Weekend Videos–Nicholas Courtney and Doctor Who

Nicholas Courtney passed away on February 22at the age of 81, following a long illness, reported by his former Doctor Who cast mate Tom Baker to have been cancer. Courtney was a well-regarded character actor who worked extensively in the theatre and on television. He was a regular on the comedy French Fields and appeared opposite Frankie Howerd on Then Churchill Said To Me, a series that was made in 1982 but was shelved because of the Falklands War. However it is for Doctor Who, and in particular the character of The Brigadier – Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – that he is best known. Courtney appeared with every actor to play The Doctor in the first incarnation of the show except one – Colin Baker – and that includes Richard Hurndall who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors. In addition he appeared in Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions with Colin Baker, and Paul McGann playing their respective versions of The Doctor, and with David Tennant, who played a character named Colonel Ross Brimmicombe-Wood.

Courtney’s first appearance on Doctor Who was not as the iconic character of Lethbridge-Stewart but rather as Space Security Agent Brett Vyon in the third season serial The Dalek Masterplan. Among other people to appear in this series was Jean Marsh, who had previously appeared in the The Crusades arc of Doctor Who (she kills Vyon who, as it turns out, was her brother). Most of The Dalek Master Plan is lost. However among the episodes to survive is the one in which Nicholas Courtney first appears.

Courtney’s next appearance in the series was as Lethbridge-Stewart, but not quite the Lethbridge-Stewart we know. In Web of Fear Lethbridge-Stewart was a Colonel, and UNIT had yet to be formed. Based on his hat he was in a Scottish regiment, which fits with what we later discover about Lethbridge-Stewart. He appears opposite Patrick Toughton as The Doctor, Fraiser Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria. Courtney was originally cast as Captain Knight while David Langton (who later played Richard Bellamy on Upstair Downstairs) was to play Lethbridge-Stewart. Fortunately – given what happens to Knight – Langton was took another job and Courtney was recast as Lethbridge-Stewart. Unfortunately most of Web Of Fear after the first episode is lost and we have to depend on is fan recreations using photos taken while the show was being made, and Courtney doesn’t make his first appearance until the second or third episode. What I have is the last part of the last episode of one of these recreations.

Significantly more exists of Lethbridge-Stewart’s next appearance (although not enough to air as a “complete” episode) and in it the major aspects of his participation in Doctor Who were set. In Invasion we learn that four years have passed since the Yeti incident (for everyone except the occupants of the TARDIS) and Lethbridge-Stewart has been promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He now commanding an element of a new United Nations organization known as UNIT. Also introduced is the ever faithful Benton (John Levene) who at this point was still a corporal. This particular pair of clips are a bit of a mixed bag. It begins with an animated recreation of the end of the missing first episode and at about the 3:50 mark transitions into the complete second episode, which features Benton and two other soldier in mufti grabbing the Doctor and Jamie and taking them to their leader whose headquarters are aboard an RAF Hercules transport. The leader is of course Lethbridge-Stewart.

It is the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, that Lethbridge-Stewart is most closely associated with. In this clip, the Brigadier and UNIT’s new Science Advisor, Liz Shaw, encounter a problem that people who met previous versions of The Doctor should comment on more regularly, namely that he doesn’t look the same as he did when he knew them. In this case the change from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee is just a little more than the Brigadier can absorb at the moment, though the man who (to Lethbridge-Stewart’s mind at least) is pretending to be The Doctor does seem well informed.

Perhaps the Brigadier’s most famous line in the series was from the last episode of The Daemons. “Chap with the wings. Five rounds rapid.” In fact Courtney used the line as the title for his 1999 autobiography Five Rounds Rapid (he wrote a second autobiography in 2005 called Still Getting Away With It)

The Brigadier and UNIT were pretty much fixtures of Doctor Who for the first two seasons of Pertwee’s run on the series. They became less so during the last two seasons, after The Doctor was freed from his exile on Earth by the Time Lords. About half of the serials after that featured UNIT. The final Pertwee episode had a relatively minor involvement of UNIT, with The Doctor returning to UNIT to regenerate. In this set of clips the Brigadier,and Sarah Jane witness the Doctor regenerating. This time around The Brigadier takes the whole thing entirely in stride, mentioning the first time that it happened. Of course Tom Baker’s Doctor could be a bit eccentric at the best of times, but newly regenerated he was more than a handful (as you might be able to tell I preferred Pertwee’s Doctor).

Robot, the first Tom Baker episode was the penultimate appearance of Nicholas Courtney in the Tom Baker series of Doctor Who. He’d appear one more time in Terror of the Zygons in the show’s thirteenth season, while UNIT itself would disappear a couple of serials later in the serial The Android Invasion. In that episode The Doctor goes to an office with Lethbridge-Stewart’s name on it but he’s absent. Still, you can’t keep a good character down and the Brigadier kept popping up from time to time. In Mawdryn Undead we get two versions of the Brigadier – now retired and working as a maths teacher in a British Public (which means Private) school – separated in time. One has a definite memory problem. Unfortunately, while this serial very much exists, the BBC seems to have cracked down on people posting full episodes. What we have in this clip is Peter Davison’s Doctor reviving the memory of the older, moustache-less, version of the Brigadier in a sequence which includes brief excerpts from various episodes in which the Brigadier featured. Interestingly the episode wasn’t meant to feature The Brigadier at all. It was written for William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the very first Doctor Who episodes. However, the actor (whose real name is Russell William Enoch) was unavailable to appear on the show and after some consideration was given to using Ian Marter and his character Harry Sullivan, Courtney was picked for the role.

Later the same year, Lethbridge-Stewart appeared in The Five Doctors special, commemorating the series’ twentieth anniversary. In this clip the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) drops in on The Brigadier at a UNIT reunion where he meets Colonel Crichton, Lethbridge-Stewart’s replacement, who doesn’t really impress the Doctor. Continuity obsessed fans were able to determine that this episode took place after Mawdryn Undead because The Brigadier recognises Tegan and the Fifth Doctor.

The Brigadier’s final appearance in Doctor Who proper was in the twenty-sixth and final season of the show’s original run. The episode was very much an old home week for Courtney as it featured Jean March as Morgaine. Marsh had appeared in the very Doctor Who story that Courtney did, The Dalek Master Plan. In that episode Marsh’s character, Sara Kingdom, kills Courtney’s Brett Vyon. In Battlefield she tries to kill him, but fortunately doesn’t succeed. In these two sequences we find The Brigadier, recalled to duty with the return of The Doctor, encountering Morgaine, and then in the second clip reuniting with The Doctor – who else could it be indeed.

Nicholas Courtney’s final appearance in the Doctor Who universe was in the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Enemy Of The Bane from the sho’s second season. The episode aired almost exactly twenty-five years after the last time Elizabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney had appeared together, in The Five Doctors. In the episode Sarah Jane needs access to some material that only Sir Alistair, now a special envoy for UNIT, is able to provide her with. Amazingly the entire episode has been posted on YouTube (though for how long I don’t know).

That was Nicholas Courtney’s last episode as Lethbridge-Stewart. Reportedly Courtney was supposed to appear again in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith but had suffered a stroke and was unable to appear. It is also said that Courtney wanted to make one final appearance on Doctor Who in an episode that would kill the character off. Unfortunately this wasn’t to be.

Nicholas Courtney was an integral part of the original Doctor Who series, a first rate actor who took what could have been a throwaway role and became an iconic figure to the point where the word Brigadier has become a “TV Trope” (a convention or device found within creative works) for “any senior military person in a sci-fi drama who is a good guy.” And it seems to me that both Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Nicholas Courtney were pretty good guys. 

TV On DVD – August 14, 2007

After a week's hiatus I'm determined to get this one out as quickly as possible while still maintaining some semblance of standards. Well at least I got the standards part mostly right. As always, the original list comes from the TV Shows On DVD website. There's a couple of bits of editorializing on value for money – just a warning.

My Pick of the Week
The Fugitive: Vol. 1, Season 1
One of the truly legendary television series of the 1960s. The show is really an anthology series but with a continuing storyline based on Victor Hugo's Les Miserable. David Jansen, whose face always possessed a world weary quality is well cast as Richard Kimble while Barry Morse (a Brit who is a naturalised Canadian – yes, he's still alive and kicking) took the thankless role of Lt. Philip Gerard, Javert to Jansen's Jean Valjean. By having the lead character being a man on the run the audience is given an entry point into various stories that make the series an anthology. While Kimble's search for the "one armed man" and Gerard's pursuit of Kimble are always there, they are only rarely the central aspect of the story.

So why is this my prick of the week? Well, a big chunk of it is nostalgia. It was something that I watched as a kid (and was angry when the local station lost the rights to the series before the finale which I only saw around the time that the movie came out). The other part though is that the series was well done. The anthology aspect of it was a logical outgrowth of Kimble chasing and being chased. As much as I enjoyed Andrew Davis's movie version it lacked the time to develop the characters that the TV series had and – obviously – the opportunities to tell stories about the people that Kimble had an impact on during his time as a fugitive. (The less said about the 2000 series with Tim Daly and Mikelti Williamson the better. The producers of that fiasco just didn't get it.) Even without special features, this is a set to get.

All Creatures Great and Small: The Complete Series 7 Collection
All Creatures Great and Small: The Complete Collection
Series 7 was the last for this great British series, and I'm sad to say that it isn't one of my favourites. By this point the series has long since abandoned James Herriot's original stories and in the seventh season they seem to have tried to recapture the magic of the series by bringing Peter Davison back to the series as Tristan Farnon. By this time Davison had of course played The Doctor on Doctor Who as well as starring in Campion and A Very Peculiar Practice. So twelve years after the series debuted (and after about fourteen years and a World War had passed within the continuity of the series) Davison was basically back playing a Tristan who was little changed by his experiences (in the books, Tristan never returned to the practice and instead worked for the Ministry of Agriculture after being an officer during the war). Of course I never got over the replacement of Carol Drinkwater as Helen by Lynda Bellingham who always looked too old for the part though she and Drinkwater are the same age. Still even poor (in my opinion) episodes are better than a lot of shows that are on TV today.

Avatar Last Airbender V4 Bk2
I willingly admit to my ignorance. I have absolutely no idea of what this animated series is about. I do know that it is supposed to be quite popular with both critics and viewers, but while I'm sure it airs on some cable station in Canada (probably YTV) I've never seen it and given that the storyline appears to be quite complex I have no doubt that to fully appreciate it I'd have to start at the beginning.

Baby Looney Tunes, Vol. 4
Some ideas seem like a good thing at the time but turn out to be bad later. I can't believe that this isn't one of them. The concept of the classic Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies characters as infants is less appalling than the idea behind the series Loonatics, but really not be that much. Save your money for the next edition of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection and see the characters as they were meant to be seen.

Doctor Who: Robot
Doctor Who: Survival
Two serials from the classical era of Doctor Who. Robot is the episode which introduced Tom Baker and I hate to say it but it isn't a particularly great episode, being rather derivative of King Kong in places (mostly the final episode where a giant robot menaces a village while carrying Sarah Jane in its hand). Still, any episode with Sarah Jane, the Brigadier, Sgt. Benton and Harry Sullivan can't be all bad. I confess to actually enjoying Survival almost as much. It was the last episode of the series' first run, which means Sylvester McCoy as The Doctor and Ace as a companion who was nowhere near as intelligent as Sarah Jane but would sooner kick an enemy in the bollocks than scream. I liked Ace and have always wondered about her final fate. The episode also marks the final appearance of Ace as a companion who was nowhere near as intelligent as Sarah Jane but would sooner kick an enemy in the bollocks than scream. I liked Ace and have always wondered about her final fate. The episode also marks the final appearance of Anthony Ainley as The Master, and quite honestly it looked like the character might have made his final appearances as well (but of course you can't keep a good villain down – death is at best a minor inconvenience). I also find the Cheetah people a far more interesting menace than the robot and the collection of vaguely mad boffins who created it. That said, like every Whovian worth his grotzits, I believe that Sarah Jane is The Doctor's greatest companion.

Dynasty: Season 2
The second season of Dynasty was when the series really came into its own with the introduction of Alexis Carrington, played with a delicious wickedness by Joan Collins who plays wickedness with the energetic delight of someone who may have just a touch (or more) of it in herself. Before the arrival of Alexis, Dynasty can probably be summed up as a fairly poor Dallas knock off. With Alexis it developed an incredible over-the-top quality that no other show matched. You'd believe the most outrageous things with Alexis. Annual cat fights with your ex-husband's new trophy wife? I believe it. Screwing your boyfriend to a heart attack and then literally marrying him on his deathbed? It was absolutely believable on this show, if it was Joan Collins doing it. She made the word Bitch practically an honour that you had to be worthy of.

Elvis: The Mini Series
This is the CBS miniseries from a couple of years ago that starred Jonathon Rhys Meyers as "The King." I`ve never seen it; I confess to never having been a huge Elvis fan – or even a small Elvis fan. Apparently it was quite good, with Meyer's portrayal of young Elvis being good enough to win an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Miniseries (yet another example of a British – well Irish – actor taking the bread out of the mouth of a deserving Canadian actor who could have played the role ;-) ). However, as I say, I am in no position to judge.

Home Run Derby, Vol. 2
Hmm. This is an interesting sounding show that I've never heard of before. Basically Major League ball players in 1959 came to the Los Angeles Wrigley Field (former home of the Pacific Coast League's Los Angeles Angels an occasional home of the Dodgers before they moved into Dodger Stadium) and participated in a head-to-head home run hitting contest. There'd be nine "innings" and each player would get three outs per inning – an out being defined as any hit that was not a home run or any pitch not hit that was in the strike zone. The winner of each game would win the princely sum of $2,000 with a bonus of $500 for any player who hit three straight homers, an extra $500 for the fourth homer and $1,000 for every consecutive homer after that. The winner would also return to "defend" his title. In the days before free agency when player salaries were a lot lower than they are today, that was a pretty good supplement to a player's income. The series was apparently popular but was cancelled in 1960 when host Mark Scott died suddenly of a heart attack at age 45. This set focuses on the show's biggest money winner, Henry Aaron who won six straight "games" and $13,000. Certainly an interesting relic of the period.

The Kids in the Hall: Pilot Episode
The pilot for the legendary Canadian comedy series never before released on DVD; who wouldn't want that? Well apparently, Canadians. It is not available from Amazon.ca. Well at least they don't make it easy; searching the site with either a partial or complete title reveals nothing but entering the ASIN # obtained from the Amazon.com website produces a page for The Kids in the Hall: The Pilot Episode! Certainly it's a bit of absurdity worthy of the Kids in the Hall (or at least Dave Foley in a dress).

Loonatics Unleashed: The Complete Second Season
The horror, the HORROR. My recommendation on Baby Looney Tunes ("Save your money for the next edition of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection and see the characters as they were meant to be seen.") applies here as well except that it should be done as a form of penance for even thinking of buying this abortion. What were they thinking and/or smoking when they came up with this idea?

Masters of Horror: Valerie on the Stairs
Masters of Horror: We All Scream for Ice Cream
I'm not entirely familiar with this Showtime series, but the quality of the writers (Clive Barker for Valerie On The Stairs, John Farris for We All Scream For Ice Cream), directors (named here) and actors (William Forsythe, and Christopher Lloyd among others) in these two discs promises a great deal. These are Season 2 episodes; coming in a couple of weeks will be a boxed set of the Season 1 discs which had been released in the same manner. Based on price and the fact that the Season 1 set includes a previously unreleased disc of extras, you would probably be better off to wait for the eventual release of a complete Season 2 set unless you specifically want only specific episodes of the series.

Mcleod's Daughters:Season 3
Apparently this Australian series airs in Canada on the non-denominational religious channel Vision TV, and on the digital specialty channel One - the Mind, Body & Spirit Channel, all of which is by way of explaining why I have never heard of this series until now (Australian, religious channel, "Mind, Body & Spirit Channel" – none of them my cup of tea, except maybe Australian. Apparently the series is one of the most popular shows in Australia and is consistently nominated for and wins "Logies" – the Australian equivalent of the Emmy, named after John Logie Baird (the inventor of the first practical television system, "mechanical television"). Who knew?

Murder City
Why is it that so many cop shows and mysteries feature "two mismatched detectives" who find themselves working together to solve crimes? I don't know, but they do. Murder City features Amanda Donahoe as Detective Inspector Susam Alembic ("perhaps the most talented DI in her department") who is partnered with Detective Sergeant Luke Stone, played by Kris Marshall. Stone is seen by many of his colleagues as "an amateur detective" and by some as incompetent for his mistakes. I haven't seen this show, which airs on BBC America but not on BBC Canada (at least not yet) but I'm interested in anything with the alluring Ms. Donahoe, who I loved in LA Law which was before I saw her in Lair Of The White Worm where she was literally bewitching.

Overhaulin': Season 3 Vol. 2
Cars, many of them classics, overhauled for unsuspecting owners. It undoubtedly helps if you're a car guy, which for the most part I'm not.

A Pup Named Scooby Doo, Vol. 7
I'm not sure that I need to say it, but I've never been a fan of anything to do with the Scooby-Doo franchise except of course with the original link to Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is a cultural reference (which morphed when Sarah Michelle Gellar took the role of Daphne in the live action movie). Even so the notion of the adventures of Scooby-Doo as a puppy somehow seems wrong to me. On the other hand it does seem to give some background to the characters but somehow it doesn't seem right to me, Considering that only 29 episodes of this show were ever made, seven volumes seems like a lot. What it is is an effective way to get money out DVD buyers who would probably be paying less if a season set or complete series set were offered. It is, I'm sad to say, a rather common and annoying practice for the producers of DVDs aimed at kids and paid for by their parents.

Short Takes – June 4, 2007

I ate salmon last night. I should never eat salmon, but it was something new and I knew my mother wanted to try it so.... At least this time I didn't vomit. I came close, but the fish stayed where I put it.

The Big Donor Show: It's several days after the fact and I still don't know how I feel about this one although I edge slightly towards agreeing with the network. As I'm sure you know, the Dutch network BNN put on a reality show – produced by Endemol, the same company that created Big Brother just about everywhere (but not in Canada for some reason; we have to be content with watching Americans) and has spread like a giant fungus all over the world – about a woman dying of a brain tumour who was going to choose one of three patients to donate her kidney to (apparently she had only one). The potential recipients had a one in three chance of getting the organ but that was far higher than their odds on a waiting list (in the Netherlands or probably anywhere else in the world). Inevitably the notion of the show brought condemnation from just about everyone you could think of, from Pope Benedict on down. There were calls in the Dutch Parliament for the Health and Media ministers to prevent the show from airing. Of course as we all know by now, the show turned out to be a hoax – or rather the central premise did. The terminally ill woman turned out to be a perfectly healthy actress and the three patients, while really ill, were in on the stunt. After revealing the hoax, Endemol Director Paul Römer stated "Let there be no misunderstanding, I would never make a program such as 'The Big Donor Show' for real. I do understand the massive outrage very well. But I also hope for people to understand why we did this. It was necessary to get the shortage of donors back on the political agenda. I call up everybody to get very angry about that, and to fill in a donor form." The Dutch Minister of Education, Ronald Plasterk called the show "a fantastic idea, and a great stunt" although Christian Democrat MP Joop Atsma, who led calls for the show to be banned, claimed that he didn't feel it had contributed towards solving the problem. The proof, one way or another, may be in the figures – two days after the show aired the Dutch national news program NOS News reported that over 50,000 organ donor forms had been requested.

BNN was an appropriate venue for this stunt. The network is aimed at a youth demographic; the sort of people who tend not to fill out donor cards because they think they're going to live forever and also the type of people who tend to get into car and motorcycle accidents. The network is also known for shocking content, some of which can't be named or described in a family blog, and for medical shows like It Could Have Been You and Over My Corpse in which youth with handicaps are consulted and tell about their lives. The biggest reason that the network was an appropriate venue for the show is found in the network's name. The initials BNN originally stood for Brutaal News Network (Flagrant News Network in English), but when network founder Bart De Graaf died in 2002 it was rebranded as Bart's Neverending Network. De Graaf had been in a serious car accident as a child which resulted in severe renal failure which also led to a growth disorder that made him look like a 12 year-old boy. A popular presenter on the Dutch network Veronica (an outgrowth of the famous pirate radio station) de Graaf underwent a kidney transplant in 1997, the same year he founded BNN. His body rejected the kidney in 1999 and he died in 2002 at age 35. Laurens Drillich, current chairman of BNN, said of The Big Donor Show, "We very much agree that it's bad taste but we also believe that reality is even worse taste. I mean, it's going very, very bad with organ donorship in the Netherlands. We as a broadcaster, BNN, had someone who started our TV station who needed kidneys and was on a waiting list and died eventually at the age of 35. That happened five years ago and in the last five years the situation has only gotten worse in the Netherlands." I'm not entirely convinced that The Big Donor Show was a good idea but it is often the case that people need something shocking to get them to do things that they really should do anyway – look at how blood donation went up immediately after the World Trade Center attacks but only 5% or Americans donate blood. If The Big Donor Show got people to sign organ donor forms and they and their families live up to the promises that those forms make, maybe it made a difference. I hope so.

Doctor Who won't end after four season: The British tabloid The Sun – a paper that no self respecting parakeet would even relieve itself on – reported a few days ago that Doctor Who would be axed in 2008 because producer Russell T. Davies wanted to move on to new projects and "He and senior staff have hatched a plot to hand in a group resignation in summer 2008." Davies claimed that the heavy workload, "nine months of 16-hour days every year" was taking its toll and he wanted to move on to new projects. This was followed almost immediately by an accurate news story from the Guardian newspaper (registration needed) stating that while Davies might go, the show wouldn't: "there isn't any way it would be axed even if he left. He loves the show and he does feel that maybe it would benefit from some new blood." (I can just picture the editors at The Grauniad drooling in anticipation of making The Sun look like a bunch of total prats.) Not only don't I think that Russell T. Davies is not indispensible as producer of Doctor Who, it is my opinion that it's about time for him to go even if he doesn't want to. In its original incarnation Doctor Who had a turnover of producers about every three or four years until the arrival of John Nathan Turner. Turner served as producer for nine years – three times longer than average – and oversaw the decline and cancellation of the series. It's my opinion that a show like Doctor Who needs a continual regeneration of ideas which basically can only come through periodic turnover of writing and production staff. That's what Turner forgot and what the BBC will hopefully remember.

Battlestar Galactica on the other hand will: On the other hand producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick have confirmed rumours that Battlestar Galactica will end after the fourth season. The rumours first surfaced at the 2007 Saturn Awards when both Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackoff told an interviewer that the fourth Season would be the show's last. At the time Moore denied the report but confirmed it on June 1. In an interview about the discrepancy between his two statements he said that "the decision to end after season four needed to be a collective one, which would be why there was some disconnect with prior reports." The plan had always been that there would be a beginning middle and end to the series and they both feel that they will have told the tale they want to tell by the finish of the fourth season. As much as I love the revival of Battlestar Galactica – and I love it a lot – I find this sort of finite storytelling to be one of those ideas that should be adopted a lot more on television. It was key to one of my favourite series – Babylon 5, although that series sort of went off the rails when the decision was made to wrap up both the Shadow War and Earth Alliance Civil War storylines in the fourth season because it appeared that the show wouldn't be around for a fifth season...and then it was. As long as producers are able to get a reasonable guarantee that they will have the time they need to tell their story having a plan is a good thing, but how many TV executives – particularly in broadcast TV – are willing to make that sort of guarantee? The answer is "damned few", right Kidnapped and Vanished fans.

Who does the PTC hate this week?: The PTC's criticism of a lot of shows stems from a fallacy and nowhere is that clearer than in the organization's hysterical condemnation of the season finale of NCIS for "grotesque violence." The first line of the second paragraph of their diatribe states "On the 5/22/07 episode of NCIS that aired during the so-called "family hour" of 8 p.m. ET/PT". Indeed the phrase "Family Hour" "is used in the subtitle for the article: "Horrific Drug Scene Aired During 8pm 'Family Hour' and Without Appropriate Content Ratings". Well here's a news flash for the PTC – you're thirty years out of date. The "Family Hour" (or to be totally accurate the "Family Viewing Hour") was a restriction imposed upon the television networks by the FCC starting with the 1975 television season. It was struck down by US Circuit Court Judge Warren Ferguson in 1976. Ferguson found that the FCC, having lobbied the networks to implement the scheme rather than holding public hearings on the matter had overstepped its bounds and that as a result "the Family Viewing Hour had no binding merit."

Ah, but what of their criticism of NCIS? What is the "grotesque violence?" Well it was directed against a corpse. In the episode, Tony DiNozzo and his girlfriend Dr. Jeanne Benoit are held hostage by a drug dealer who wants the balloons of heroin that are in the digestive tract of his dead drug mule. As the PTC describes it, "The scene shows the dead smuggler having his midsection sliced open and his blood-soaked organs pulled out of his body. The man's digestive tract is sliced open and heroin powder spills over his bloodied torso. When a fight ensues, one character stabs the drug dealer with a scalpel and another character shoots the drug dealer. Then the junkie-sister is seen burying her face in her brother's bloody entrails as she snorts the heroin off his dead body." Needless to say the PTC is outraged: "This episode was rated TV-14, with no content descriptors. Based on the graphic violence, the "V" descriptor should have been used, and due to the foul language, the "L" descriptor should have been employed as well." But they go on: "This episode, this scene, is one of the most grotesquely violent programs we have ever seen on primetime broadcast television. At a time when the nation holds a heightened sensitivity to the volume and degree of violence on television, CBS seems intent on baiting the Congress to act on the recent recommendations of the FCC and expand indecency standards to include graphic violence when children are in the viewing audience. And not only did CBS choose to air this episode during the 8 p.m. 'family hour' when they knew millions of children and families were in the viewing audience, but they ignored the industry's own 'solution' of attaching a proper content rating." And they call on their members to inundate advertisers and CBS affiliates with letters: "If the sponsors knew about the content of this episode, they must be called to account; and if they did not know about the content, then they should demand – and receive – a complete refund from CBS. Furthermore, we are calling on the viewing public to communicate with their local CBS affiliate to ask how their actions serve the public interest, as required by each affiliate's broadcast license. It is outrageous that CBS – which uses the public airwaves for free – would have the nerve to air something so graphically perverse and violent when they know millions of children and families comprise the viewing audience."

This whole thing, particularly the PTC's continual diatribe on "correct" applications of descriptors raises a lot of questions. Easily the biggest of these is who, at the networks, applies the descriptors and what are their guidelines. Obviously the PTC would like a central body – presumably with similar views to their own – to impose the descriptors on the networks. However even a central body to provide ratings and descriptors for TV shows would be rife with problems. The documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated deals with the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board and found among other things that films with homosexual themes were treated far more harshly than films with heterosexual themes, that "the board's raters receive no training and are deliberately chosen because of their lack of expertise in media literacy or child development," and that many ratings board members either have no children at all or none under the age of 18. The question of who decides on the ratings for shows and the descriptors attached to them is, I think, a legitimate one.

On the other hand I personally find the scene that the PTC is most infuriated by to be less than what they claim it to be. The demand for the language descriptor is absurd – the language in this episode is no worse than on any number of other episodes of the series or other shows on at the same time. People have quite frankly seen worse violence to living people than what happened to the drug dealer in this episode (he's stabbed with a scalpel and DiNozzo shoots at him but doesn't hit him). So the PTC's "grotesque violence" is all happening to the corpse of the dead "mule" and to be quite honest we've seen more graphic depictions than that in autopsy scenes on CSI, and Crossing Jordan; even a few episodes of Quincy were reasonably graphic back in the day. No I think what really set the PTC off on their crusade – this "crime" against families was deemed worthy of a press release and call to action of its own and isn't designated as the PTC's "worst of the week" – it the moment when the "mule's" junky whore sister snorts the drugs from off his remains. Yes the scene is shocking and more than a little disgusting but it is in character for the person performing the act, a heroin addict desperate for a drug fix.

But what would the PTC replace shows like NCIS with if they had their way? Well we can get a sense of the sort of pap that they would replace most shows if not all with by looking at their Best of the Week shows. The most recent of these is ABC's National Bingo Night. This is a show that many people have found to be so dismal as to be unwatchable and reviewers were even more shocked by. To the PTC it was great because "This provides a great opportunity for friends and family alike to enjoy a family activity together." This follows a trend in that the PTC wants more game shows and "gentle" reality shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The last scripted series to be labelled as the PTC's Best of the Week was Everybody Hates Chris on March 2. I've only been able to find one other scripted show that they liked – a CBS Hallmark TV movie called Valley Of The Light – although the Council's archives appear only go back to the beginning of February 2007. Meanwhile many series from the five broadcast networks have been named as Worst of the Week and virtually every show on TV has been given a "Red Light" rating in the organization's Family Guide to Primetime TV, and I don't anticipate any change in the coming 2007-08 season. These people don't want good television or television that challenges the viewer; under the guise of "protecting the children" they want television that doesn't offend anyone that will be watchable by the lowest common denominator – the person who is most easily offended. The rest of us suffer from their insistence on not being offended. The public, based on Nielsen ratings, wants shows like CSI and Grey's Anatomy (the two top scripted shows on the list) – both of which the PTC has condemned for violence and sex (not to mention language) – while the PTC wants the networks to serve up pablum like National Bingo Night. And it insults us all, including Canadians because so much of what we see is the product of the American broadcast networks.

The Latest Doctor

I had meant to post something earlier, either late yesterday or sometime earlier today, but in truth it is amazing what one drumstick of Tryptophan and a 3 year old nephew can do to me. Christmas night I had to wake up from my nap to go to bed. Monday I woke up too tired to go Boxing Day shopping even if that didn't mean standing overnight in front of some store to get the best possible bargain - I did that once and once was more than enough.

Television on Christmas, and for most of the week before and after, is pretty dire stuff mostly made up of reruns, made for TV movies and more reruns. Even sports were pretty weak. The NHL doesn't play on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day - never has - and the NFL moved all of its Sunday games to Saturday so as not to play on Christmas - which may be something new. There was probably a Bowl game of some sort (actually no, there wasn't), but the only pro league to be playing was the NBA, which had two game (I suppose I could wonder if this is some sort of commentary on the family values of the league or its players union but frankly I'm not that interested). About the biggest thing on TV on Monday was the last "episode" of ABC's Monday Night Football. This is of course one of the many differences between North America and Britain. While we become comatose from overingesting turkey and don't notice the raft of reruns on Christmas, the British eat goose - well except for the Scots who save their feasting for Hogmanay - and watch TV - usually special episodes of shows, some of which have long since vanished from the air except at Christmas. Of course the one special that was most awaited - on both sides of the Atlantic - was Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion if only because it was the first real appearance of the new Doctor, David Tennant. The show aired on Christmas evening in Britain and on Boxing Day evening in Canada and all I can say is that while I miss Christopher Ecclestone a lot, David Tennant really isn't bad at all, given just how much - or rather how little - we actually saw if him.

The episode actually starts on Earth, with Rose Tyler's mother Jackie decorating a tacky white artificial Christmas tree and looking wistfully at a Christmas package she has prepared for her daughter. The scene then cuts to Rose's old boyfriend Mickey as he's working at a garage. Suddenly both hear a familiar - to them - sound: the TARDIS. However, unlike most appearances of the time ship this time the old blue police box is falling out of control crashing into things before finally landing in the courtyard of the housing estate where Jackie and Mickey live. The doors open and from them emerges an unknown figure. He rushes around confused but knowing who they are. He finally says "Merry Christmas" and collapses. Rose comes out shortly there after and when her mom asks where The Doctor is she is informed that this is him to which Jackie responds "What do you mean that's the Doctor? Doctor Who?" At which point the theme starts.

I wanted to emphasize this because you really don't see much of The Doctor in this episode. According to the TV listings the episode was supposed to last 90 minutes but the actual running time was closer to 75 or 80 minutes with commercials which means that the show itself ran about 60 minutes without commercials. Of that Tennant's version of The Doctor was only active on screen for what seemed like 15 or 20 minutes. For the rest of the time the focus was on Rose Mickey and Jackie, and on Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. This emphasis on the human characters seems a bit odd. In the case of the Rose storylne it is in keeping with the series' concept in which Rose is less of a screaming sidekick and more of a heroic figure on her own. In this case though she is made painfully aware of just how dependent she is on The Doctor. When she, Jackie and Mickey are attacked by various Christmas related menaces (a quartet of musical Santa Clauses whose instruments double as weapons, and a whirling Christmas tree) she's forced to revive The Doctor long enough to defeat the initial menace - in this brief conscious moment he describes them as "pilot fish"; scavengers picking around a greater threat. This however disrupts his regeneration, to the point where one heart stops and he seems near death again. This has the side effect of stripping her of the ability to understand any language spoken, which is granted to her by the TARDIS. It's something that brings home not only how dependent she is on The Doctor but also how used she has become to being with him and to the adventure of being his companion. She loves it, and Mickey at least understands just how addicted she is to it, even though he doesn't like it.

The main crisis faces Harriet Jones as Britain's Prime Minister. As part of the "new Golden Age" Britain has launched a Mars probe - Guinevere I - which is due to land on Mars on Christmas Day. In fact the probe is intercepted by an alien space ship headed for Earth. The aliens, who we shortly learn are called the Sycorax, are claiming Earth - and its inhabitants - for their own. Jones is forced to choose to surrender Earth or else "They will die." As it turns out they are the roughly one third of the Earth's population who have A+ blood (this figure is totally accurate by the way; 34% of the population of earth has A+ blood). Every person with A+ blood goes to the highest building they can find and stand on the edge (this includes the Queen and the entire Royal Family) In desperation Harriet goes on television asking for the help of The Doctor, if he's on Earth. The Sycorax bring her and several of her advisors up to their ship where they kill the designer of the Guinevere probe and Harriet's UNIT advisor. They lose interest in Harriet however when they detect an energy source from Earth - the TARDIS, with Rose, Mickey, and an unconscious Doctor aboard. Rose and Mickey are captured, but some spilled tea helps to revive The Doctor, something which Rose realizes when she suddenly starts to understand the words of the Sycorax leader. Once he steps out of the TARDIS, he makes short work of the Sycorax plot (it turns out that they're using something akin to hypnosis as a bluff) and rapidly defeats the Sycorax leader in single combat. He tells the remaining Sycorax to leave Earth and to never return, and to tell any other races they encounter that Earth is defended. They don't get a chance - Harriet Jones uses an adapted alien weapon to destroy the Sycorax ship, angering The Doctor immensely. Harriet's logic for committing what The Doctor calls murder is compelling - the Earth survived this time only because The Doctor just happened to be on Earth this time - but he regards humanity as the real monsters, and he does take action against Harriet personally.

The episode has a nice fun feeling to it even without The Doctor being present as much as he normally is. He shows up and saves the day with incredible ease. The Sycorax as a menace are the sort that he can defeat. They seem to be a gentler version of the aliens from Independence Day travelling the galaxy looting what they can but I had the distinct feeling that they were more like interplanetary conmen, trying to convince the unsophisticated yokels that they have magic available to them. The Sycorax are defeated easily because they're an insignificant menace - to him. In fact he literally defeats them wearing a pair of pyjamas. It serves well in its role as an introduction for Tennant. On the whole he isn't bad, although at times his accent, enunciation and the speed with which speak can on occasion be hard to understand. Of course I at least initially said that about Eccleston as well. As an actor he's an interesting physical type, and once we see him more extensively in the role we'll probably become more comfortable with him in the part. Mostly though this is an episode isn't really about introducing us to Tennant and more about how humans interact with the Doctor and the degree to which his relations with them have an effect on their actions.

(I should mention Torchwood. We have the impression that Torchwood is the name of the weapon itself, but apparently it's something more. It is in fact a spin-off of Doctor Who - the name is an anagram - which will feature John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness and will debut on the BBC in the autumn of 2006.)

Nine Days Of the Doctor - Day 9

Here it is finally, Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 9

Christopher Eccleston: 2005

Companion: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper)

Comments: The first thing I have to say is WOW! The second thing I have to say is that Christopher Eccleston is a bloody idiot for giving up this job, although to be fair a recent report indicates that the BBC was aware when he took the part that he didn't intend to go beyond one year.

The first episode focusses on Rose Tyler. Rose is a clerk in a department store who starts out having a not so bad day. She's got a good job and a boyfriend and so what if she quit high school. But when the security guard gives her the money to take to the guy who buys the group lottery tickets things start to go a bit badly. "Wilson" is supposed to be in the basement but instead of finding him she finds a bunch of living shop dummies, and an odd sort of bloke in a black leather jacket and tight jeans who proceeds to get her out of the department store and then blows the place up, but not without telling us that he's called The Doctor. Rose is so intent on getting away that she doesn't notice an odd blue telephone booth.

The first episode is very much structured as a way to introduce new viewers to the show while still keeping long time fans involved. By focussing on Rose and her attempts to deal with what she's experiencing the viewers get a comprehensive introduction to the characters. Besides her boyfriend Mickey, Rose has a rather eccentric mother who brings more than a little comic relief to the situation. Through a character named Clive Finch the mystery nature of The Doctor is brought into focus. Clive's an Internet conspiracy nut but he's got a real one this time, full of cryptic mentions in ministerial diaries and of course pictures. Pictures of the Ninth Doctor at the Kennedy Assassination, with a family who did not board the Titanic in 1912, and a drawing that washed up on the shores of Sumatra after the explosion of Krakatoa. When Rose asks him what he thinks The Doctor is he says that he thinks The Doctor is an immortal, an alien and that his only companion is Death. Well two out of three ain't bad. The point is that Clive is our introduction to the mystery that is The Doctor, a mystery that Rose is already immersed in and doesn't really know it. This isn't to say that we don't see a lot of The Doctor, but we only see the layers of his character revealed gradually. At first he seems like a "nutter" but in time Rose comes to realize that he isn't crazy and that he really is alien. Unlike previous Doctors, he seems - initially at least - to want to keep his distance from Rose and humans in general. There are lots of nice touches for him as well. It's fairly clear that he's only recently regenerated; when he looks into a mirror at Rose's home he comments on his new face and particularly the ears. His explanation of who he is has all the charm mystery and wonder that you could ever expect from The Doctor telling us about himself and leaving us no wiser than we were before. It's his big thing - he's charmingly mysterious and always has been.

The selection of the villain in the first episode is perfect. The Nestene Consciousness, working through it's plastic agents the Autons (the shop dummies, equipped with guns in their hands) is an old villain, having appeared twice during Pertwee's time in the role. It's familiar a dangerous but not major foe like the Daleks, the Cybermen or even the Sontarans. Better, this time they gave the Consciousness a reason for its actions, which has also provided us with a tantalizing glimpse at what has been going on since the last time we've seen The Doctor, and it's not pleasant. There's been a war and the Doctor fought in it. The war destroyed the Nestene's food planets. Earth is ideal.

The dialogue is absolutely spot on, a mix of technobabble, nice speeches and plenty of sharp banter. Russell T. Davies, who wrote most of this season (he's written 11 episodes; Steve Moffat who create Coupling wrote the other two), got the mix just right. The banter in particular was nice. After telling Rose about all the things the Consciousness will be able to control to attack humanity - the shop dummies, the telephones, the cables - Rose adds "The breast implants." Earlier Rose asks The Doctor why he sounds like he comes from the North (Eccleston has a pronounced Lancashire accent) to which he replies "Lots of planets have a North." In terms of effects the show is a massive step up from the old continuing series. The interior of the Tardis is no longer the old "white room" but looks convincingly alien, and there are plenty of CGI explosions if that's your taste.

I have a few quibbles. First, I'm not convinced that the one episode stories will work as well as the old half-hour serial format. I'd much rather they tried to find stories that will work over a two hour arc with a cliffhanger in the middle rather than forcing them to be self-contained. I understand that there are some later stories are like that, but would rather see that be the norm rather than the exception to the rule. Another problem I have, and I know it will probably affect many North Americans is the accents. Between Billie Piper's East Enders accent and Eccleston's Lancashire voice it can be a bit hard to pick up on what they're saying. Eccleston has a line where he describes Rose as "blonding" into something. It took Close Captioning for me to realize that he meant "blundering" into something. Other than that I pretty much liked the whole thing, even the re-orchestration of the classic Ron Grainer theme. To steal from Ebert and Roeper, two very emphatic thumbs up!

Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 8

Presenting Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day Eight.

Paul McGann: 1996

Companion:Dr. Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook)

Comments: Paul McGann was four years and nine days old when the first episode of Doctor Who appeared on the BBC. Perhaps a little too young at the time to be hiding behind a sofa, he did quite literally grow up watching the show. Born and raised in Liverpool he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts before embarking on a very busy film and television career. He is probably best known for playing the "I" in the film Withnail & I and had a small part in Alien 3, but let's not hold that against him - at least it wasn't Alien Resurrection. It's unfortunate then that he only got the one chance to play The Doctor on TV. Ironically his agent was worried that appearing as The Doctor would result in him being typecast and advised him not to take it. Even more ironic is that the agent who advised him on this was Janet Fielding, better known to fans of the show as Tegan Jovanka.

The story of the first attempt to revive Doctor Who is an amazing case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. While the show had been cancelled in 1989 it was still generating revenue through the sale of videos and from licensing fees for merchandise such as books. Virgin Publishing had the license for a time and were not only publishing novelizations of classic episodes - as the previous licensee Target had done - but were printing non-fiction episode guides and new stories. When the BBC took back the license they also published new stories. Some of the earlier series were aired on BBC2 to generally good audiences. The BBC felt the market was there for a new series, but they felt they needed outside partners.

There were all sorts of rumour about possible productions. At one point Cinema Verity was reported to have acquired production rights for a new show - appropriate since Cinema Verity is the production company owned by Verity Lambert who was the very first producer of Doctor Who back when William Hartnell played The Doctor. Lambert supposedly wanted to start the series right from the beginning. Green Light/Lumiere Pictures acquired the rights for a time and were set to do a series or movie directed by Leonard Nimoy with Alan Rickman as The Doctor. This also collapsed in part because there were rumours that Steven Spielberg wanted the project. What the BBC got was Philip Segal who had been head of production at Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. When Segal left Amblin he took Doctor Who with him. The project quickly became a partnership between Universal where Segal had first taken it and Fox.

The script that Segal put together was a bit of a hodge-podge. There were a great many "fannish" elements, as well as a great many things that the fans were bound to object to. Sylvester McCoy was brought back for a cameo appearance as the Seventh Doctor who was gunned down by a San Francisco street gang. The regeneration was triggered when a surgeon was confused by what she saw inside the patient (two hearts has a tendency to provoke this reaction). The Doctor had been sent to Skaro to recover the body of The Master who had been tried and executed by the Daleks for various crimes (the Daleks tend not to be interested in trials or crimes). Reincarnated as Eric Roberts (Segal had wanted Christopher Lloyd but the studios said he'd be too expensive - as it turns out, Julia Roberts' older brother cost the producers more than Lloyd would have). It was revealed that The Doctor was "half human" which was the reason why he was entrusted with the "Eye of Harmony" which powered his TARDIS. Worst of all The Doctor kissed his new companion and not a friendly peck on the cheek either.

No matter what else could be said about the new movie, one cannot fault McGann's performance as The Doctor. In dress he's very reminiscent of Pertwee's Doctor albeit less colourful. He's dressed in a black velvet frock coat, vest and ascot tie. Thankfully the "question mark" motif that had been forced onto The Doctor during John Nathan-Turner's time was nowhere to be seen. Initially at least he's not at his best - he has amnesia but soon becomes aware of the threat posed by The Master. We don't really get to know much about this incarnation of The Doctor (obviously), but he has an earnestness about him that works. It would have been very interesting to see where McGann would have taken the character. As for his "companion" in the movie, she is intended more as a temporary romantic interest - because Hollywood obviously wondered what kind of hero doesn't have a romantic relationship, particularly when dressed in "those" clothes. She's pleasant and competent, and mercifully not a screamer, but Grace doesn't have the depth that the sadly absent Ace developed. She's another character that gets things explained to her, which since the mass American audience didn't know that much about Doctor Who meant that she was being told about what the TARDIS did and how The Doctor traveled through time. It did give an opportunity for banter though. Consider this example of dialog:
Grace: I suppose you knew Madame Curie too.
The Doctor: Intimately.
Grace: Does she kiss as good as me?
The Doctor: As well as you.

When the Doctor Who movie premiered in Britain it was the second highest rated program for the week. Unfortunately it did not do well in the United States. Airing on Fox, and opposite the episode of Roseanne in which Dan suffers a heart attack, the show had been a ratings disappointment performing worse than any two hour TV movie aired in May 1996 and doing poorly when compared with other Fox programming. Fox refused to pick the show up as a weekly series (and as far as I can tell has never aired the movie since). Without an American partner the BBC was unwilling to take a chance with a new series either. Doctor Who was - apparently - dead again.

Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 7

In honour of the revival of Doctor Who debuting in North America on April 5 on CBC, I present Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 7. Those of you who are interested in the new series might want to check out Doctor Who online. Click on the "New Series" link and go to the bottom of the resultant page to see teasers and trailers for the new series. Looks good.

Sylvester McCoy1987-1989

Companions: Melanie "Mel" Bush (Bonny Langford), Dorothy "Ace" (last name unknown although there's a suggestion that the producers wanted it to be Gale) (Sophie Aldred)

Comments: Born James Kent-Smith in Scotland in 1943 and raised in Dublin Ireland by his mother and grandmother (his father died in World War II, shortly before he was born). Between the ages of 12 and 16 he studied for the priesthood and actually applied to enter a Dominican Monastery but was rejected because he was too young. He soon discovered girls and thoughts of a religious life vanished. At various times he worked as an insurance salesman and was once a bodyguard for the Rolling Stones. He entered show business first at age 27 selling tickets and keeping the books for a theater. Later he joined the "Ken Campbell Roadshow" where he had a double act with a young man named Bob Hoskins. After Hoskins left the show, Kent-Smith developed a comedy act as a circus stuntman who did things like stuffing ferrets down his pants (!) - the name of the stuntman was Sylvester McCoy and as a joke Sylvester McCoy was billed as being played by Sylvester McCoy. A critic didn't get the joke and liking the irony of the situation, James Kent-Smith adopted Sylvester McCoy as his stage name.

McCoy was primarily a stage actor with some credits in children's television when he was selected to play The Doctor by John Nathan-Turner. In fact he is the only actor to play two different Doctors on the show. Since Colin Baker refused to sign on to play the Sixth Doctor for the regeneration scene, McCoy put on a curly blonde wig and Baker's trademark multi-colored coat and was photographed laying on his stomach so that his face wasn't seen during the regeneration scene. McCoy's Doctor was far more subdued than Colin Baker's both in dress and personality. Normally dressed in a straw hat, off-white jacket, a sweater vest decorated with question marks over a white shirt and tie, and tweed trousers with a sort of Scottish plaid feel to them, his biggest affectation was the umbrella he always carried which had a question mark handle. In terms of personality he was very much a toned down throwback to Patrick Troughton's version of The Doctor - comedic but with an added, philosophical aspect to his character. Another aspect that the writers were beginning to explore was the notion that The Doctor was more than "just" a Time Lord; there was something deeper going on.

In terms of Companions, Mel remained pretty much as she had been in the two serials she did with Colin Baker, namely a screamer as well as a health food activist. The problem is that the scripts didn't give much opportunity for development. Ace fared much better. In fact her character was developed more than any other companion with much of what turned out to be the final season of the original series being devoted to her character. She was a rebellious teen with a bad relationship with her mother, a love of explosives, and a hatred of racism caused by the death of a childhood friend in a racially inspired attack. Over time she became increasingly confident and less brash.

The scripts for McCoy's first season were quite weak, a result of the turmoil that surrounded John Nathan-Turner's relationship with the previous script editor. There was no time for the new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, to put his stamp on the twenty-fourth season - McCoy's first - and scripts previously accumulated on the "slush pile" were used for the season. To say the least they were uneven. The next season was the show's twenty-fifth anniversary. It contained an uneven Cybermen story, and a beautifully realized Dalek story taking place at Coal Hill School (where Ian and Barbara had taught Susan) climaxing on November 23, 1963 - the day that Doctor Who premiered on BBC TV. Even one of the silliest episodes The Happiness Patrol was deeper than many people thought. At the very least is it was an anti-fascist tale and could very readily be seen as a parody of Margaret Thatcher's Britain, although the murderous robot made to resemble a collection of licorice allsorts tended to undercut things. The Greatest Show In The Galaxy serial has been analysed as being a parody of the BBC and it's management with the "Gods of Ragnorok" representing the TV audience which is always seeking some new entertainment. The twenty-sixth, and as it turned out the final season of the series not only featured the aforementioned arc devoted to Ace, which also continued to show The Doctor as a master manipulator, but also an appearance by Lethbridge-Stewart (who never did appear with the Sixth Doctor - at least not on television) and Anthony Ainley's final appearance as The Master.

Sadly the changes weren't enough. The BBC had already moved the show away from its traditional Saturday afternoon time slot, moving it first to Monday and then to Wednesday for the final two seasons and the ratings had not improved. Nathan-Turner was thoroughly tired and wasn't prepared to put up the same sort of fight that he had when Michael Grade had cancelled the show (Grade had left the BBC in 1988) so he simply packed up his office while McCoy and Aldred were informed they were unemployed. McCoy recorded a final monologue and that was it.

Or was it?

Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 6

In honour of the return of Doctor Who to television as a series, debuting in North America on CBC on April 5, I present Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 6.

Colin Baker:1984-1986

Companions: Perpugiliam "Peri" Brown (Nicola Bryant), Mel (Bonny Langford)

Comments: It's rather difficult to believe that Colin Baker was actually eight years older than Peter Davison, if only because Baker's version of the Doctor seems much more immature than Davison's. Baker had actually trained as a solicitor (in Britain a lawyer who contacts and advises clients) and only began training as an actor full time at age 23 (in 1966) (among his fellow students was David Suchet). He alternated between television and stage work before being cast as The Doctor. His period in the role was undoubtedly one of the most turbulent and only partially because of him.

Colin Baker's Doctor is generally regarded as the worst ever. He is an abrasive, arrogant, pushy, aloof, unpredictable know-it-all with absolutely no sense of taste (just look at his costume). Throughout his tenure in the role he had people rooting for the monsters. The contrast between Colin Baker and previous incarnations of the Doctor is seen in the episode The Two Doctors in which he worked with Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. This version of the Doctor was at least in part a result of consultations between Baker and producer John Nathan-Turner. It seems to have suited Colin Baker's personality though - he'd spent a lot of his career playing "people you love to hate" and apparently set out to create a Doctor who fit that description.

John Nathan-Turner had taken the job producer in the last year of Tom Baker's time in the role and would continue to the end of the original series. Most Doctor Who producers stayed with the show for three years - Turner was there for nine and while continuity is good in principle it's not always good in practice. On the other hand he was facing a number of external pressures. In the last year of Davison's time as Doctor coverage of the Olympics had caused two weeks where two episodes had aired on the same day making a 50 minute episode. The BBC liked the ratings results and decided that Season 22 - Baker's first - would all be 50 minutes long. There would now be thirteen 50 minute episodes instead of twenty six 25 minute shows. It was a disaster because it destroyed the pace of the show. The aforementioned Two Doctors was made up of three of these episodes which was the equivalent of six normal episodes. It destroyed the show's tension, and the material simply wasn't adequate for the extended length of time. Then there was the question of violence. Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewer's and Listener's Association had been criticizing the show for having too much sex and violence since the Davison years, but if anything the amount of violence (and "sex" in the form of Nicola Bryant's impressive cleavage which initially at least was very much on display) increased in the Colin Baker period - Baker himself said in an early interview that the show wasn't violent enough. The trouble was that BBC 1 had a new Controller. He was Michael Grade, nephew of film and television producer Lord Lew Grade, and he hated Doctor Who. He cancelled the show, nominally because of the violence and because it "underperformed".

No matter what else can be said about John Nathan-Turner, he did have a gift for public relations and promotion. He organized a campaign to revive the show using his press contacts and after a gap of 18 months the show returned to the air. It was vastly different than what had been planned however. The 50 minute experiment was abandoned but only fourteen episodes would be made. A complete season of episodes that had already been written was tossed out in favour of a season long arc that seemed far too rushed because of the number of episodes, known as The Trial of the Time Lord. Nicola Bryant's character Peri was killed off(apparently) in the eighth episode of show and a new companion, Mel was brought on without any indication of how she met The Doctor. The result was forced. The writer of the last two episodes died after finishing only one, and the story editor quit taking with him a hastily version of the last episode forcing Turner to hire a writing team to come up with a new script without referring to the script that the story editor had created. It was a mess.

Peri was the Doctor's first American companion (although the actress Nicola Bryant was British she was so convincing that Turner actually thought she was an American) and was carried over from The Davison period. She was the constant butt of The Doctor's bouts of temper and ego, although by Colin Baker's second season there seemed to be a definite affection which heightened the sense of loss when the character was killed off. She definitely filled (pun intended) the part of a companion's role of retaining adult male viewers - her cleavage was often on display. Often courageous in a hesitant way, she was usually the recipient of The Doctor's frequently petulant explanations. As for Mel, she possessed a great set of lungs which she used often for screaming, but stage actress Bonny Langford (who at 12 appeared in the movie Bugsy Malone with Scott Baio and Jodie Foster) was the personal choice of Turner for the job of companion.

Colin Baker's time as The Doctor ended as it started - with controversy. Turner was informed that despite poor ratings against The A-Team, the series would continue but only if Baker were replaced. Turner told Baker that three years was long enough in the role - although Colin Baker had actually only appeared in the show for two years and one episode (and had said that his ambition was to stay in the role longer than Tom Baker) - and fired him. He then tried to rehire Baker for one episode to do the traditional regeneration scene. Understandably, Colin Baker refused.

Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 5

In honour of the new Doctor Who series, which will debut on CBC TV on April 5, I now present Day Five of Nine Days Of The Doctor (even though Chris Eccleston, the actor hired to play The Doctor in the current series has quit after the first year, meaning that there will soon be a tenth Doctor).

Peter Davison: 1981-1984

Companions: Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), Tegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding), Vislor Turlough (Mark Strickson), Perprigilium "Peri" Brown (Nicola Bryant).

Comments: Peter Davison, born Peter Moffett, is probably best known not for playing The Doctor but for playing the rather dissolute veterinary student Tristan Farnon in the television adaptations of Jame Herriott's All Creatures Great And Small, which made him a very popular and sought after actor. He was the first actor to play the Doctor to have been a viewer of the series from the beginning, and apperntly modelled his portrayal primarily on Jon Pertwee, although there was some suggestion that he play the part as Tristan Farnon with courage and dignity. He was definitely cast to be different than Tom Baker. It's reported that he left the series at the end of his three year contract at least in part on the advice of Patrick Troughton. It is true that liekmany actors in similar series he didn't want to get typecast as The Doctor.

Davison's Doctor is far less flamboyant than any of his predecessors including Hartnell. His normal dress was a cricketer's sweater, a beige coat with red piping and striped trousers. The one bit of eccentricity was a piece of celery pinned to the left lapel of his coat. At some point the producers decided that The Doctor needed a symbol and a question mark was embroidered on the right lapel of The Doctor's shirt. The question mark would be a recurring theme in the costumes of the next two actors in the role. Davison's Doctor is probably the most physically active of all his incarnations. He's an expert cricketer (Davison was a keen amateur player) and in one episode plays the game expertly while his survival in another episode depends on his carrying a cricket ball in his pocket. Unfortunately the scripts begin to suffer in this period so while some stories are quite good there are a number that are rather weak. Davison does participate in the last purely historical story The Black Orchid and there's a nice episode with Lethbridge Stewart.

Of all of The Doctor's companions, perhaps the most disliked by the fans is Adric. In part this is because he's a teen-ager and a bit of a know it all at that. The character was written as being abrasive and arrogant. Apparently actor Matthew Waterhouse wasn't particularly well-liked by his fellow actors. Nyssa as precisely the opposite, a gentle caring young woman who was also brilliant at just about everything. She tended to be the peace maker between Adric, Tegan and The Doctor. Sarah Sutton was also a favourite of Davison's, to the point where he urged them to retain her in the role of the Doctor's companion instead of Janet Fielding. Tegan was one of the most argumentative companions ever on the show. She was strong willed - a trait that often got her into trouble - but tremendously loyal. (There was a definite chemistry between Davison's Doctor and Fielding's Tegan which, had the show been aimed at a more adult audience, might have been interpretted as some sort of sexual tension. At least that's my perception, which may be skewed by the fact that with her later short hair and more revealing clothes, I tend to find Tegan very sexy.) Turlough is one of the more interesting companions - he was also infuriating. He was at turns traitorous, cowardly and ruthless. You could never be sur you could trust him. Finally, Peri only appeared in two serials with Davison, and was introduced primarily to set her up for the transition to Colin Baker's Doctor. She did seem to have a close relationship with the Fifth Doctor in contrast with her relations with the Sixth.

Davison's time as The Doctor saw the return of The Master. After Roger Delgado's death the character was retained durning Tom Baker's run in the series but his face was only seen occassionally and then as horribly disfigured. In this form he was played by Peter Pratt and George beevers. At the end of Baker's time as The Doctor, The Master managed to take over the body of the Keeper of Traken, Nyssa's father. The character was played by actor Anthony Ainley who, with the addition of a moustache and goatee, bore more than a passing resemblance to Roger Delgado. The Fifth Doctor was also the last to use what might be described as "Doctor Who's Magic Wand", the Sonic Screwdriver. The device had first appeard during the Troughton years and was used by Pertwee and Baker. The second Romana even had her own. It was destroyed in the episode The Visitation and not replaced. Another item of marginal interest was Kamelion. The BBC officially lists Kamelion as a companion however it only made two appearances in the series - the serial in which it joined the Doctor and the one in which it "died". In the show Kamelion was a shape shifting android. In fact it was a remote controlled robot. The problem, and the reason why it was only seen in two serials, was that the device never worked properly and the inventor, the only one who knew how to operate it, died after selling it to the BBC.

One of the highlights of Davison's time as Doctor was the 20th anniversary of the show, commemorated in the episode The Five Doctors. Actually there were only three of the original actors on screen - Davison, Patrick Troughton, and Jon Pertwee. William Hartnell had died in 1975 and William Hurndall, who bore a rather superficial resemblance to Hartnell picked up the role. Tom Baker was unwilling to appear, feeling that too little time had passed since he had played the Doctor. He was "present" through the use of scenes from an unaired episode Shada (which was not completed because of a strike at the BBC). When a publicity photo featuring the Five Doctors was needed Baker's figure from Madame Tussaud's wax museum literally stood in for him. The episode was Jon Pertwee's last appearance as the Doctor.