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

I stopped watching Doctor Who in 1983, not because I stopped liking it, but because I moved away from the UK. Apart from catching a few minutes of what I later realised was an episode of The Curse of Fenric, I didn’t start watching Doctor Who again until late 1991/early 1992. A couple of friends (one of whom being the fan of The Web Planet I mentioned previously) and I would rent VHS tapes from the local Blockbuster Video store and we’d get together and watch them.

I distinctly remember where I was when I learned that The Tomb of the Cybermen had been returned: in the I-believe-now-gone Fagin’s bookshop on Sadler Gate in Derby.

One of the booksellers there told us the episodes had been found in Hong Kong and that it was going to be rush-released on VHS. Consequently, whilst I don’t credit Tomb with being the story that got me back into Doctor Who, I do associate its rediscovery with my rediscovery of the show. (incidentally Fagin’s was also the place I bought my first Target novelisation – the Virgin reprint of Planet of the Spiders if anyone’s interested.)

“Our lives are different to anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. There’s nobody in the universe can do what we’re doing.”

The Doctor, The Tomb of the Cybermen: Episode 3

At the time, of the surviving Troughton episodes, I might only have seen The Krotons (in the Five Faces of Doctor Who season in 1981) and The Mind Robber upon its 1992 BBC2 repeat – it’s hard to recall precisely, but certainly my knowledge did not extend beyond those already released on VHS. As a recent acolyte, I had no expectations or preconceived notions of what Tomb might offer. I was probably more fortunate than those who’d been hardcore fans for longer or remembered it from its original transmission in 1967.

No, what nostalgia I have for this story has grown over the subsequent 20+ years. There are of course other stories I associate with this time of my life: Genesis of the Daleks, The Caves of Androzani, The Time Meddler (which possibly explains some of my love for that particular story), to name just three, but The Tomb of the Cybermen is the first for which nostalgia probably accounts for my looking forward to it more than my remembrance of its high quality.

That’s because, sadly, some of it is isn’t much cop.

At times though, it does threaten greatness. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are, for the most part, excellent right from the very first TARDIS scene. In fact from the moment that the TARDIS crew meet up with the expedition at the entrance to the tomb, the Doctor can’t help himself, showing off his knowledge of Cyber-technology and symbolic logic (although given the underwhelming displays of deductive reasoning in the rest of the expedition party, he hardly has to try hard to show he’s the smartest cat in the room). Jamie too gets stuck in like the seasoned traveller he now is and Victoria, despite, as has often been stated, the strange ease with she adapts to mid-sixties fashion, also gives as good as she gets, especially to the patronising Hopper and his crew.

“Some character has balled up the lot!”

Captain Hopper, The Tomb of the Cybermen: Episode 2

For the third Kit Pedler/Gerry Davis Cybermen story in a row, we have an ineffectual or inept leader in Parry, so much so that I’ve started to wonder if the pattern is deliberate – that it’s some observation of what would only a few years later become known as The Peter Principle.

Cutler (from The Tenth Planet) was presumably a good soldier at some point, Hobson (The Moonbase) was perhaps a decent scientist and Parry knows his Cyber-history, although his thirty-second deduction of there being nothing of interest in the tomb other than a hatch beggars belief. (Another way of looking at it is – what would there be for the Doctor to do if the leaders knew what they were doing all the time! ) To be fair, by the end, Parry looks a broken, almost haunted, man – all these deaths will play heavily on his conscience, you feel.

“I love to see the experts at work, don’t you?”

The Doctor, The Tomb of the Cybermen: Episode 1

What drags Tomb into the mire is the often hammy acting, occasionally clunky dialogue (far too many examples to quote, but plenty to choose from with Klieg, Kaftan and Hopper and his crew) and some inconsistency in characterisation and motivation, especially the flip-flopping of trusting and mistrusting Klieg and Kaftan. I can live with the terrifying threat of a tiny Cybermat blocking the massive double-door entrance and even Cybermen and Toberman on wires – they’re part of the charm, after all – but by the time Klieg is vacillating between abject fear of and total belief in his invulnerability to the Cybermen within a single scene in Episode 3 I find myself cursing the screen, having gone from “You wouldn’t do that!” through “Nobody would say that!” to simply “Aaaaarrrrggh!”

There’s also some incredible complacency on display too – even, this time, from the Doctor who leaves Victoria with the decidedly untrustworthy and rude Kaftan, the belief that the Cybermen won’t cause them any problems once the hatch is closed, locking Klieg and Kaftan in a room that they know contains a weapon.

And yet, as with The Moonbase before it, it has its moments, such as when the Doctor talks to Victoria about his family and his statement about the unique nature of their lives.

Aside from the the excellence of the Doctor and his companions, the location work is impressive, the tension leading to the Cybermen’s release is palpable and the honeycomb tomb is exceptionally well-realised; it’s just such a shame that at the same time rarely has a TARDIS crew come across a group of such exceptionally tetchy explorers, archaeologists and astronauts as these. Almost to a man (and indeed woman), they are irritable and irritating.

On the other hand, that might just be what space travel does to a group who’ve spent a long time together in a small rocket!