N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

For this story, I was happy to have with me as guest blogger my son, who’d wanted to watch The Invasion for some time.

He was impressed by the cliffhanger to Episode Three and the ease with which the Brigadier was able to open an apparently massive thick door in Episode Seven, but was not convinced by the pretend Cybermen they threw off the roof in Episode Eight. I was pleased that he wasn’t at all put off by how sedentary the story is and that it takes four (count ’em!) weeks before we get the big reveal of who the bad guys are, which shows it doesn’t have to be all go-go-go to keep the modern viewer glued!

“Underneath all that charm there was something odd. Sinister. Almost inhuman.”

The Doctor, The Invasion: Episode One

For me, the real star of The Invasion is Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughn who possesses the tremendous arched eyebrow menace of a Bond super-villain and the ability to switch from oily smarm to apoplectic rage in disturbingly swift fashion. But then with a henchman as hapless as Packer, who can blame him? Vaughn proves himself to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work – his taunting of Professor Watkins in Episode Six is particularly impressive and even in his last-minute redemption you half-expect him to do the dirty on the Doctor. (I should add that guest blogger agreed that Vaughn was probably the best thing in the story.)

The music too is excellent and also suitably Bond-like in places. (I must confess I hadn’t realised that Don Harper would go on to do the music cues for Dawn of the Dead – one of my favourite movies. You learn something new …)

And of course Episode Six sees one of Doctor Who‘s most memorable cliffhangers with the Cybermen walking down the steps at St Paul’s.

Even though they got Zoe’s costume wrong in Episode One – it should’ve been her lamé catsuit – Cosgrove Hall’s animation for The Invasion‘s missing episodes is excellent. It’s a shame this was to be their last contribution to Doctor Who as their house style for me is perfectly suited to 60’s Who and by far my favourite of the animation techniques employed to plug in these gaps.

“Can’t we keep her on, sir? She’s much prettier than a computer.”

Peters, The Invasion: Episode Eight

Finally, I’m still not sure whether The Invasion is genuinely attempting to have a feminist dialogue at times or whether the arched eyebrow patronising that goes on is where its true sympathies lie. I must confess the Brigadier’s brazen old-school chauvinism – ‘This is a job for my men’ – is one of my favourite moments. Perhaps he’s just being chivalrous? Or more likely it’s just that Nicholas Courtney is so damn good, I’ll forgive him any line of dialogue!

All in all though, The Invasion is a cracking slow-burner of a story, one that feels so much like a 70’s UNIT story that you almost feel you’ve seen it in gloriously gaudy colour before. It is, of course, the first UNIT story and I remember, when I first started to watch the show again in the early 90’s, being mildly surprised that UNIT had been introduced in the 60’s and that the Second Doctor had met the Brigadier! Ah, such ignorance …

As with The Wheel in Space before it, it was much better than I’d remembered and a good way for the Cybermen to sign off for a while (six years as it turned out!), even if the Brigadier does go all Scooby Doo, Where Are You! at one point: “Those crazy kids …”