The Smugglers The Tenth Planet Power of the Daleks The Highlanders The Underwater Menace The Moonbase The Faceless Ones Evil of the Daleks

BBC Season Four

• Change and Renewal by Alex Keaton
• A Review by James Niero
• Season Four As Audio by Stephen Maslin

Change and Renewal by Alex Keaton 7/5/01

Season 4 refurbishes the experimental notions of seasons 2 and 3 by basically supplying the series with a fresh new lease of life, in both the literal sense of change in the main character himself, and the underlying renewal in the formatting approach. Season 4 advances on a whole new range of Doctor Who mythology by again injecting a new, original and definitive dimension to it - that of the Doctor's ability to regenerate. The eccentric, aging scientist played by Hartnell changes into a clownish, whimsical, avuncular and 'cosmic hobo' played by Patrick Troughton and a whole new list of possibilities is opened up for the future of the series.

Troughton complies with the original traits of the Doctor by retaining the character's intellect and moralistic codes while injecting a whole new persona into the character, often Troughton himself would cover up forgotten lines by pulling out and playing a tune on his recorder and thus draw even more of a comic element to the character. At the time when Troughton became the Doctor, many viewers disliked him claiming that he was too comical and too hard to understand but little did they realise that this was indeed a virtue as it meant that he had succeeded in re-defining the character into the mysterious enigma that had originally been devised for Doctor Who. Had he been a mere replica of Hartnell's Doctor, or too like him, the idea of regeneration never would have done exactly what the series' needed - to open up the character's versatility, unpredictability and most of all, tolerance.

There is an innocence that is drained from the series format in this season as the production team decide to abolish the historical visits from the format - marked for one last time in The Highlanders. The overwhelming educational input previously aspired is thus relinquished with it and the series' credibility is expanded, now speculated by a more scientifically intellectual and good versus evil approach - and this is a good thing as it becomes more entertaining, less confined and maintains its originality to increase the series to a higher quality of sophistication. The Doctor even underlines his new found quest of traveling to different planets and defeating evil when Troughton makes his excellent speech: "There are some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things. Things that act against everything we believe in. They must be fought."

The first phase of the series' beginning was over, Hartnell had introduced us to the series and now Troughton, along with the production team, would open up new areas for it to explore and complete the experimentation ignited in Season 2. They had already succeeded in securing the series future for the time being, with a new actor in the lead speculating as a cause for great improvement in ratings (the highest being The Moonbase with an average of 8.3 million viewers) but would now have to continue their pace for, forever, would the series keep changing...

Awards; Season 4

It was quite a formidable task this time, as this was season was caught up in sort of experimenting for the new Doctor and didn't concentrate on stories as heavily, but here are the achievements for this season anyway...

The Evil of the Daleks: (4) - Best Serial, Best Director ( Derek Martinus), Best Acting by the regular cast, Best Art Direction.

The Tenth Planet: (2) - Best Sound, Best Visual Effects.

The Power of the Daleks: (2) - Best Original Screenplay (David Whittaker), Best Cliffhanger Sequence (Part 2) - The Doctor attempts to warn the colnists of the danger of the daleks but fails as his cries are drained over by a grating, metallic voice...

The Macra Terror: (1) - Best Supporting Cast Actor (Peter Jeffrey as the Pilot).

The Moonbase: (1) - Best Music.

The Smugglers: (1) - Best Costume Design.

The Underwater Menace: (1) - Best Make Up.

A Review by James Niero 8/11/09

The fourth season of Doctor Who had the feel of anticipation and dread. William Hartnell was set to retire and leave his role as the Doctor. Everyone knew he would be departing in the season's second episode but what would that mean for the show?

The season's first episode, The Smugglers, set in the 17th century, centering around pirates and smugglers, passed without incident. It wasn't until the following episode, The Tenth Planet, that everything changed. The show introduced us to the series second most popular villain of all time, the Cybermen. It was in their very first incarnation in The Tenth Planet that they were truly frightening. Not quite machine, yet not quite human. The Cybermen spoke terrifyingly and were already destined to become popular. It was a big episode, forcing the Doctor to battle his newest adversary and thus collapsing from exhaustion and ultimatley dying in the TARDIS. While shocked fans watched, the Doctor revealed his greatest power: the ability to regenerate his body and thus becoming a whole new person.

Patrick Troughton took the lead role in the season's third episode, The Power of the Daleks which not only provided us a different 'spin' on the Doctor but a different 'spin' on the Daleks, revealing for the first time they had an Emperor. Producers knew the season may be a strain on the fans with such massive changes so they pulled out all the stops and introduced us to the ever popular Jamie who joined the cast in the following story The Highlanders. The Underwater Menace which followed was one of the less popular stories of the season but thing's picked up in the following adventure, The Moonbase, which saw the return of the Cybermen. Completely redisgned to show them as pure machine. Ben and Polly remained through the show with the following episode, The Macra Terror but both departed the series in The Faceless Ones. The season finale saw the return of the Daleks and the introduction of Victoria.

Doctor Who had indeed changed but ratings remained high despite the absence of its original cast (now just a distant memory), its twisting and turning storylines (now replaced by 'monsters of the week') and any historical-themed episodes.

Season Four As Audio by Stephen Maslin 15/10/12

Sisyphus, in case you didn't know, was a character from Greek mythology, condemned by the gods to push a rock up a hill for all eternity. When he got it to the top, the rock would roll back down and he would have to start all over again. Anyone involved in a long-running TV or radio series must surely know what that feels like. You spend time and trouble building characters and developing long-term plans, only to have the whole lot come crashing down around you when Mary Tamm doesn't renew her contract.

Myths like that of Sisyphus are built around fragments of truth and commonly shared experience, expanded over time into a coherent narrative. Only access to a time machine could give us any hope of disentangling the original strands but, as we know, time travel is not an exact science. (Doesn't the Doctor tell us so at the beginning of The Smugglers? "That's the cause of half my troubles through my journeys: I never know.") Most of 20th century Doctor Who is, superficially, a doddle to get back to, even for non-Gallifreyans like us: 100% retrieval for the 1970s and 80s (those parts of it which have been released on DVD at any rate). But the years 1966, 1967 and 1968 have a less than one-in-three chance of being revisited. (With Season Four, it's closer to one-in-five.) The Doctor Who stories of that time are just that bit closer to myth as a consequence.

Odysseus' return to Ithaca? Never saw it. Joshua and the Walls of Jericho? Wasn't there. The Mahabharata War? Gone in the mists of time. Doctor Who Season Four? Never saw that either. Still haven't seen most of it and almost certainly never will. Not my fault of course. Missing episodes, you see, 29 of them, more than for any other season. So it is that what we know of Season Four is not the same kind of 'knowing' that we have of, say, Season Six (with only 7 episodes missing). Our image of Season Six is just that, an image, a visual one, warts and all. We know that The Dominators and The Seeds of Death are rubbish because we can see that they are. Yet the visual continuity of most of Season Four is, tele-snaps notwithstanding, predominantly one of our own making.

In terms of overall tone, the season starts a bit early with the introduction of Ben and Polly (and contemporary life) during The War Machines. It also finishes a bit early too, with their departure at the end of The Faceless Ones. (Actually, they really leave much earlier in that story. As Dodo before them, all of a sudden, there they are, gone.) The Evil of the Daleks that follows feels much more like a Season Five Monster tale, heralding a premature escape from the Swinging Sixties and taking permanent refuge in a darker world of horrors. Season Four is not the product of an adherence to Reithian ideals as in the first three seasons, nor is it like the scary family show that came after. If it's 'about' anything, it is an attempt to re-establish the show and ground it in the modern day but, more importantly, it also concerns the evolving chemistry of four people: the Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie.

"Buster and Paul"
028 The Smugglers (Brian Hayles) 10th September - 1st October, 1966
Narration: Anneke Wills

A couple of days after episode two of The Smugglers, Scotland Yard arrested Buster Edwards, suspected of involvement in the Great Train Robbery back in 1963. In the 1988 film 'Buster', he was somewhat inaccurately portrayed as a loveable rogue, which was more than a little insensitive towards the robbery's victims. If it's a genuinely engaging, street-wise Londoner you're looking for, without any stain on his character, then Doctor Who had one of the finest ever in Ben Jackson. One of the most memorable aspects of Season Four as a whole is not only his distinctive voice and boundless energy, but also his being 'one of us' (in a way that Steven Taylor never was). The contemporary feel kick-started in The War Machines is, in spite of The Smugglers' 17th century setting, maintained by his and Polly's very 20th-century reactions. Without these two charming individuals, the season curtain-raiser would be nothing but a fairly flat slab of hackneyed melodrama. (The biggest nonsense of the story is that no-one notices that Polly, as "Paul", is not the lad she is passed off to be. Fair enough, if the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens are anything to go by, then the ideal of womanhood of the 17th century tended towards the chubby but even so! One is left with the uncomfortable feeling that the script is actually questioning the sanity of the good people of Cornwall. Shame on you Brian Hayles!)

One imagines a few exasperated sighs around the BBC about a programme that had looked to redefine itself as 'with it' a few months previously, retreating to the realms of the traditional, but don't get me wrong: as an audio, I like The Smugglers (though it is a somewhat guilty pleasure: something to put on for International Talk Like A Pirate Day). With the absence of music (only the sound of the sea), Anneke Wills' silky narration and its double archaisms (the historical setting and the era of television that put it on screen), it is an enjoyable enough time to spend in headphones. We are still, however, nearer the bottom of Sisyphus' hill than the top of it.

"Moscow Attacks"
029 The Tenth Planet (Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis) 8th - 29th October, 1966
Narration: Anneke Wills

Long before al Qaeda became the bogeyman that justified massive arms expenditure, there was the Soviet Union. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the system was destroying itself from the inside, all that was really said about it in the west at the time was that it was "bad". Its fanatical, brain-washed, vodka-soaked citizenry would forcibly prevent old ladies from crossing the road or steal your hard-earned breakfast or, given half a chance, lay waste to entire continents before casually wandering in, oblivious to fallout, to laugh heartlessly over what remained. Motiveless, without a single shred of humanity, caring nought for the utility of labour-saving devices or coca cola, they were our very own Martians.

One shirks from making any reference to a possible metaphor about the Cold War in a 1960s programme set in Antarctica, but if such an intention was ever there, it really doesn't matter anyway, for everyone would have been gawping in disbelief at the Doctor's new alien foes, the Cybermen. Almost every current fan surely has an image of them taken from The Invasion or from Earthshock or of the 21st century model. All impressive in their way, but still of a fairly generic alien type. Once upon a time, however, they were barely credible, a bizarre cocktail of DIY bodge job and uber-weirdness. They were supposed to be, in Ben's peerless prose, "advanced geezers" and one could quite well believe it. Until, that is, we hear those voices... When the Daleks first arrived, small children all over Britain were eager to impersonate their distinctive delivery. Would those same children have even attempted impersonating the Cybermen of The Tenth Planet vintage? (As if to keep up the odd voice theme, almost every assumed human foreign accent in The Tenth Planet's multinational Antarctic base is really, really badly done.)

Without the sheer unlikeliness of its aliens (and the shock of our first regeneration sequence), The Tenth Planet would, to be honest, be a very poor story indeed: visually, these are aliens that are an extraordinary example of creative design gone haywire, just this side of ludicrous; culturally, there's an off-the-cuff expediency that would guarantee Doctor Who's survival for decades; as audio adventure, it's almost totally without interest.

(See also: Spare Parts)

"The Black and White Ball"
030 The Power of the Daleks (David Whitaker & Dennis Spooner) 5th November - 10th December, 1966
Narration: Tom Baker (1993), Anneke Wills (2003)

The penultimate Dalek story of the 1960s, at a time when they were still the show's default setting, was of course Patrick Troughton's first story too. Not entirely a painless transition for the lead character or for the audience. His first few minutes are midway between Tom Baker's and Colin Baker's: half daft, half rather unpleasant. It takes an episode for him to win us over and, by the time he does, we're back in quite familiar territory: namely, what, as a dramatist, does one do with the most evil creatures in the universe?

How that was answered depends on which audio version you have. The Tom Baker narrated cassette is almost wistful reminiscence, never too far from the whiff of the wine glass and the fireplace. The Daleks are past tense and often less threat than pantomime. The Anneke-Wills-narrated CD, on the other hand is, despite the much-improved quality of the original sound, rather dry. Here the Daleks are archaeological specimens, like dinosaurs. (In both versions, the audio-only Daleks more than once sound absolutely ridiculous.) The inclusion of telesnaps on the 'reconstructed' version helps no end as the images recover some of the original visual impact (the discovery of the cobwebbed and dormant Daleks, the Doctor's Stovepipe hat, the Dalek production line), but it's still less than satisfying and the brutal slaughter of the finale falls really flat.

Nevertheless, the Daleks here are still (if we ignore The Chase) in their first flush of greatness, but, highly rated though this story is (and being missing from the archives helps a lot), we are reminded that what the Daleks later became known for was papering over the cracks in a sometimes creaky franchise, brought back whenever trouble loomed; as saviours of the show itself rather than the villains within it.

(See also: The Murder Game)

Perhaps you think I've been a little negative so far. Unless you count The War Machines as being from Season Four (and stylistically it is, if not actually so), none of the first handful of stories are, as audio entertainment, what you would call great, not even The Power of the Daleks, unless you are the most die-hard of Dalek fundamentalists.

What positives could one point to in the season overall? Well, for a start, Patrick Troughton is, after a shaky start, consistently superb, striking the perfect tone even when handling duff material. There's also a great line up of companions. Ben and Polly are a perfect match of opposites, endearing and full of beans, and soon we would have Jamie too, whose manifold virtues need no elucidation to anyone with even the vaguest grasp of 60s Doctor Who. (The problem was that his arrival on board the TARDIS put us firmly in Castrovalva territory: one companion too many, a fact well understood by the producers, who asked Anneke Wills to stay on after The Faceless Ones, but not Michael Craze.)

And the stories, as we shall see, did get a lot better, though not quite yet...

"Walt Disney Presents 'Culloden At Christmas'"
031 The Highlanders (Elwyn Jones & Gerry Davis) 17th December, 1966 - 7th January, 1967
Narration: Frazer Hines

Two days before episode one, Walt Disney died in California. Naturally, this had no bearing on The Highlanders in any way whatsoever, though his was a shadow that had loomed over much mid-20th century family entertainment: the sentimentality, the flashes of genius, the obvious stereotypes, the ultimate triumph of nice over nasty. Though such traits can be heard here too, The Highlanders is also surprisingly enlightened and even-handed in its approach to history. (One would, I imagine, find it easier to sit through The Highlanders with a Scot than through The Tenth Planet with a specialist in American accents or through The Smugglers with a Cornish historian.)

Most important for us though is the first appearance of James Robert McCrimmon. He would be our touchstone until the end of the decade, as permanent and revered a feature as the good Doctor himself. Apart from being a damn fine portrayal, what's nice is that his future inclusion in the TARDIS crew isn't obviously flagged up, as if the producers of the show are as surprised as we are. What is a little hard to take, however, is that he accepted the invitation from three strangers so clearly involved in witchcraft.

The Highlanders as audio is often misleading. Many of its original flaws are glossed over ("with nooses around their necks") and many of its strengths remain unretrieved (the trusty BBC costume department for instance). On TV, it seems to have been a final nail in a coffin: there was not to be another 'proper historical' until Black Orchid.

"A Fistful of Zaroff"
032 The Underwater Menace (Geoffrey Orme) 14th January - 4th February, 1967
Narration: Anneke Wills

On January 18th, 1967, the first blockbuster spaghetti western, 'A Fistful of Dollars', was finally released in the US. It's hard to credit that this coincided with, of all things, The Underwater Menace. Sergio Leone had succeeded in resurrecting the moribund format of the Western in a harsh modern light but, as if to exemplify the gulf of expectation, the BBC showed that, in spite of producing near-miraculous TV in adversity week after week, they could still come up with baffling flights of fancy that just didn't work.

As an audio experience, TUM starts well, with some sparkling dialogue and the now-familiar old chestnut of a new companion doing the "gosh" and "golly" routine. Yet, as soon as the need for a plot arises, the script degenerates into ponderous cliche. (Zaroff is of course "the greatest scientific genius since Leonardo". Forgive the Second Doctor's deliberate hyperbole, but how many scientific geniuses does that ignore?) The regulars are superb; it's just that everyone else is not. As a one-off entertainment for youngsters, there was surely enough feeling for the Doctor and his chums (whom Ben describes as "our lot") to maintain interest. Episode 3 is surprisingly watchable but, as a whole, it's a duffer. Over the top and corny, though not without a certain retro-charm.

Doctor Who's most obvious B-Movie.

"The White Heat of Technology (Clever, Clever, Clever)"
033 The Moonbase (Kit Pedler) 11th February - 4th March, 1967
Narration: Frazer Hines

Parallel lives: the Doctor and the Prime Minister. William Hartnell? Harold Macmillan. Patrick Troughton? Harold Wilson. Jon Pertwee? Edward Heath. Tom Baker? James Callaghan. Peter Davison? Well, there's no convincing analogue for him but Colin Baker? Margaret Thatcher, definitely.

It's predictable that the prevailing zeitgeist (and a great deal of hindsight) throws up similar ideals for authority figures. All of the above have at least some appropriate synchronicity but the closest fit is Troughton-Wilson. It's not just that Harold Wilson was the British Prime Minister throughout all of the Troughton era, but that he and the Second Doctor are oddly similar icons of a certain strand of 60s culture. They are both slightly comical but also highly intelligent, extremely canny, wilfully idiosyncratic, and loved and respected by many; while fulfilling the same role as his patrician predecessor, the Second Doctor, like Wilson, was much more of the common man.

Before becoming PM, before Doctor Who was even broadcast, Harold Wilson made a speech in which he coined the phrase "the white heat of technology". Stories like The Moonbase (and later on, Fury From The Deep and The Wheel In Space) are its cultural analogue. Technology (and the future of technology) in the mind of the average citizen was merely a matter of perseverance: the patient unveiling of electronic miracles that would transform everyone's lives, sooner rather than later. Controlling the weather for example. A world of levers and dials and significant beeping.

It's a pity that Doctor Who's embracing of this idea of the techno-future spawned one rather unfortunate consequence for The Moonbase's villains. Gone were the uncanny, totally alien vocal characterization of The Tenth Planet Cybermen. Instead, an earthbound machine version (and an occasionally unintelligible one), something that a human scientist of the 1960s was actually capable of, rather than something very odd from way out there in the vastness of space. The visual design is likewise normalized; the Cybermen were born-again boring.

The Moonbase is a tad boring too at times, but it is a genuine improvement on previous stories. The Radiophonic Workshop conjures up some very eerie and hypnotic sounds, the supporting cast is a lot more believable and the plotting is that little bit more joined-up. Polly may still be on coffee duty but she is also instrumental in polishing off the first wave of Cybermen (and the two boys almost coming to blows in their attempts to impress her is an unexpectedly adult twist; in my opinion, not at all a welcome one).

Like it or not, this is the first airing of the Cybermen as we know them today: logical, functional, comprehensible machines. They were to become the Doctor's main foe until the end of the decade and were to leave us some of the most unforgettable images in the show's history.

(See also: The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Wheel in Space, The Invasion)

Qualitatively speaking, Doctor Who often ends badly. Pyramids of Mars is three episodes of genius with the last a bit of a let-down. The Key To Time's first four stories are some of the best ever, but the last two are dire. Season Four, however, does not conform. This is partly a function of earlier seasons not being planned as seasons and partly a matter of budgeting patterns. Whatever the reasons, the exception is a welcome one.

"When The Future Goes Wrong In The Present"
034 The Macra Terror (Ian Stuart Black) 11th March - 1st April, 1967
Narration: Colin Baker

March 18th, 1967. The supertanker Torrey Canyon ran aground between Land's End and the Scilly Isles, contaminating 50 miles of French coastline and 120 miles of the Cornish coast, killing countless sea birds and huge numbers of marine organisms. Britain got its first glimpse of the twentieth's century's greatest free lunch recast as environmental ruination: economic progress at a price, sometimes a very visible and unpleasant price.

Doctor Who, meanwhile, was in the middle of a run of stories that, coincidentally, had at its core the theme of technology and its discontents. The Moonbase had showed an advanced Earth culture defeating a technologically superior life-form (with a little help). All the while, its own progress was taken for granted. The Macra Terror, a far cleverer tale, said that you couldn't and shouldn't.

We've all heard the stories of the Macra in the studio being less than terrifying but, as an audio-only experience, the threat is very well captured, helped no end by Colin Baker's excellent narration. The plot is rather good too, a dystopian fantasy with an above-average cast for the time, not without am-dram histrionics, but with a splendid contrast between innocence and its manipulation.

To be honest, until The Macra Terror, Season Four on audio often drags. What this story has that its predecessors do not is that something a little bit different: quirky music, an alien foe that doesn't directly tell you of its intentions, a cast regular going over to the other side and a general lack of lulls. Until this point, the stories were often unsophisticated. (It's a family show, what do you expect?) The Macra Terror may sound lightweight but it isn't; it is the breezy veneer counter-pointing the hidden menace beneath that really elevates it.

(See also: Gridlock)

"Boeing, Boeing, Gone"
035 The Faceless Ones (David Ellis & Malcolm Hulke) 8th April - 13th May, 1967
Narration: Frazer Hines

The BBC's Lost In Time DVD box set was rather a melancholy experience, its release a tacit acceptance that we will almost certainly never find any more lost episodes. Yet it was also quite a shock for someone who had never seen the orphans on offer. Some of the 'partials' of the Hartnell and Troughton eras are astonishingly good, not at all the wobbly-set malarkey that one was led to expect. Most unexpected were the two surviving episodes of The Faceless Ones. One has become so used to making excuses for Doctor Who's distant past that it is extremely gratifying to see stuff that needs no apology at all. (It's no surprise that Malcolm Hulke had a hand in the script: like 'Maigret' in space, as written by The Frankfurt School.)

As audio, it is the closest the season gets to straight drama, with very little music and not that much radiophonics. The script is very 'real', with just the hint of socio-political allegory, aided by an excellent cast, with only Pauline Collins seeming out of place. (Thank heavens we didn't get Samantha Briggs as a permanent companion.) It's a shame that two of the best companions of the 60s get so quickly side-lined but, all in all, it's a very sophisticated tale in all departments: script, cast, atmosphere and ideas. Even though Ben and Polly's eventual departure doesn't really fit, it is a truly poignant one.

"Patrick Troughton's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
036 The Evil of the Daleks (David Whitaker) 20th May - 1st July, 1967
Narration: Tom Baker (1992), Frazer Hines (2003)

The Evil of the Daleks. The soundtrack to 'The Summer of Love'.

I don't know what David Whitaker was up to when he was writing it (and I certainly don't want to cast any aspersions as to his character) but The Evil of the Daleks is, quite simply, an LSD bad trip. At first, nothing's wrong. You're wandering around familiar streets. You feel you've mislaid something but you're sure you'll get it back. Then things start to get a bit strange. A place you thought you knew well is peopled with what seem like caricatures of humans in not-quite-right clothing, none of whom seem to be talking sense. Not altogether unpleasant at first, it takes on an increasingly nightmarish quality until you find yourself in a claustrophobic hell, danger lurking around every corner, good and evil battling for supremacy in your mind...

Well, not quite, but one has to admit there is something more than a little hallucagenic about TEotD; the Daleks having the run of a Victorian mansion does achieve a real sense of dislocation. (Contrast this with the alien-planet setting of The Power of the Daleks, which is exactly where you'd expect to find them.) What could have upset the story as a whole is the lack of any consistent tone. (Seven parts is somewhat of a stretch. Check out how often Season Seven drags or goes round in circles.) Yet it is held together by a very, very well-organised script. Jamie and the Doc are on top form (Jamie's reaction to what he see as the Doctor's callousness comes as quite a shock) and Marius Goring as Maxtible gives one of the Troughton era's best supporting cast performances. Dudley Simpson's music is excellent too (though the recurring oboe theme that follows Victoria's frequent bouts of sobbing gets a little tiresome). But the most striking thing of all is how the Daleks sound: a huge step up in menace. The voice alone is enough to inspire abject terror. They were never as frightening as this during the Pertwee era or, arguably, in any other era. Heaven only knows what effect it had on the children of the time.

Only a single TV episode survives and we again have two different audio versions competing for the authenticity prize. Of Tom Baker's three narrations of Second Doctor stories, this is the only one not in the first person and is also the most flatly delivered (though he does lapse into self-conscious theatricality more than once: "the strain was eNORmous!"). It is creepy and compelling, with long stretches left without any narration at all actually heightening the tension, but is let down by the unrestored soundtrack being at times barely audible. The cleaned-up Frazer Hines' version released on CD is clear as a bell but at times lacks a sense of the story's encroaching darkness. Neither quite gets it right.

A classic nonetheless.

(See also: The Time of the Daleks)

And on July 1st, the day that Episode 7 was aired, the first British colour television broadcasts began on BBC2. The tennis championship at Wimbledon. Red strawberries and white cream. How very British.