In remembrance of Mary Tamm, Adam, Andi and Stephen look at the search for the 4th segment of the Key To Time. Conversations include how good Romana looks in purple, the joy of Count Grendel, what we’d really like to see for the 50th anniversary (here’s a hint it involves a musical number and lots of Taran Wood-beasts), Queen, Game Of Thrones and is Adam fat or pregnant? Also introducing The Naked Scarf drinking game, fun for all the family!
We finally reach the end of The Trial Of A Time Lord just in time for Adam’s birthday. Because what better way to spend it than discussing how a man in a clown coat has to avoid the machinations of a velvet penguin and a almost, slightly possibly not really future version of himself.
Oh, Mary… RIP
With Andi unavailable due to illness Adam and Stephen take a break from The Trial Of A Time Lord to pay tribute to Caroline John by looking at the 3rd Doctor and Liz Shaw’s début story. They discuss the limits of the Auton’s plans, the Doctor’s fetish for stealing clothes from hospitals and the dangers of a Simon Le Bon bomb.
As they inch closer towards the end of this ‘epic’ our plucky heroes must face the Freudian nightmare that is Terror Of The Vervoids. Can they survive Pip and Jane Baker without a script editor ? Just what will they think of Mel? Why is Honor Blackman wearing a track suit? And is this really Murder On The Orient Express in space, or is it strangely closer to a certain long gone British soap opera? To misquote the Valeyard: ‘Stop the Matrix, I want to get off!’
Adam, Andi and Stephen continue their look at The Trial Of A Time Lord and are all incredibly happy to see that even if the legal inquires are yawn worthy there’s nothing like a bearded maniac to cheer up proceedings. When not talking about the lovely lunacy of Mr Blessed, they also tackle subjects such as Sil, Peri’s bald cap and how sometimes when travelling in time and space you just have to throw a corpse or two.
Malcolm J Stewart, in his review of “The Happiness Patrol”:
In the commentary accompanying this story, it is revealed that, when initially interviewed for the DVD, scriptwriter Graeme Curry’s response was to question why it was being released at all, given how little people liked it.
Curry should have had more faith in his own work. There are problems with The Happiness Patrol, but they’re not weaknesses in vision or approach. They’re the effects of institutional neglect: a cheap-as-chips studio system that increasingly wasn’t up to the job of making drama of this kind.
No, looking back, it’s clear that for Doctor Who to become the show it needed to be, it wasn’t Doctor Who that needed to change. It was the BBC.
Compare this to the faith that the BBC puts into Doctor Who today.
BBC politics have always fascinated me and I think that interest started because of how Doctor Who was treated in the 80s.
Join Adam, Andi and Stephen as they start to tackle one of the most controversial stories in Doctor Who’s history. Does it deserve it’s terrible reputation? Do we really need constant cutaways to court? How many crash zooms can one face stand? Will Adam give in to Andi’s utterly random demands to put the song Sex Dwarf into this episode? And is the world truly ready for a sexy William Hartnell Halloween costume?
Now this is actually quite brilliant.
