When Doctor Who returned for its seventh series in 1970, it was almost an entirely different programme. Much like how – as you can find out in a look at series six here – the end of The War Games effectively drew a line under Doctor Who‘s black and white incarnation, the BBC very nearly took the opportunity to draw a line under Doctor Who itself. The details will always remain unclear and open to speculation, but with declining post-‘Dalekmania’ levels of interest very much on a changing drama department’s mind, there were at the very least serious discussions about the possibility of replacing Doctor Who with something new and exciting and more attuned to the dazzling possibilities of the thrilling new world of colour television. Thankfully, caution – or more likely paperwork – prevailed, and incoming producer Derrick Sherwin was briefed to reposition Doctor Who in a new and more energetic direction, and more importantly one that would get viewers to actually stay with entire stories after tuning in for the first instalment to see what the monster looked like. So somebody clearly did like The Quarks after all. Or didn’t. Whichever way round that works exactly.

Surmising that the best approach to this was literally bringing the series down to Earth, Sherwin devised a new format for Doctor Who that crackled with an energy and freshness that mirrored the arrival of both colour television and a new decade. Inspired by in equal measure by certain then-recent hit movie franchises and certain then-current ITV shows, with The Doctor exiled to Earth and working with a gadget-friendly military division tasked with tackling alien, technological and quasi-paranormal threats, this gave rise to a fast-moving, action-packed and visually arresting set of episodes with a more relatable sense of menace and a stylish new leading man in Jon Pertwee, who it’s safe to say was one of the Doctors who very much enjoyed inhabiting the part as fully as possible. It also however led to the budget rapidly running out, which led in turn to cost-consciously lengthy stories that continue to divide opinion. Viewers at the time certainly seemed undivided, though, so fire up Project Inferno and let’s drill down to the real talking points about it…

Was The Opening Of Spearhead From Space Really A ‘Shot-For-Shot Remake’ Of The Opening Of Quatermass II?

Cash-spillingly shot entirely on film and entirely on location due to industrial action, the appropriately-named Spearhead From Space was a powerhouse introduction not just for the new series but for the entire new direction that Doctor Who was taking. Beating the BBC’s simultaneously-launched new adult ‘sci-fact’ drama Doomwatch – created, possibly not entirely coincidentally, by recently ship-jumping Doctor Who scriptwriters Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler – to the punch, it exhilaratingly scared the wits out of viewers with four episodes full of fast-moving Carry-On-film-gone-psychotic mayhem courtesy of a plastics factory infiltrated by a malevolent space octopus. The one ‘fact’ that about Spearhead From Space that you will see repeated time and time again is that it opened with a ‘shot for shot remake’ of the opening scenes of the legendary 1955 BBC science fiction serial Quatermass II. Did it actually replicate it that closely, though? While it’s unarguably established fact that as part of his relaunch strategy Derrick Sherwin ordered episodes of the Quatermass serials from the BBC Film Library for inspiration, he himself never referred to a ‘remake’ of any kind, let alone a ‘shot for shot’ one of Quatermass II – in fact his remarks more closely suggest the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment – and this ‘fact’ appears to have been largely a fan assumption that got out of hand. A well-founded fan assumption that got out of hand, maybe, but an assumption nonetheless, and one that everyone has long just accepted on face value – but how many dedicated fans of either programme could tell you with any degree of certainty whether this was an accurate observation or not? After all, back when this phrase first became common currency, very few Doctor Who fans could realistically have seen Quatermass II. Now that we can see it, though – The Bolts, the first episode of Quatermass II, opens with spinning radars and dishes on top of military vans, a supervisor doing some trademark Nigel Kneale dry-witted dialogue with a radar operator about his voice going faint due to “the village boozer” and how “I’m going to make ruddy BBC announcers out of you lot if I have to soften up your gullets with my bare hand”, reports of an unusual meteor shower that they actively dismiss as ‘a jet or a fuel tank’, and an interminable sequence with a farmer on a tractor stumbling across said non-jet slash fuel meteors in transit. The first episode of Spearhead From Space opens with standard issue ‘Earth seen from space’ footage, a radar spinning on top of a radar station, a nervy operator calling ‘ma’am’ in for a second opinion on a weird meteor shower apparently flying in formation, and an impressive shot of the meteors searing through the sky and their mercifully quick discovery by inaugural Pertwee-era Poacher Sam Seeley. So not exactly a shot-for-shot remake, but a close and intentional homage, and very much in keeping with Sherwin’s stated aim to capture the atmospherics and realism of the serials rather than just copying them directly. Anyway, if the comparison caused some fans to seek out the original Quatermass serials, then there’s nothing really wrong with a bit of harmless and convenient conclusion-jumping. Aside from which, there are bigger and more fundamental questions surrounding Spearhead From Space…

Who Was Channing?

When the Nestene Consciousness launched its original plot to eradicate mankind and take over the Earth, it did so with the assistance of specially created plastic sort of superficially human-ish figures with ray guns hidden in their wrists who unthinkingly did its space octopus bidding. At the most basic end of this artillery were a small army of skinheads in boiler suits whose efficiency would appear to be questionable at best. Next up the scale were the disconcertingly David McCallum-esque shop window dummies that smashed out onto the high street on cue, casually annihilating old women, members of The Bluetones and a not at all over-reacting man on a bike in a hat and worse still causing untold disruption to poor old Wally The Workman’s lunch break. Then there were the waxwork-usurping plastic replicas of politicians, world leaders, high-ranking military officials and Auto Plastics’ mysterious new manager Channing. Not only is it never explained who the sinister figure given to sinister glares through frosted glass windows is supposed to be a replica of, it’s even actively implied that there was nobody that he could actually potentially have replaced; neither of his colleagues-by-proxy Ransome or Hibbert – with the latter of whom he could have found alternative side employment as professional Gilbert And George lookalikes – seem to associate him with any known figure from Auto Plastics management past or present, and there are even a couple of direct references to his just having arrived without explanation. It’s entirely feasible that the Nestene Consciousness might have simply plasticed him up from nowhere, but if that was the case, why not just replace Hibbert with a replica? It can’t even really be argued that they needed the human staff of the factory under their control to ‘make’ Channing, as he appears to have pre-existed any of the actual untoward petrochemical-driven production line chicanery. One angular theory is that he may actually have been Hallam, Hugh Burden’s character from the 1966 Michael Caine film Funeral In Berlin, whose defecting-to-the-East-to-steal-Nazi-gold shenanigans would at least have made him an idea candidate to install as the head of a plastics factory bent on the destruction of humanity. Sadly, we may never know as, like all self-respecting Cold War double-agents, he melted at the end of the story. Though at least he was something approaching a valid and convincing mimicry of an actual identifiable human…

How Many Voices Did Radio’s ‘Man Of A Thousand Voices’ Actually Have?

If there was one thing that Jon Pertwee was not short on, it was unlikely and frequently incoherent and often downright implausible anecdotes that existed primarily to emphasise how brilliantly talented he was. From being offered and declining virtually every part in Dad’s Army at one point or another, to the endless pranks pulled by, with and on his ‘old sparring partner’ Tenniel Evans, to his frequently trotted out excuse about not having seen any of the subsequent Doctors because “I’ve been very busy working on another show called Worzel Gummidge“, to the amusing misspellings of his name that weren’t, to the proud proclamations that The Ghosts Of N-Space was ‘Number One in the Hit Parade’, to whatever all of that was about bareback horse-riding in drag as ‘Madam Pertweeova’, he would offer each and every one of them uninvited if you gave him half the chance, and usually even if you didn’t. Then there was his – and conspicuously few other people’s – claim that he was known as Radio’s ‘Man Of A Thousand Voices’. Perhaps mercifully, he never really got to use any of them in Doctor Who – but he almost did. In episode five of Inferno, Pertwee called upon his self-proclaimed vocal mimicry talents to essay the part of a radio announcer reporting on the state of emergency imposed after the Parallel Earth’s crust was penetrated by Project Inferno; to further cunningly conceal his identity and prevent anyone from suspecting a thing, Pertwee was actually seen on screen listening to his own announcement. Thankfully, producer Barry Letts saw sense and cut the brief scene before transmission, arguing that it was too obviously the series’ lead actor doing one of his ‘many’ -it says here – voices and nobody would be fooled for a second. As sometimes happened in those days, however, this cut was actually enacted after duplicate copies of the finished episodes had been made for overseas sales, and when a full colour copy of Inferno was located in Canada in the mid-eighties it turned out to have the missing sequence intact. Despite the best efforts of the cast and their ‘concerned’ faces, it has to be said that the voice issuing from the radio sounds absolutely nothing whatsoever like any newsreader in the entire history of news, although it does sound very much indeed like Jon Pertwee doing an effort-deficient impression of Ray Alan and Lord Charles in the middle of a maelstrom of static and crackles, giving rise to the possibility that Pertwee might actually have been responsible for the infamous Vrillon Of Ashtar Galactic Command hoax. Mind you, it wasn’t even the silliest line he delivered in that story…

“What Did You Expect? Some Kind Of Space Rocket With Batman At The Controls?”

In Inferno, The Doctor manages to get himself stranded in a parallel universe where he is able to observe what would happen if the drilling project in his own reality was allowed to continue unrestricted, and also if Benton shouted his lines with a slightly different inflection. While attempting to get back in enough time to warn everyone of the dangers of allowing furious toxic red sludge to seep corrosively all over the globe because a couple of self-satisfied men with bad hairstyles thought climate change was a myth, The Doctor has cause to show the detached TARDIS console to the alternate reality version of decidedly lava-averse drilling safety consultant Greg Sutton, whose bewilderment at this method of cross-dimensional transportation prompts The Doctor to ask if he was expecting “some kind of space rocket with Batman at the controls”. Even aside from the logistical implications of acknowledging the Caped Crusader as a fictional element of the Doctor Who ‘universe’, and the question of exactly how much time he had spent at the controls of space rockets of any sort, there’s no swerving the fact that this is a quite comprehensive and authoritative slight aimed at a longstanding rival, and one whose big television adaptation moment had only recently been pitched directly against Doctor Who by the ‘other side’ to boot. Was this the new production team announcing that the days of furrowing brows over whatever ITV could throw at them were over and the ‘ratings war’ had been won before it had even started? Possibly, but what is more interesting still is that this was the start of what would turn out to be a very bleak decade for poor old Bruce Wayne. A long way from anything resembling an organised ‘rebranding’, Batman spent the seventies as little more than a quasi-comedic piece of iconography, with all manner of off-script licensing arrangements leading to everything from a bizarre early seventies ‘tour’ by Adam West accompanied by Nicholas Young from The Tomorrow People as Robin, to the seemingly endless procession of mind-hurting ‘Bugs Bunny Meets The Superheroes’ touring stage shows (which, incidentally, you can hear much more about here), and all the while repeats of the sixties series swirled around the schedules to the ‘delight’ of an audience who were it has to be said slightly more cynical than those who had watched it the first time around. While the actual comics tried their absolute hardest to return the franchise to its darker roots, which in turn would ultimately lead to the even bigger late eighties reinvention, the most sophisticated take on Batman that the wider seventies public saw was the Filmation series with Bat-Mite (which again you can find much more about here), and that’s not necessarily as impressive a yardstick as it might sound. Anyway, regardless of how familiar the production team may or may not have been with what actually happened in Batman, Doctor Who had good reason to be bigging itself up, not least on account of certain decisive breaks with its recent past…

They Like Intelligent Strong Sensibly-Dressed Female Lead Characters And They Cannot Lie

Over the past couple of instalments, we’ve seen plenty of evidence of debatable welcomeness of just keen the Doctor Who production team were to cast shapely young women as series regulars – and in supporting roles whenever they got the chance, which was more or less all of the sodding time, basically – and the corresponding delight that the cameramen took in angling their shots around certain prominent physical features. To the extent that it would be easy for detractors to point at this series of retrospective features and accuse me of using affected disdain for the practice to facilitate more or less the exact same ultimate purpose, but I’m not taking the blame for some blokes in suits speculating on what might get ‘the dads’ watching back in 1967 for a moment longer – and thankfully it was at this precise point in Doctor Who history that Derrick Sherwin decided that he’d had quite enough of the dolly birds getting in the way of telling a thumping good scientifically veracious story. Given that the relaunch involved Earth-exiled The Doctor teaming up with military counter-alien task force U.N.I.T., and bearing in mind the example set by previous one-off proto-feminist characters like Ann Travers and Isobel Watkins (about whom you can find more here and here respectively), he took the opportunity to ditch the traditional assistant model and pair The Doctor up instead with level-headed long word-spouting Cambridge-educated academic Dr. Elizabeth Shaw. Rational, deductive, and never prone to panic even when being chased over railings by weirdly crouching stuntmen or whacked on the head by bipedal lizards in a barn, Liz was a breath of fresh air both in character and in appearance, favouring sensible hairdos and with-it yet presentable clobber over a self-consciously ‘sexy’ look, and some would argue actually ending up looking more sexy as a consequence. Perfectly suited to the longer form and more cerebral approach of series seven, Liz gave reinvented Doctor Who a depth and a level of dialogue that did an enormous amount to tackle the ‘lol you can see the strings!!! oh no hang on that’s Stingray‘ sneery misconceptions that were already haranguing Doctor Who and make it into a relevant and widely enjoyable series again. It’s just a shame that, due to a number of reasons, the character was amicably written out after the end of the series and never really seen again. It’s also a shame that nowadays buffoons spend too much time splitting hairs over whether she was an official ‘companion’ or not because we never saw her travel in the TARDIS or something; no but she was in The Ambassadors Of Death so stick that in your wilful refusal to consider the conventions for crediting regular cast in BBC shows around the time The Daleks’ Master Plan was made and smoke it. Or indeed read a longer form rebuttal of this particular strand of nonsense here. Meanwhile, although Liz herself definitely had a ‘new’ look, was she in fact part of a wider one…?

Was There Actually A ‘New Look’?

It’s entirely reasonable to say – as indeed people quite often do – that series seven represented an entirely new direction for Doctor Who. It’s slightly more questionable to claim – as people equally frequently do – that this also involved a ‘new look’. Although there is unarguably a definite unity of style, direction, ideology and indeed overall approach that with the best will in the world was not always evident during the black and white era, it is less reasonable to suggest that there is a tangible visual unity. On face value, the four stories that made up Series Seven would seem to have little in common with each other outside of being made in colour, and ironically it was precisely because of the deployment of new-fangled colour television technology that they ended up so visually disparate. Due to industrial action over the operation of new studio equipment, Spearhead From Space had to be made entirely on film and entirely on location; the other stories used the traditional combination of filmed location and videotaped studio work, but the unavoidable overspend on Spearhead From Space meant that the amount of sets that they used varied from several to, essentially, one big massive one. Meanwhile the much heralded new image-combining visual effect Colour Separation Overlay, still very much an untested and experimental process at that point, is effectively used for different purposes in all three. On top of all this The Ambassadors Of Death plays around with elements of postmodernism, from the opening on-the-spot news reporting incongruity to Jon Pertwee more or less walking off the set at the end. All of this isn’t exactly helped by the fact that all four stories now effectively survive on different formats; the original colour film prints, a restoration made by combining black and white film prints with the American-standard colour signal from an off-air video recording, an alarming Frankenstein-esque hotchpotch incorporating elements of black and white film, electronically recovered colour, hand-colourisation, and an off-air afflicted by severe picture interference, and a conversion back from not-very-well-converted-in-the-first-place 525-line NTSC video masters respectively, with only the first episode of The Ambassadors Of Death still surviving on its gloriously glossy original videotape and looking and feeling like a massive sensory overload in this context. Series seven is one of Doctor Who‘s absolute high points, but to suggest that it represented a solidly-defined vision of, well, vision is a bit of a stretch. While we’re on about all of those minor yet significant differences, though…

Doctor Who And The Doctor Who And The Doctor Who And The Silurians

If you want solid and unassailable evidence that the incoming Doctor Who production team had some difficulty in establishing exactly what form this ‘new look’ should took, look no further than the fact that all four stories in series seven essentially had different opening titles to each other. Despite the ‘title zooming out’ business, Spearhead From Space at least has the early seventies opening titles more or less as we know and love them, even if they do somehow bafflingly manage to look ‘on film’ despite actually being on film in every single other episode they were used in anyway. Inferno goes for a mid-sixties style gambit of appending appropriate scene-setting stock footage – in this case rampant spewings of lava – to the end of the titles and indeed behind the actual story title. The Ambassadors Of Death tries out a weird and not remotely successful stop-starty ‘sting’ approach with a recap of the previous week’s cliffhanger intrusively shoehorned into the middle. Then there’s The Silurians. Or, as the pedants would frowningly have it, Doctor Who And The Silurians. The whys and wherefores of this diversion from the norm and indeed from anything resembling straightforward old fashioned logic may well have been endlessly speculated and debated on, but there’s ultimately no getting away from the fact that that’s exactly what it says at the start of all seven honkingly-soundtracked episodes. So is that how we should refer to it? Well, there’s a thorny question and a half. Normally we’re all for point-proving pedantry around here, but this just seems like a pedantically proven point too far. It looks wrong, it sounds wrong, it disrupts episode lists like nobody’s business, and anyone who interrupts anyone else’s perfectly valid and well-made observations about The Silurians to condescendingly chortle that it’s actually called Doctor Who And The Silurians actually should be forced to write out ‘I Must Remember To Occasionally Actually Enjoy Doctor Who As An Actual Television Programme Instead Of Looking At Huge Long Lists Of Nothing In Particular And Going ‘Aaaaaahhhhhhh!’ With A Big Self-Satisfied Look On My Face’ ten thousand times whilst being forced to watch the episodes of The Tripods set in the vineyard on a loop and edited into ‘movie format’. Seriously, in similar circumstances, would you honestly voluntarily refer to Blake’s 7 And The Space Fall, Rising Damp And The Come On In The Water’s Lovely, Trumpton And The Pigeons or Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) And The Ghost That Saved The Bank At Monte Carlo? Probably yes, knowing some people, but that’s by the by. It’s a fascinating production slip-up – and one that feels oddly in keeping with the wider reinvention of the series – but to use it to score imaginary points in your own head is just plain ridiculous. In any case, there were much stranger anomalies worth commenting on about The Silurians. Or were there…?

The Music In The Silurians Isn’t As ‘Weird’ As People Seem To Think

Aside from Channing looking through that window, the big television event of 1970 was BBC1’s adaptation of The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, famed as much for the towering central performance of Keith Michell as the controversial divorce-behead-friendly bearded monarch as it was for the honktastic dronethentic soundtrack provided by early music firebrand David Munrow. Not far behind were the similarly Munrow-bolstered follow-up Elizabeth R and Ken Russell’s big screen troublecauser The Devils, and Munrow himself could also regularly be heard on Radio 3 introducing youngsters to the delights of the crumhorn in the storytelling slot Pied Piper. Meanwhile, Prog Rock fans were thrilling to the interpolation of medieval instruments and baroque time signatures by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Gentle Giant, Gryphon and The Roundtable, the last of whom not entirely coincidentally featured a certain David Munrow amongst their lineup. While it may well have been primarily down to the efforts of one particular clavichord-wielding evangelist, the fact of the matter is that there was a significant resurgence of mainstream interest in ‘early music’ as the seventies rolled around. So when Carey Blyton opted to emphasise the earthy prehistoric nature of the primary antagonists of The Silurians by marking their appearance with something that sounded somewhere between Chris Morris’ ‘Answer Prancer’ music and a minuetting goose, it wasn’t quite so much of a deviation from normality as the average Doctor Who ‘programme guide’ might seem to suggest. Yes, it might be repetitive, distracting, and at a whopping seven episodes’ worth of it even verging on annoying in places – although, let’s be honest about it, the sound made by that Silurian tracker detector thing was considerably more irritating – but suggesting that this was some crazed unwarranted experiment in audience torture that got out of hand is a suggestion that could be disproven by Okdel in six seconds flat. In any case, this was far from the only infiltration into Doctor Who by the heavyweight visionary sounds of Progressive Rock…

Who Were The ‘Heads’ On The Production Team?

In some regards series seven of Doctor Who was quite ‘prog’ in and of itself with its lengthy stories, abstract concept album-friendly themes and storylines and combination of mythological and futuristic concepts with slow-moving and unspectacular scientific straightforwardness. It’s reasonable to assume that this was a fortuitous coincidence of timing and budget, and at the very most – and not unlike all that ‘early music’ business – a background influence from the general popular cultural mood of the time rather than a deliberate attempt to distract the far-out types who meant it, man, from their fourteen thousandth listen to Nice Enough To Eat for long enough to tune in. That said, there was still enough in the way of direct infiltration from actual Progressive Rock into Doctor Who to raise the odd retrospective eyebrow. The appearance of a short but prominent burst of Fleetwood Mac’s Oh Well – Part 1 in Spearhead From Space can just about be explained away as being due to the fact that it was rocketing up the charts at the time the story was filmed, although it does seem a tad incongruous when they could have opted for something less hard and heavy – and although they wouldn’t have known it at the time, easier to license for commercial releases later on – like Early In The Morning by Vanity Fare. What can be less easily waved away, however, is a scene recorded for the following series’ The Mind Of Evil later in 1970 (which there is much more about here), which features The Master listening to The Devil’s Triangle, an instrumental suite from King Crimson’s top five album In The Wake Of Poseidon. While this was undoubtedly one of the major sounds of the year, it was only really so amongst a certain specific audience of tuned-in album-leaning prog types, and somebody must have intentionally picked it out and argued the case for dubbing it on to a television programme with an audience made up primarily of people who probably thought that Yellow River by Christie was a little on the raucous side. So who, if anyone, was wandering around the Doctor Who production office brandishing copies of Space Hymns, May Blitz and Three Parts To My Soul? Although he probably would have loved Quintessence, it’s doubtful that Barry Letts was first in the queue for the nearest A-AUSTR gig. Terrance Dicks would probably have said that Progressive Rock was fine by him “as long as they progress as far away from me as possible!”. Jon Pertwee has been described by both of the above as a ‘middle-aged teenager whose musical tastes ran to heavy rock’, but although they certainly indulged his demands to perform ‘funny voices’ and dress up as a washerwoman every three minutes, would he really have been insisting on communicating his latest musical discoveries to the masses like some frock-coated John Peel? Could we assume, in that case, that it was the various directors assigned to the various stories? Or might this even be a silly and scarcely convincing contrivance to fill up a bit of space because with all of the stories being so long there’s comparatively little to say about them? Or – hey – maybe they were all so out of it on crazy acid that they can’t remember. Anyway, whoever it was, they played their own small part in making sure that we actually did get more Doctor Who…

What Did We Nearly Get Instead Of Series Eight?

As successful as the Doctor Who relaunch may have been with viewers and the BBC ‘top brass’ alike, there was still no guarantee that it would actually return the following year until very late in the day indeed. Not, in fact, until Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks were just about to start work on Inferno in March 1970. Understandably, Letts and Dicks were both sufficiently concerned about what they might be or indeed might not be doing next that they had both been actively developing other potential projects for the BBC, which have been extensively namechecked in histories of Doctor Who despite surprisingly little actually being known about either of them. Letts had been working on Snowy White, an action serial about an Australian based in London, which is usually quite lazily described as sounding ‘like Crocodile Dundee‘ when in fact it was more than likely influenced by Barry Humphries’ ‘Barry Mackenzie’ comic strips and would probably have had more in common with offbeat contemporaneous BBC television detective series like Spy Trap and the updated take on longstanding radio favourite Paul Temple, as not entirely coincidentally produced by Derrick Sherwin. Dicks meanwhile was working on Better Late, a programme idea that he has seemingly never described in anything other than “well it wasn’t better and it was late!”-level witticisms, although we can take an educated guess that it was probably about Ian Better who was always late, and Ian Late who was better at turning up on time, and the wacky events that took place between their respective arrivals. Presumably thankfully, neither series ever actually had to happen, and viewers got to thrill to the adventures of Bert The Landlord and The IMC Robot after all. As for Derrick Sherwin, he moved on from Paul Temple to create Skiboy… but that’s another story. Which you can read much more about here.

Anyway, join us again next time for fans getting confused by their confusion over diphthongs, a Sensorite falling down a lift shaft, and some polite and considered speculation on the likely intelligence level of any viewers who genuinely believed that the BBC might have blown up a church…

Buy A Book!

You can find an expanded version of It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed? looking at the entire sixties run of Doctor Who in Can’t Help Thinking About Me, a collection of columns and features with a personal twist. Can’t Help Thinking About Me is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Or swipe Wally’s while he’s still looking ‘alarmed’.

Further Reading

TV’s Newest Series! is the thrillingly baffling story of Derrick Sherwin’s post-Doctor Who ITV action series Skiboy and its remarkable off-piste trajectory; you can find it here.

Further Listening

You can hear much more of my thoughts about Doctor Who‘s struggles to stay in step with feminism and plenty more besides on The Zeitgeist Tapes – the podcast where politics and pop culture collide – here.

© Tim Worthington.
Please don’t copy this only with more italics and exclamation marks.