Chicanery

In Part Eleven of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, original TX 15/11/1986, the evidence in the Doctor's trial is at odds with his own memory, as the footage has been twisted by the prosecutor, the Valeyard, to show him in a worse light than reality:

THE DOCTOR: I didn't do that!

THE INQUISITOR: Stop the Matrix!

THE VALEYARD: Are we to be subject to more chicanery, Sagacity?

In the fifth episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, "Chicanery", original TX 08/05/2017, Jimmy McGill has just provided the courtroom with proof his brother's electromagnetic hypersensitivity is all in his mind, hoping to provoke him into exactly the unhinged rant he ends up delivering:

CHUCK: No, no, no. No no, it's a trick, it has to --

ALLEY: Enough is enough. I submit that Mr. McGill's mental illness is a non-issue. If he were schizophrenic --

CHUCK: Schizo--!

ALLEY: -- it would not take away from the fact that the defendant --

CHUCK: I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers, I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta, as if I could ever make such a mistake! Never! Never! I just -- I just couldn't prove it! He -- he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him --

ALLEY: Mr. McGill, please. You don't have to go into --

CHUCK: You think this is something? You think this is bad, this -- this chicanery? He's done worse! That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No, he orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof, and I saved him! And I shouldn't have! I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was nine, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! "But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy!" Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer?! What a sick joke! I should have stopped him when I had the chance! And you, you have to stop him! You --

And that is how Pip and Jane Baker foreshadowed one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most acclaimed dramas of the twenty-first century.

The Best Thing Ever to Appear in Doctor Who Magazine

Time and Relative Exhibition in Weston

There's a really quite wonderful exhibition of Doctor Who art currently on display in the Weston Museum, just a short train journey away from me, and if you can get down there before it closes I can't recommend it enough. Those of you who can't, however, will have to make do with my amateur photography.

A Comprehensive Guide to Doctor Who Repeats on the BBC, 1963-1989

Back in the day, of course, if you missed an episode of Doctor Who that was it. No VCRs, no catch-up services, nothing. You'd have to get a friend to re-enact it for you in the playground, wait for the Target book to come out, or hope the BBC repeated it at some point. Would you like a list of every time that last thing happened?

Not A Nineteen Seventies Doctor Who Serial

Funny Radio Times listings for comedy shows. We've talked about them before. The ones for Not the Nine O'Clock News are great, so go and look at them.

I find this one, written in the style of a Doctor Who episode, particularly interesting, however. That listing is for an episode broadcast in May 1980. In October 1978, then-script editor of Doctor Who Douglas Adams commissioned his frequent collaborator John Lloyd (with whom he had co-written part of the first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) to write a serial for the show, but in January 1979, Lloyd informed Adams he would be unable to finish his script, as he had been appointed producer of Not the Nine O'Clock News. However, Adams was still keen on Lloyd's storyline - entitled The Doomsday Contract - and tried to get another writer, Allan Prior, to adapt his detailed story outline into scripts. Prior's scripts were rejected and seemingly no longer exist, and when Adams departed Doctor Who in late 1979 Lloyd's story would never see broadcast.

Is this listing in some way referencing the show's producer's unrealised Doctor Who story? Or is it more innocuous?

A Twice-Weekly Serial Set In The Exciting World of League Football

Between October 1965 and March 1967, the BBC produced and broadcast 147 episodes of the football-based soap opera United! At the end of its second season, the BBC cancelled the show due to low viewing figures, and, as was common practice at the time, they wiped all the master tapes for reuse. Whilst many "missing" episodes of TV shows that have been lost in this manner have been recovered over the years, allowing us to at least get a glimpse of how they looked, United! has not been so fortunate, and not a single episode is known to survive, not even on audio. The most common context for the series to come up in these days is somebody pointing out the large crossover the show's production crew had with Doctor Who, but nobody has ever made an exhaustive list of who worked on both shows, and when.

Until now.

Shadap Your Face

19 November 1979: The cast and crew of Doctor Who are working on the concluding serial of the show's seventeenth season, the six-part Shada by Douglas Adams. The location shoot has been completed, albeit with difficulties arising from a labour dispute. On the first of three studio sessions, the cast return from lunch to find the dispute has escalated into industrial action, and all recordings at Television Centre have been postponed. The future of Shada - scheduled to begin airing on BBC One in exactly two months' time - is instantly thrown into doubt.

Let's Do The Mind Warp Again

The 1986 series of Doctor Who, a 14-part arc split up into four individual segments known collectively as The Trial of a Time Lord, is one of the shining examples of a deeply troubled production, perhaps best summed up by the writer of the final segment dying before he had completed the script, the script editor finishing it but the producer then getting cold feet about the original ending and deciding to change it, and the script editor being so incensed by this that he withdrew permission to use his version of the final episode and walked out on the production, meaning a new writing team had to be brought in to write a new conclusion without knowing anything about what was originally meant to happen with just days to spare.

2002: A Time and Space Odyssey

As 2002 dawns, it has been over five and a half years since the Doctor Who television movie starring Paul McGann - intended as a backdoor pilot for a full series - was aired. That full series was never picked up owing to disappointing ratings in the US, and it seems like the show may have missed its chance for its big comeback.

But fans aren't catered to too badly. There are not one but two monthly ranges of novels - one chronicling the continuing adventures of the Eighth Doctor after he departed San Francisco, and another featuring the previously unchronicled adventures of his seven predecessors. Big Finish Productions were producing fully-dramatised audio stories featuring four of the five surviving Doctors and their companions, and their second series of adventures starring McGann were about to kick off. And there's still a monthly magazine, which in January 2002, kicked off the new year with an extensive article asking 50 big questions about the show's future, answered by people in the know. 17 years on, how on the nose did it turn out to be?

Small Beginnings

A question nobody ever asks me is, "Mr. Wickham, you've listened to a hell of a lot of Doctor Who plays by Big Finish Productions, where do you think I should start?" I find the company's own list of recommendations quite baffling in several places, so I thought I would make my own, providing examples for each Doctor. (Most of these items are usually put on sale at least once a year, so keep an eye out.)

Doctor Who and the Lost 1986

In February 1985, BBC One controller Michael Grade made the decision to put Doctor Who on hiatus. Initially thought to be an attempt to kill the show off for good, public outcry later forced him to reduce it to a delay of 18 months - rather than debut at the beginning of the year, as the show had been doing since Peter Davison became the Doctor, it would start in September. More drastic was the cut in runtime - the delayed season would run for just 14 25-minute episodes.

The 1985 season had seen a shift to 45-minute episodes (the show had previously been running twice-weekly on weeknights, and this year had also seen a return to the traditional Saturday nights), which the originally planned 1986 run would have retained. So late in the day was the postponement that pre-production had already begun, and it was roughly known what the lineup of the season would be, and work was well underway. With the hiatus and abbreviation of the season, the decision was made to throw out all work that had been done on the 1986 serials in favour of one over-arcing story, The Trial of a Time Lord. Here, then, is what Season 23 looked like in a parallel universe where the powers that be were slightly more favourable to the show...

The Alternative Dr Who Christmas Special Guide

For the first time since its triumphant return to our screens in 2005, there is no new episode of Doctor Who on Christmas Day this year, with the new production team plumping for a New Year's Day special instead. But if you're desperate for a fix of festive Who before the year is out (and want to do something slightly more interesting than rewatch some of the previous years' specials), why not look to parts of the show's spin-off media instead?

Terror of the Zy-Gougers

Some time ago now, Big Finish Productions - purveyors of fine audio dramas, principally based on licensed 'cult' properties - decided to let the first fifty of their Doctor Who audio dramas go out of print (continuing to sell them as downloads). Obviously, despite how cheap the downloads are, a fair number of Who fans do like physical media, and this means second-hand CD copies of all 50 plays have been subjected to considerable amounts of price gouging online, but exactly how much chiefly seems to depend on the quality and content of the stories.

Nowhere is this more apparent than The Chimes of Midnight, widely hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories in any medium, which will now set you back more than five times as much as its price when it was originally released in 2002! (All prices given are correct as time of writing...) Another highly regarded story, Spare Parts (the 'Genesis of the Cybermen' story, which went on to inspire their return in the TV series in 2006) will cost you nearly £50.

Stories which are less well thought of, or have less of a 'hook', fare a bit better - several of them, such as The Rapture, can be yours for a mere £10, slightly cheaper than it was when it was first released. You do get the occasional anomaly, though - Jubilee, a highly-acclaimed Dalek story by popular writer Robert Shearman which was loosely adapted for the TV series, is only slightly more expensive to buy now than it would have been when it was new. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how fan opinion sways these prices in the vast majority of cases.

(Wouldn't it be nice if BF combated this with some limited-edition reissues of some of the most badly affected stories? Next year is the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who at Big Finish, so it'd be the perfect opportunity! The first few stories all used the Pertwee theme rather than era-specific ones due to rights issues, so it'd be a great chance to correct that, and even do some new behind-the-scenes features given BF didn't start doing those until 2007... Go on, you know you want to, BF.)

Lost in N-Space

The Summer of 1993: A brand new, fully dramatised Doctor Who radio drama, The Paradise of Death, is recorded and broadcast in five weekly parts on Radio 5 - the first new 'proper' Who made by the BBC since Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred went to find cities made of smoke and people made of song in December 1989. It stars Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney, and was written by the producer of Pertwee's television era, Barry Letts. Letts went on to novelise the story for Target Books the following year. (I'm going somewhere with all this, don't worry.)

A David Agnew Production

Exactly who wrote a story can sometimes be a matter of debate. Or there could be some legal issue that stops the true author from being named. Or it could just be that they don't want their name involved with the project. In those cases, a pseudonym has to be used.

The Writers' Guild of America used to have an official pseudonym, 'Alan Smithee', that was to be used in the event of a film director wanting to take their name off of a film (generally because they were dissatisfied with the final production and did not have enough creative control over the project). The BBC had a similar name to be used in the event of a contested writing credit, 'David Agnew'. There are a couple of known uses of this name, and the last two are what makes the name particularly notable.

Weird Doctor Who VHSes

Between 1983 and 2003, every existing episode of Doctor Who was released on VHS by the BBC, before starting the whole process again on DVD. You'd think this would be fairly simple, but a couple of the releases were a bit strange. Let's examine some of the strangeness, shall we?

The Unhelpful Dr Who Radio Times Listing Game

Oh good, it's been long enough since I last wrote an article where I just plugged something into the BBC Genome search to see what I could find that I can do another one -- erm, by which I mean, here's a special New Year's Eve treat. Some of the Radio Times descriptors for episodes of the BBC's popular science fiction serial Doctor Who have tended to be very unhelpful or vague when divorced from the context of the rest of the listing, so I've compiled a list of some and now challenge you, the reader, to tell which episode they're from. All the descriptions are reproduced in their entirety, with answers at the bottom of the post.

Doctor Who: "Twice Upon a Time" Review

NEVER FORGET

Much like the episode that preceded it six months ago, "Twice Upon a Time" is a deeply mixed bag, and in that sense representative of the era it marks an end of. When it's on form, it belongs in the same category as the portrayal of Vincent van Gogh's battle with mental illness. When it isn't, it ranks alongside the revelation that Davros had eyes all along.

Repeat Offenders

This is not the Sixth Doctor.

There are only so many actors in the world, and it is therefore quite likely that sooner or later, any long-running TV show will begin to reuse the same ones in different roles. Paul Barber has had five different  guest spots in Casualty over twenty years, for example. But this article isn't about him, it's about Doctor Who.

The 2005 revival frequently featured actors who'd appeared in the original 1963-89 run, the first such example being William Thomas, who appeared in a small role in part 2 of Remembrance of the Daleks in 1988 before getting killed off in the pre-titles sequence to 2005's "Boom Town". He then went on to play the recurring role of Gwen Cooper's father in the 2006-11 spin-off series Torchwood. However, until the tenth series of the revival in 2017, it was uncommon for the show to reuse actors who'd already appeared in another episode of the revival (excepting very minor roles and people in monster costumes). Then Jennifer Hennessy, previously Valerie in 2007's "Gridlock", showed up in two episodes as Bill's foster mum, Moira, and Joseph Long - who turned in a heartbreakingly good performance as Mr Colasanto in 2008's "Turn Left" - played the Pope in the rather less-good "Extremis".

So, continuing on this theme, here are some particularly notable repeat performances in the show's 54-year history...

Change and Decay

This is a follow-up to last week’s piece on the many lives of Dr Who, and a thought I had whilst reading it… which led me to a conclusion I don’t really like.

All shows depend on change. Any long-running show will need to renew itself every few years, and Doctor Who just so happens to have an in-built mechanism to do that to its lead character. But that’s not the only way in which the show changes. In 1970 the show’s entire format changed by exiling its lead character to Earth; this was a change producer Barry Letts had inherited from the previous production team, and he managed to get multiple second winds by occasionally letting the Doctor sojourn off-planet again, before finally freeing him from his exile permanently in 1973. In 1982, following a bad run of ratings for Tom Baker’s final season, the decision was made to take the show away from Saturday nights and run it twice-weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays instead. Both of those changes coincided with a change of Doctor, but ones that didn’t included the first ever change of companion in 1964, the replacement of Philip Hinchcliffe as producer with Graham WIlliams in 1977, and the decision to make the 1986 season one long 14-part story. The point is: every few years, the show needs a shot in the arm, and it can run on that for a few years before it’s time for the next dose.