Doctor Who: Classic Series

Another Doctor Who Night In
(Part Four)

[L]ast time out, I mentioned having a nice evening in watching a couple of classic Doctor Who DVDs, namely the first and third stories from Season 16\’s Key to Time sequence, The Ribos Operation and The Stones of Blood. I\’ve already given my views on The Ribos Operation, So, on now to The Stones of Blood.

The Stones of Blood has always been, by far, my favourite story from the Key to Time sequence, and is one of my Top 3 from the Graham Williams era. It features an excellent script by David Fisher, and a great cast, with particularly strong performances not only by the regular cast, but by fantastic supporting characters Professor Emilia Rumford (played by Beatrix Lehmann) and Vivien Fay/Cessair of Diplos (played by Susan Engel).

I found the aliens in this story to be pretty interesting. I loved the idea that the Ogri (the Stones in the title of the story) were a silicon-based lifeform that fed on blood. A pretty good variation on the vampire theme. I really wish the Ogri had made a reappearance in the series, rather than being \”one-hit wonders\”. Likewise the alien justice machines, the Megara. And the Cailleach, the Celtic goddess who is actually 3,000 year-old alien escaped prisoner Cessair of Diplos, who carries the Great Seal of Diplos, which is actually the next section of the Key to Time, and who also controls the Ogri. And the alien prison ship itself, which is in hyperspace, but which also happens to occupy the exact same space in our world as that between the stones. Entertaining and fascinating sci-fi concepts – this story is positively overflowing with them.

There\’s even the almost-compulsory cult, led by their crazy High Priest (de Vries), who worship and serve the Cailleach. Doctor Who seems to have an obsession with taking pokes at cults and religions, which is all fine by me, as I tend to share those views. As a matter of fact, there are TWO stories featuring cults in the Key to Time sequence, the other one being the hilarious Swampies in The Power of Kroll. The scene where the cult are about to sacrifice the Doctor also gives us one of the best lines in the series, as Tom Baker looks up at de Vries, who has a knife raised in the air, and says \”I hope that knife has been properly sterilised\”. Cracking line! 🙂

Overall, The Stones of Blood is a fantastic story, full of inventive ideas, good acting, and which moves along at a cracking pace. It\’s one of the very few Doctor Who stories from the Graham Williams era that I\’d argue holds its own against the classic Hinchcliffe era of the series. Great stuff!

Another Doctor Who Night In
(Part Three)

[L]ast night I had another Doctor Who DVD-watching session, swinging back to the Tom Baker Doctor again. I watched a couple of Graham Williams-produced stories from his second season, this time concentrating on two of the tales from the Season 16 Key to Time sequence, the first and third stories respectively, The Ribos Operation and The Stones of Blood. I\’ll give my views on The Ribos Operation this time out, and leave The Stones of Blood for the next post.

The Ribos Operation is a pretty decent story, if a little slow and lacking in excitement. The main plus points are the strong script and excellent cast. There is a new main supporting character and companion joining the Doctor and K-9 Mark II (voiced by John Leeson), in the form of the elegant and gorgeous Mary Tamm as Time Lady Romana. We also have the first appearance of an occasional recurring character, the White Guardian (played by Cyril Luckham). The rest of the supporting cast was also very capable, with particularly strong performances from the two lovable rogues Garron and Unstoffe (played by Iain Cuthbertson and Nigel Plaskitt), the main bad guy\’s right-hand man Sholakh (played by Robert Keegan), and the old hermit Binro (played by Timothy Bateson). I really liked the exchanges between Unstoffe and Binro.

The negative cast performances stem mostly from the almost compulsory late-Tom Baker/Williams era failing of overly-melodramatic and ham acting from some actors. The Spam Awards for this story go, in particular, to The Seeker (played by Anne Tirard) and the annoyingly exaggerated cartoon villain/insane galactic ex-tyrant ruler the Graff Vynda-K (played by Paul Seed). This type of pantomime acting has always been one of the things that I find really irritating in Doctor Who, and I really do consider it the bane of the classic series.

And then there\’s Prentis Hancock, playing the Shrieve Captain. Prentis is a lovely bloke, but every time I\’ve seen him in any television role (and I\’ve seen him in quite a few), he seems to play the same brooding, angry, unsociable stereotype. I dunno whether he\’s just been typecast in that role, or it\’s simply because he\’s lazy and is comfortable playing the same part over and over again, but I don\’t recall ever seeing him do any other character than the same stereotype that he\’s played so many times in Doctor Who and elsewhere. Even as a regular cast member on Space: 1999, most of the time he seemed to be playing a barely slightly more mellow version of the same grumpy, permanently angry character.

Last but not least, let\’s not forget this story\’s scary monster, the Shrievenzale, which was about as scary as Kermit the Frog, if you ask me. In other words, complete crap. The Shrievenzale is one of those Doctor Who monsters which is very dodgy-looking and barely any better than the infamous Myrka from Warriors of the Deep.

Still, aside from those few small quibbles, I quite enjoyed The Ribos Operation. Next time out, I\’ll be giving my views on The Stones of Blood.

Another Doctor Who Night In
(Part Two)

[I]n my last post I detailed my latest recent DVD-watching binge of Doctor Who stories, the recent choices all being Tom Baker stories. Last night I watched a couple more Doctor Who stories, switching this time to Jon Pertwee and the two Auton classics, Spearhead from Space (Special Edition) and Terror of the Autons, as featured on the Mannequin Mania DVD box set.

Spearhead from Space is one of my favourite Pertwee stories. When Jon Pertwee fell out of the TARDIS, almost exactly one month after my ninth birthday, I wasn\’t too pleased. I\’d been a Pat Troughton fan since I first started really paying attention to Doctor Who back in 1966 or so, at the young age of five-going-six years old. Up until that point in my life, he was the only Doctor I\’d known, as I\’d been too young to really remember Hartnell, although I\’d doubtless seen a few of his as well, and had a view brief flashes and memory fragments of several stories.

So when Troughton left, and this new guy, Pertwee, took over, I was not a happy camper. But that mood didn\’t last for long. By the end of the first episode of Spearhead, I\’d completely forgotten about Troughton, and Pertwee was now most definitely The Doctor in my eyes. The sheer excellence of the story itself greatly eased the transition, and at that tender age, I found the concept of the Nestene Consciousness, and in particular the Autons, very scary and unnerving. For years afterwards, I was extremely nervous whenever I walked past any department store window. My young imagination already had the shop front dummies ready to smash through the windows and grab me. 🙂

Terror of the Autons is also a good story, but it never quite had the same impact on me as Spearhead from Space, although to this day, I still hate plastic flowers, plastic chairs and telephone cables. 🙂 The Autons in this one (except for the cops) weren\’t quite as frightening as those in Spearhead. With their massive heads and their circus background, they looked faintly silly and ridiculous, although the fight sequences with the UNIT troops were excellent.

However, this was the story that first introduced The Master, played by the late, great Roger Delgado, who quickly became a great favourite of mine. For that reason alone Terror of the Autons will always hold a fond spot in my heart. The story also introduced the new companion, cute and cuddly Jo Grant, played by Katy Manning, who joined Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain Yates, Corporal Benton and the rest of the UNIT cast, and who was to be at Pertwee\’s side for the next three years of his run on the show. The classic and much-lauded \”UNIT family\” was now well and truly in place to usher in a new and one of the most fondly-remembered periods in the show\’s history.

Overall, another cracking night\’s viewing on the Doctor Who front.

Leonard Nimoy (1931 – 2015)

[T]he news of Leonard Nimoy\’s death yesterday has had a strong impact on me in a way that the vast majority of celebrity deaths usually don\’t. When I woke up yesterday morning and saw the news for the first time online, it was like a kick in the gut. I spent the entire day stunned, in tears, just sitting in front of my computer browsing the web for more news. Even though I usually don\’t give a damn about the passing of most celebrities, this one has left me totally gutted. Why?

This sad news really should\’ve come as no great surprise to anybody. Leonard Nimoy was 83 years old, and had been in pretty bad health for many years. But like a sick relative that everyone loves dearly, we\’re still in mourning when they die. Leonard Nimoy, in particular his iconic Mr. Spock persona, was like a close friend or relative. His passing truly is almost like losing a member of the family. But why has the death of a television actor, someone I\’ve never met, had such an effect on me?

To get an answer to that, we have to go right back to my early childhood, in the late-1960\’s and early-1970\’s, when I still hadn\’t yet entered my teens (I turned 13 in December 1973). I\’ve been a huge fan of the original Star Trek and Doctor Who since those early days, and back then I was totally obsessed with both shows, and both have always been a major part of my life, even to this day. But back to the beginning. My family life in those days was pretty rough, poverty stricken, constant domestic disputes and fighting between my parents, and all set against the dark, terrible earliest years of the Troubles, in Northern Ireland. Star Trek and other sci-fi was a way of escaping from real life and domestic problems into a much more pleasant world of make-believe, where Spock, and the Doctor, were major characters in my fantasy world.

I\’d actually been a sci-fi fan since the mid-1960\’s, that delicate age of 5-7 years old, where you start to really notice and get into stuff for the first time. I first began to notice Doctor Who on UK television about 1966 or so, and soon after that, sci-fi films such as George Pal\’s The Time Machine, Irwin Allen\’s The Lost World, and the classic film version of Journey to the Centre of the Earth also became favourites of mine. So the way was well-prepared.

Then in 1969, during the summer break between seasons of Doctor Who, something called Star Trek began its first run on UK television, making its debut on BBC1. I was a starry-eyed eight year-old back in 1969, and I\’d never seen anything remotely like Star Trek. And this weird alien guy with the pointed ears, Mr. Spock, he made a huge impact on me right away. He immediately became my favourite character on the show, and has always remained the main man for me, in EVERY incarnation of Star Trek. He has always been my favourite Star Trek character, and more than any other character in TOS, he has always epitomized the whole ethos of Trek for me. Star Trek was always more than just a TV show to me, and Spock was always far more than just another television character.

Leonard Nimoy may once have written a book titled I am NOT Spock, but, as far as I\’m concerned, he IS and always WILL be Spock. No disrespect intended to Zachary Quinto or any other talented newcomers who try to fill Nimoy\’s huge shoes, but the man is irreplaceable.

Live Long and Prosper my friend, wherever you may be.

Doctor Who: Galaxy 4

[O]lder Doctor Who fans will instantly recognize Galaxy 4 as the title of a really ancient, dusty old Doctor Who story, which originally aired on the UK television channel BBC1, over a four-week period during the months of September-October 1965. The story itself no longer exists in the BBC archives, as it was wiped during the shamefully short-sighted BBC \”space-saving\” purge of old TV shows back in the early 1970\’s, although a few bits and pieces did survive here and there.

The previously existing audio-visual material, including six minutes of footage from the first episode, \”Four Hundred Dawns\”, was initially included on a 1998 VHS video as part of the documentary The Missing Years, and subsequently re-released on the 2004 DVD release of Lost in Time. Episode Three, \”Air Lock\”, which was recovered back in early 2011, was released on the March 2013 DVD release of The Aztecs: Special Edition as an extra, along with reconstructions of the other 3 episodes, plus the other surviving clips and photographs, all of which had originally been intended for the DVD release of The Time Meddler.

The only way to enjoy the original story in its entirety is in book form, and the complete soundtrack also exists, released in 2002. Actually, there were TWO books, and I have really enjoyed both the Target Books novelization of Galaxy Four, by original writer William Emms, and the Doctor Who: The Scripts edition (Titan Books) of the William Emms Galaxy 4 script. The titles Galaxy Four and Galaxy 4 seem to be interchangeable, and vary from book to book, although Galaxy 4 seems to be considered the correct title. Either of these books will give you the full story, if you manage to get your hands on them. I\’m uncertain if either book is still in print (if not, try Ebay or Amazon).

In this story, the TARDIS lands on an unnamed planet in the aforementioned Galaxy 4, a world which is only days away from exploding. The Doctor (the first Doctor – William Hartnell) and his companions Vicki and Steven encounter the Drahvins, a race of female clone warriors, who have crash-landed on the planet and are unable to take off again. Also on the planet is another crashed spaceship belonging to the frightening, alien Rills and their robot servants, the Chumblies (this rather silly name being given to them by Vicki). The Drahvins tell the Doctor that they were attacked by the Rills and both ships were damaged and had to crash-land.

The Drahvin ship is irreparable, but the Rill ship is almost fully repaired and will escape the death of this world. The Drahvins need to capture it, to get away. They are trying to enlist the Doctor\’s help, but the Doctor realizes that it\’s the Drahvins who are the aggressors and the Rills are peace-loving and civilized. The Doctor helps the Rills finish repairing their ship and escape, and one of the Chumblies stays behind and helps the Doctor, Vicki and Steven escape in the TARDIS, while it and the Drahvins perish when the planet explodes.

By all accounts, the televised story was a fair-to-middling mid-1960\’s Doctor Who adventure, pretty decent, although nothing special, certainly not one of the greatest classics of the series. However Galaxy 4, like a few other old Doctor Who stories, seems to go a little bit further than other sci-fi television shows of that era, with a few more twists and a less predictable plot. Back in those days most TV sci-fi was very simplistic – you always knew who the bad guys were, because they were almost always the ugly, scary ones.

Most of the time, Doctor Who was as guilty as any other show in that respect – the series was, after all, dependent on the monsters and aliens for its kiddie \”scare factor\”. But in Galaxy 4, the writer, William Emms, turned all that completely on its head, making the repulsive, reptilian, warthog-like, ammonia-breathing Rills the intelligent, civilized \”good guys\”, and the beautiful, blonde amazonian Drahvins the villains of the story.

I\’ve also always admired the bravery of the production crew on Doctor Who, for at least making the attempt to create \”alien-looking\” aliens on the show\’s miniscule shoe-string budget, whilst US sci-fi series with much larger budgets (Star Trek, for example) have traditionally served up \”aliens\” who are, ninety-five percent of the time, obviously only humans wearing latex masks or with bumps glued onto their heads and markings painted on them. The effects and make-up on Doctor Who often looked tacky and cheap, but at least they had the guts to try and make the \”aliens\” look a bit \”alien\”.

To the younger viewers of the modern Chris Eccleston/David Tennant/Matt Smith incarnations of the Doctor, most of these old 1960\’s Doctor Who stories must be virtually unwatchable. Compared to the modern, frenetically-paced, slick CGI series, these ancient shows creak along at an unbearably slow pace, with too much jibber-jabbering, not enough action, have rather simplistic stories (they were supposedly aimed at kids, after all, and seen from this perspective, they are pretty good), and terrible or non-existent special effects. But having said that, I wonder just how much of the current version will still look good in fifty years time. Modern sci-fi shows tend to depend far too much on SFX, which date very quickly, and less on strong storytelling, which endures pretty much forever.

Old farts like myself still love those ancient 1960\’s television shows, and we remember them fondly from our childhood (although I have no memories of Galaxy 4, as I was only four years old at the time). Nostalgia is an incredibly addictive drug. It\’s probably also stating the obvious to point out that we must take into account that, FOR ITS TIME, and compared to the rest of the 1960\’s BBC output, Doctor Who was an innovative, exciting, frightening and controversial television show. There was nothing else like it on UK television at the time, and the series has influenced countless other sci-fi shows over the decades since then.

I\’m hoping that it\’ll still be around in another fifty years, long after I\’m gone, entertaining yet another new generation of fans.

The Age of Innocence – \”Sensawunda\” and the Older Science Fiction Fan

Older sci-fi/SF fans (or \”fen\”, to give them their correct title), almost all have an incredibly developed Sense of Wonder, more often referred to in the SF world as \”sensawunda\”, that wide-eyed innocence and boundless enthusiasm, that willingness to see beyond the mundane world around us and embrace the infinite potential and possibilities of the universe, of all time and space.

It\’s almost like a special extra sense, an ability to link to our \”inner child\”, something that makes us different from the rest of the mainstream \”mundane\” population, who seem to have lost that link to their childhood once they became adults. Many of those people would look at us and consider us \”big kids\”, adults who have refused to grow up and drop the obsessions and attitudes of childhood (or even something much less flattering). We, on the other hand, look at them and consider them boring, unimaginative old farts, having lost all the childish aspects that made life fun, and growing old long before their time.

Our sensawunda keeps us forever young. Unfortunately, very few of the younger generation these days seem to have it, at least once they grow out of the wide-eyed innocence of their childhood years. We older fen were instilled with a powerful essence of sensawunda from a time before we could even read or write. The kids these days have seen it all a thousand times, and have had everything handed to them since birth. They lose their sensawunda at a very early age, and today\’s teenagers are for the most part very worldly-wise, cynical, and almost impossible to impress.

All of the things we saw on TV and at the cinema, way back when they were new and ground-breaking, are part of background culture for these kids. They don\’t see anything remarkable about these great films and TV series, because they\’ve \”always been there\”, as far as the kids are concerned. They miss out totally on one of the greatest aspects of geekhood, and we older geeks are so, so lucky to have lived through it all.

Back \”when we were young\”, every new sci-fi series, every new sci-fi cinema release, every new book release by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov or other top SF writers, every new issue of the Spider-Man Comics Weekly, The Avengers, The Mighty World of Marvel, Countdown and TV Action, Lion and Thunder or any of our favourite comics, any and all of these geek objects were things of wonder, and we all waited on them obsessively, like addicts waiting on their next fix (but in a nice way, of course).

I try to compare cynical modern teens with the wide-eyed innocence and enthusiasm of my teenage self, sitting eagerly in front of the TV every week, waiting for the next episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who. Or sitting in the local cinema, mouth wide open, watching Star Wars for the first time, and listening in awe to the tie fighters roar all around me over the amazing new THX sound system. In the pre-video, pre-internet age, every new sci-fi TV series and sci-fi cinema release was SPECIAL. The newness and uniqueness of it all was overpowering.

In those far-off days, you saw a series episode or film ONCE, and then they were gone, forever. Now, with DVDs, streaming and all the modern recording techniques, you can watch anything, over and over again a hundred times. It may be amazingly convenient, and none of us would be without it, but it has also played a huge part in killing the magic, the sensawunda. It\’s all become as common as muck, so easily accessible and available. There\’s nothing special about any of it any more.

The current generation of kids, at least here in the West, are spoiled rotten. All of this great technology and sci-fi culture has been around since long before they were born, and they\’ve grown up with it as an integral part of their lives. But you know the old saying – \”Familiarity Breeds Contempt\” – they just don\’t appreciate it. It\’s no big deal to them. We older fen, on the other hand, we were there when Star Trek first appeared in the 1960\’s, when Star Wars ushered in the era of blockbuster sci-fi movies in the late-1970\’s. Before that, with only a handful of exceptions, sci-fi movies were cheap B-movies, sneered at by everyone except the hardcore fans.

We were there for the first appearances of Blake\’s 7, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Alien, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We were there when all of these great television shows and films (which are now familiar cultural icons) were new, fresh, and NOBODY had ever seen anything like them before. Some of us were even there for the first appearance of Doctor Who (although I don\’t remember anything about it, as it was two weeks before my third birthday!). And the oldest fans were there for the three original Quatermass TV serials – The Quatermass Experiment (1953), Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958), Captain Video and His Video Rangers, and even the sci-fi \”pulps\”. Well before my time, and I\’m so envious of them.

All of us older fans, we\’re starting to get on a bit (I\’m 53). But the one great thing about being middle-aged or older is that we lived through the truly great eras of nearly EVERYTHING – sci-fi TV and cinema, the growth and explosion into popular culture of SF literature, the great eras of US and UK comics, and the great popular music eras of the 1950\’s, 60\’s, 70\’s and 80\’s. We are SO lucky. We\’re the most fortunate of all, because we lived through the one, true geek generation. We\’ll never see its like again.

The kids these days missed out on all of that, and will NEVER experience anything like it. There are so many bright, shiny new fads these days, massive marketing machines making sure that they happen seemingly one right after another. And each of them lasts all of five minutes until the next one comes along. Nothing is unique or special any more. They\’ve seen it all before.

To be honest, I\’m not overly enthusiastic about the rapidly looming advance of my \”senior years\”. But being a geek is the one area in life where I can honestly say \”It\’s great to be old\”. 🙂

Doctor Who: 50 Years in Space & Time (Part 11)

Here\’s the penultimate part of my look back at Doctor Who\’s 50th Anniversary:

The Radio Times Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special
The TV Times Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

11. Radio Times 50th Anniversay Special

The Radio Times Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special is a real doozy, with no less than TWELVE variant covers featuring all of the Doctors, including \”War Doctor\” John Hurt.

There\’s also a Steven Moffat article, on set with Tennant, Smith and Hurt, a celebration of 50 Years of Radio Times Doctor Who covers, a detailed overview of all eleven Doctors, and even a competition to win the Doctor\’s bow tie. What\’s not to like about this? Another nice one.

12. TV Times 50th Anniversay Special

The TV Times had their own 50 Years of Doctor Who Anniversary edition, which was also pretty good, although they didn\’t go quite as overboard as the Radio Times, with only four variant Doctor Who covers.

There is a nice Classic Companions piece, interviewing Peter Purves (Steven) and Frazer Hines (Jamie), plus a mini-review of The Day of the Doctor. But the main piece of the Doctor Who anniversary is the five-page 50 Years of Doctor Who Special celebration, which includes interviews with not only David Tennant and Matt Smith, but also Tom Baker and Peter Davison.

However, my absolute favourite was the A Brief History of Time (Lords) timeline, which runs along the bottom of the entire five pages of the main 50 Years of Doctor Who Special section. Anyone who knows me knows how much I like my timelines. Lovely.

To Be Continued…

Doctor Who: 50 Years in Space & Time (Part 8)

Here\’s the next part of my look back at the Best of the Bunch from Doctor Who\’s 50th Anniversary:

The reshowing of An Unearthly Child
The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who
The Science of Doctor Who Special

5. An Unearthly Child

In fifth place was the reshowing of all four episodes of An Unearthly Child on BBC4 at 10.30pm on Thursday 21st November, right after An Adventure in Space and Time ended on BBC2, was also one of the highlights. These two together on the same evening provided a great night\’s viewing, a comprehensive overview of the beginning of Doctor Who.

6. The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who

In sixth place was the two-hour The Ultimate Guide to Doctor Who, which aired on BBC3 from 8pm-10pm, on the night of Monday 18th November, was a fun, all-encompassing retrospective of all eleven Doctors, the companions, and the most popular monsters. I missed this one first time out, but was fortunate enough to catch it again on re-runs, when Part 1 of this was reshown on BBC3, on Sunday 15th December at 7pm, and Part 2 on BBC3, on Saturday 4th January 2014, at 7pm. I enjoyed it immensely.

7. Science of Doctor Who Special

In seventh place was the Science of Doctor Who Special, which aired on BBC2 on Thursday 14th November, at 9pm, and was hosted by Professor Brian Cox (with a guest appearance by none other than the Doctor himself, Matt Smith), was another excellent programming choice. It was a fun look at the science of time travel, through the lens of Doctor Who, in front of a studio audience made up of celebrities from science and many other areas of life.

To Be Continued…

Sci-Fi on Television (Part 2)

[I]f the 1970s were the golden years of telefantasy for me, the 1980s were a bit of a disappointment, with many of my favourite series going into decline or disappearing off the air altogether, and very few decent new sci-fi series stepping up to take their place.

My favourite TV series, Doctor Who, after the glory decade of the 1970s with Pertwee and Baker in the role, was now on the slide. After Tom Baker left in 1981, the series began to go into decline, and following Peter Davison\’s departure in 1984, Doctor Who rapidly degenerated into a pathetic parody of its former self, sliding towards its final demise in 1989. As a hardcore Doctor Who fan, I was NOT a happy bunny from 1981 onwards.

The early 1980s also saw a few of my other favourite telefantasy series wrap up – Sapphire and Steel, Blake\’s 7, The Incredible Hulk, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Battlestar Galactica/Galactica 1980. With the exception of V and the remake of The Twilight Zone, the period from 1982-1987 was pretty crap, filled with bland, silly, formulaic US series such as Knight Rider, Airwolf, Automan and The Greatest American Hero. It wasn\’t until 1987, and the first appearance of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that the Eighties started getting interesting for me again, at least as far as telefantasy is concerned. With both Quantum Leap and Alien Nation appearing in 1989, at least the end of the decade had three decent sci-fi series that I liked on the air at the same time.

As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Voyager were pretty dominant in the US telefantasy world, each with an impressive seven-year run (Quantum Leap was the only other decent sci-fi series on the air at that time). TNG and DS9 were favourites of mine, but once DS9 ended, my love of new Star Trek started to wane drastically, as Voyager was the only Trek left on the air, and I didn\’t rate it highly at all.

I\’d been a hardcore Star Trek fan since the original series, and Voyager was the first Trek that I actually really disliked, to such an extent that I never even bothered following it on a weekly basis. I thought the scripts were really lame, excessively based around and padded out with treknobabble nonsense, and most of the characters were less likeable and less well defined than those in earlier Trek series. There were very few truly stand-out episodes in the entire seven-year run, and the only real redeeming features were the holodoc\’s sarcasm and 7 of 9, who was absolute heaven on the eyes.

Aside from Quantum Leap, the only real competition Trek had in the early 1990s was when both Babylon 5 (my favourite 1990s sci-fi series) and the X-Files burst upon the world in 1993. This was a complete game-changer, as the X-Files, in particular, rocketed to the top of the popularity charts. Star Trek (of ANY kind) was now no longer top dog among telefantasy shows. And by the mid-to-late 1990s, it was no longer even in second or third place, as the three really big telefantasy successes of that era, in terms of popularity, were the X-Files, Stargate SG1 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I really like both the X-Files and Stargate, although I\’d agree with the common criticism that they both might\’ve gone on a bit too long and run out of steam in their last few seasons. I watched the X-Files religiously when it was on TV, but for some totally unfathomable reason, and despite the fact that it became a big favourite with me when I watched it on DVD a few years later, Stargate SG1 never registered with me at all back in the day. I have absolutely no recollection of ever seeing it on TV back in the Nineties.

Buffy (and its spin-off Angel) never really did much for me although it was extremely popular. I did watch the occasional episode whenever it was on, and I thought it was okay, but I\’m not really a big vampire or zombie fan, more of a time travel, space adventure kinda guy. Two other very popular series, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off series Xena: Warrior Princess also weren\’t what you\’d call huge favourites of mine, as I\’m also not big into fantasy either. I thought they were both ridiculously silly and formulaic, and I could take them or leave them, only watching the odd episode when nothing else was on.

The second half of the Nineties also gave us the new version of The Outer Limits, which ran for seven years. I quite liked this one, although some episodes were better than others. But in my opinion it was, overall, never as good as the original classic 1960s series, and I was really surprised that it actually made it to seven seasons.

On the downside, there were a few Nineties telefantasy series that I liked which unfortunately never got a fair crack of the whip, and ended well before their time. The ones that I recall (there were quite a few others, but these were favourites of mine) were Babylon 5: Crusade, which was cancelled after only thirteen episodes, Dark Skies, Space: Above and Beyond and American Gothic, all of which got axed at the end of their first season, and Chris Carter\’s Millennium, which also suffered a premature end, although it, at least, made it to three seasons. Even Babylon 5 itself, although it did make it to the end of the fifth and final season, had its last two seasons totally messed up by network interference and cancellations.

Unfortunately, telefantasy series are very expensive to produce, compared to mainstream TV programming. During the 1990s, US and UK television networks seem to become much more inclined to quickly cancel even relatively successful series, if viewing figures weren\’t good right from the outset, or so much as dipped slightly. For every Buffy, Stargate or X-Files, there were many other potentially classic telefantasy series that were cut short or never even got off the ground, while crap US and UK sitcoms, soaps and reality TV shows seemed to breed like rabbits.

To Be Continued…

Doctor Who: 50 Years in Space & Time (Part 7)

Here\’s the next part of my look back at the Best of the Bunch from Doctor Who\’s 50th Anniversary:

The November DVD release of The Tenth Planet
The November 50th Anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine

3. The Tenth Planet

In third place, it\’s the November DVD release of The Tenth Planet. I\’ve been waiting to see this one for a long, long time, and it didn\’t disappoint. I\’d never actually been lucky enough to own the VHS video release, and had only seen the few surviving clips on the Lost in Time DVD box set. So, finally being able to watch the whole story after all these years, featuring the very first appearance of the Cybermen, was really exciting.

The missing Episode 4 is expertly recreated here in animated form by the same people who did such sterling work animating the missing episodes on the recent Reign of Terror, The Ice Warriors and The Invasion DVD releases. And the excellent Telesnaps reconstruction of Episode 4 which had featured on the VHS video release is also here, in among the plentiful features on this top-notch and long-awaited double-DVD release.

4. Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary Edition

In fourth place, it\’s the November 50th Anniversary edition of Doctor Who Magazine, the biggest and one of the best ever editions of the magazine. There was so much good stuff in this one, simply choc a bloc with 50th Anniversary goodness, that it\’s difficult to know where to start. But if I had my arm twisted up my back and was forced to choose, my two favourites would have to be Ghosts in the Machine, a behind the scenes feature on the excellent An Adventure in Space and Time, and An Unearthly Beginning, which features never-before-seen drafts of An Unearthly Child. Great stuff!

To Be Continued…