N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
I’ve mentioned a few times how important The Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season was to me. (I’m sure I’m not the only Doctor Who fan who feels this way!) Before it I really had no idea that actors had played the Doctor prior to Tom Baker.
Given there was a bit of time to kill whilst waiting for the Season 19 Blu-ray to arrive, I decide to take the opportunity to recreate it and zip through the stories again. (And thanks to Britbox, I didn’t even need to swap discs for the different stories!)
For anyone that doesn’t know, these are the serials that were repeated in November and early December 1981.
For many of these, the choice of which stories to broadcast probably picked itself. An Unearthly Child being the first serial and Logopolis being the most recent made them obvious candidates.
And of course The Three Doctors was a good way of getting double-whammy value for the first three TARDIS incumbents!
A glance at The Guide to the BBC Archive from Doctor Who Magazine‘s Winter Special 1981 shows that sadly The Krotons was the only option as far as four-part Second Doctor stories go. The same list suggests that there was more choice for Third Doctor, but once you factor out the six and seven-parters and stories that had not at that time survived fully in colour, that pared the list down somewhat.
Curiously though, the one John Nathan-Turner chose (presuming it was he who made the decision) — Carnival of Monsters — was the only story that didn’t have a famous monster. By my judgment the other candidates would have been Spearhead from Space (Autons), The Curse of Peladon (Ice Warriors), The Time Warrior (Sontaran) and Day of the Daleks (ahem, Daleks!). Perhaps this was its appeal? (I suppose this lack of famous monsters would be rectified somewhat by 1982’s Doctor Who and the Monsters repeat season.)
Anyhoo, I won’t go over my thoughts on the stories again in detail. Suffice to say the first episode of An Unearthly Child is still brilliant and Carnival of Monsters remains a cracking idea for a story.
Indeed I remembered these two stories particularly well from those 1981 repeats; such was their impression on me that I never really forgot the image of the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara in the Cave of Skulls or the Doctor and Jo running around the SS Bernice.
I also have to say that The Krotons was more fun this time around (and clearly I was wrong to think I wouldn’t be revisiting it so soon). But I’m still not sure what creature provided Jo with a blue fur coat for The Three Doctors!
Perhaps I ought to have made other repeats part of this marathon too? To date the strongest case for inclusion had been The Evil of the Daleks, a repeat that they’d even cleverly worked into the narrative back in 1968. With hindsight, I probably should have watched/listened to it immediately after The Wheel in Space, but at the time it didn’t seem so important to include it — perhaps because I wasn’t alive to see it first time around?
In comparison, it did seem apposite for me to reflect on The Five Faces of Doctor Who as it had been significant to me as a kid.
The repeat seasons of 1992 and 1993 were also important to me, especially that first tranche of three — The Time Meddler, The Mind Robber and The Sea Devils — the broadcast of which coincided with my own nascent Doctor Who fandom. When this blog gets to The Wilderness Years, I guess I’ll have to decide whether or not I’ll recreate that run of stories!
