show better - but had the opposite effect.

Luckily RTD was paying attention, even if he didn't think the TV Movie was canon (at least not when he was writing Queer As Folk). He learned from its mistakes and went for a reboot that was clearly a continuation of what had gone before, but had a brand new Doctor and brand new companion from the start.

The Doctor makes a comment to himself when looking in a mirror which implies he has only recently regenerated, and the foe he is up against in Rose is the Nestene Consciousness, seen twice before in the Pertwee era (the first time just happening to be when we last had a soft reboot of the series). The Daleks then turn up later.

Rose would go on to bridge the transition to the next Doctor, and RTD introduced the idea of a cliffhanger ending to each series, to lead into his Christmas Specials - even if the companions came and went. Spin-off series were introduced, and these had links to the parent programme - culminating in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End which saw all three series come together. The End of Time also brought elements of the three series together for Ten's departure.

This last story saw more than just a regeneration take place. It was very much the end of an era as the executive production team all stepped down and were replaced by Steven Moffat's.

He was therefore left to introduce a new Doctor and new companion, with little or no reference to what had preceded him. He also introduced a new TARDIS, both inside and out, and would later attempt, unsuccessfully, to give us a new breed of Daleks. The latter was a change too far.

The Snowmen was an opportunity to offer viewers a new stepping-on point, with a new companion and a new TARDIS interior. Victorian Clara was a false start - the real one wouldn't be along until The Bells of St John - and we'd already been introduced to Jenna Coleman in Asylum of the Daleks.

Clara helped with the transition from Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi - plus a clumsy phone call from the old Doctor to her, as though Moffat doubted that viewers would accept the new one (shades of JNT and Tom Baker's departure).

The Pilot was aptly named, however. Moffat intended this to be another stepping-on point, especially after the ill-judged "same old, same old" publicity campaign for the previous series. Whilst we still had the Capaldi Doctor, Clara had long outstayed her welcome and had mercifully departed, and Bill came in like a breath of fresh air. A lot of the Moffat continuity had also been finally ditched.

We had little reminders that this was the same series, however, with a photo of Susan on the Doctor's desk and a pot full of classic Sonics.

Capaldi only had one more series to go (as did Bill and Moffat) and so the next big change took place with the arrival of the third showrunner of the revived series, Chris Chibnall. Like his predecessors, he wanted to make his mark. The Doctor became female for the first time, we got new companions and another new TARDIS inside and out. Chibnall took things an awful lot further by going back and messing about the very foundations of the programme, creating a whole new pre-1963 life for the Doctor. "Awful" might be an apposite epithet.

What RTD2 will do with this, if anything, we don't know. There's another soft reboot on the way, though it won't be seen until Spring 2024 - new Doctor, new companion, new TARDIS. 

Before then we have a new Doctor who just happens to look and act like an older one, the return of a previous companion, and stories which will lean on elements of the past, going back at least as far as 1966.

Change is something we fans have simply learned to take in our stride - but we do like a bit of continuity. Were someone to try to completely reboot the series, ditching everything that had gone before, it just wouldn't be the same programme, and I don't think we'd like it very much.

Countdown to 60: Vale Decem

The BBC's Christmas idents,

GMTV,

Never Mind The Buzzcocks,

QI,

CBeebies,

Breakfast,

Radio 2,

Desert Island Discs,

Greatest TV Shows of the Noughties,

Radio 5 Live,

Nan's Christmas Carol,

Alan Carr; Chatty Man,

BBC One News,

The One Show,

Hamlet,

The Graham Norton Show,

Loose Women...

The list went on. And on. He even spoke the continuity link for his final episode.

He didn't want to go, and to the public at large it seemed that, if he was going to go, then he wasn't going to do so quietly...

We were all sad to see him go - arguably the most popular Doctor since Tom Baker. But, after some 75 appearances across numerous TV programmes and radio shows between 14th December and 3rd January 2010, there were some who - like Tory MP Nigel Evans, who used this as an excuse to attack the BBC - were heartily sick of David Tennant by the time he relinquished the TARDIS to Matt Smith.

He did come back, in 2013 for the 50th Anniversary, but he was very much a guest in that and so politely stepped back to allow Smith and John Hurt to get most of the attention.

It's just coming up to 6 weeks until the 60th Anniversary (though we still don't have actual transmission dates for the three Specials), so expect the publicity to begin stepping up a gear.

Let's see just how much we get of DT in November 2023. It can't possibly be as much as those few weeks around the festive period at the close of 2009, when the man was everywhere.