Star Wars on the BBC

It is time, once again, for me to plug the name of a popular franchise into the BBC Genome and see what comes up. This time: Star Wars!

Another Insane Objective

On 27 December 1977, Star Wars finally received a theatrical release in the United Kingdom, allowing us all to see what the United States had been making such a fuss over since May of that year. Barely a week later, on 7 January 1978, Doctor Who returned from its midseason break over the Christmas holidays with a new four-part serial, Underworld.

If you’ve happened to read any other piece that mentions both that first Star Wars film and Doctor Who, it is quite likely those two facts happened to be mentioned. Because, you see, Star Wars is a good piece of science fiction. Underworld isn’t.

The story goes that the then-Doctor Who producer, Graham Williams, had attended a preview screening of George Lucas’ film and realised that his show’s production values weren’t really going to be able to hold a candle to this. He quickly made an attempt to try and enhance the appeal of Underworld, which was then in pre-production… but a confluence of factors (including Williams going on holiday, another script turning out to be impossible to produce and inflation severely affecting the budget requiring Williams to come up with an unprecedented way of saving money) meant that a lot of the story ended up looking like this:

And perhaps the bigger problem is that Underworld simply isn’t a very good story. It’s just not very interesting, which isn’t a criticism you can really level at the other sci-fi franchise we’re discussing here. And that’s why Underworld, and indeed most of the rest of that season of Doctor Who, has a tendency to be mentioned rather disparagingly in connection with Star Wars – children went to the cinema to see an exciting, impressive-looking piece of sci-fi, and then returned home to watch something that was anything but.

But you may be aware that there have been quite a few more Star Wars films since 1977. How did the Doctor Who stories of the time square up to them, and is the result interesting enough for me to write a blog post about? Let’s find out. (For the purposes of this article being readable, we’ll cover the six ‘main’ films in the remainder of the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and the one film in the sequel trilogy that we’ve seen at time of writing, not Rogue One or the Clone Wars TV series.)