tom baker

December 15, 2014

Now Just a Moment: The Doctors Revisited (Tom Baker)

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That this should prove so difficult is in many ways revealing. First, we should start with what this isn’t, which is an account of Tom Baker as the definitive Doctor. Satisfyingly, this isn’t accomplished with some deconstruction. This is unabashed hagiography – just not to the exclusion of other eras. The result is on a basic level satisfying: the joy that is Tom Baker’s Doctor is celebrated, but without the distorting effect that the era sometimes has.

But it’s curious that there’s no real attention given to the sheer span of Baker’s tenure. Indeed, what really jumps out about this is that Baker’s tenure is reduced almost entirely to its first half. There’s some clips from City of Death, and K-9 makes the companion list, but for the most part there’s not a breath of acknowledgment of anything that wasn’t part of the Hinchcliffe era. Romana isn’t mentioned outside of the City of Death clips. Davros is talked about entirely in terms of Genesis of the Daleks. The other stories to get decent clips are Terror of the Zygons, Robot, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and The Ark in Space.

It’s not full-out erasure, and there’s certainly no overt misrepresentations, but it’s strange to see the Hinchcliffe-only take on Tom Baker, simply because it opens a weird gap in the chronology of this – there’s a chunk as long as the Hartnell or Troughton eras that’s all but cut from the official history.

Some of that is a product of the focus only on actors. The good old “gothic horror to comedy” transition that is part of the history of the program through this era is, fair enough, outside the remit of The Doctors Revisited. And the aspects of the Doctor’s character that are focused on are mainly the more comedic ones, so in a way, even if all the examples are Hinchcliffe-era, it’s the Williams-era version of the character that’s remembered. Which has kind of always been the case.

But another way of putting that is that this is account is almost completely uninterested in the stories. Tom Baker’s performance consumes everything around it, even today. The fact that this is the first installment of The Doctor’s Revisited to have the Doctor in question on hand to interview adds to that, although the actual use of Tom Baker tends to be as a slightly unreliable narrator of his own era. But the focus is very firmly on the character, which Tom Baker as good as says at the beginning, when he admits that the line between himself and his character got blurred.

None of this is helped by the choice of stories to show afterwards. The Pyramids of Mars is not a bad story, although its fourth episode is a bit of a mess. But it’s a tragically safe choice, and it’s telling that Moffat, in introducing it, finds himself mostly talking about Tom Baker’s performance once again before adding a few sentences about how the story’s pretty good.…

February 13, 2012

Guest Post: David Bowie and Doctor Who

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Among the ways in which the end was prepared for is that I, suspecting that the Logopolis post would maybe take a bit longer to write than most, decided to secure a guest post for today. Not wanting to leave you in the hands of anyone other than the best, of course, I asked Chris O’Leary of the fabulous Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which was quite rightly one of Time Magazine’s 25 best blogs of 2011.

I’ll be back Wednesday with the first of three posts I’ve got before we get to Castrovalva, two of which will belong to a brand new sub-series to go with Time Can Be Rewritten, Pop Between Realities, and You Were Expecting Someone Else. Then a week from Wednesday we’ll kick off the Peter Davison era proper. (Speaking of which… were there any good BBC Books novels set in the Davison era? I’ve got a golden turkey penciled in for that slot now, but if there’s something of actual quality I’d prefer that.)

But before all of those terrible things happen, you get the pleasure of a blog post written by someone who’s actually good. Enjoy it while it lasts.

—-

David Bowie, for much of his life, has been considered an ideal candidate for various iconic TV/film parts that he will never play. He’s the great James Bond villain who never was, for instance. And from the ‘70s on, Bowie was regularly rumored to appear on Doctor Who in some manner, from playing a supporting role (allegedly considered as a replacement for Alexei Sayle in “Revelation of the Daleks”) to a villain (an eternal candidate for the Master) to playing the Doctor himself.

Who and Bowie, two modern British institutions whose trademark has been a commitment to continual transformation, are also one long parallel, with each reflecting the other from their timelines to their aesthetics. They were born in the same ward: Bowie’s first-ever recording (an unreleased track for Decca called “I Never Dreamed”) was cut in London in August 1963, within a month of the shooting of the first “An Unearthly Child.” Bowie’s Mod and R&B singles coincide with William Hartnell’s term; Bowie’s sudden turn to Anthony Newley-infused psychedelia begins directly upon the arrival of Patrick Troughton, and “Space Oddity,” the culmination of this era, debuts mere weeks after the end of “The War Games.” Phil has already gone to great lengths to find connections between Ziggy Stardust Bowie and Jon Pertwee’s tenure. And the Tom Baker years are Bowie at his most visionary and influential, from Diamond Dogs through Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy and Scary Monsters.

You can keep it going for as long as you’d like. Bowie’s floundering in the mid-‘80s coincides with Who’s hiatus (during which Bowie recorded “Dancing in the Street”) and the ugly desperation of the Colin Baker years; the 1996 “modernized” TV movie appears just as Bowie’s dyed his hair copper and is attempting drum ‘n’ bass. And Bowie’s public career ends precisely at the start of Who’s successful revival: “Rose” was being filmed in Cardiff in early summer 2004 just as Bowie was playing what would be his final concerts.

…

February 10, 2012

Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)

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Note: For gematrial reasons, section #10 is the beginning of the entry and you should skip to there. Alternatively, John G. Wood has made a proper interactive fiction version of it and posted it here because he is awesome.

It is stark white and so very bright here at the summit. There is simply light, and oneness, and completion. This is the void, and it is everything.

Nothing follows this. But out of nothing can come anything. In one story Doctor Who is built up to the heavens itself and then leveled back down. These heights are miles from Toxteth and Thatcher, from the Kingdom that the Crown rules above. No matter. Sometimes the only escape we have from the world is dreams, whether it be the world of schoolyard bullies or of Tories. Sometimes all we can do in the face of a growing darkness is retreat into a realm of silly and daft ideas and watch as they inexorably spin their way into more.

Doctor Who can’t fight Thatcher. It can’t stop her. She will run rampant and horrible over Britain for a decade, a terrible woman who does terrible things. She will win election after election, and her legacy will be nearly impossible to chisel out of the heart of the country even long after the sheer breadth of devastation she brought is clear. We are in history here, and there is no height to which one can ascend in order to find a solution to it. You can’t rewrite history. Not one line. Much as one wants to, much as one is desperate to.

But one can always rewrite fantasy. One can always rewrite Doctor Who. One must. It demands it, demands endless action, endless mercurial play. It is enough to say this of Logopolis: it could have been the end, but the moment was prepared for.

Go to section 0.

This near to the pinnacle of all things it is difficult to pin down specifics. A musky greyness is all there is. Neither thing nor absence, there is no purity here. At nearly the most refined point in the cosmos, scraping against eternity itself, we have passed knowledge, passed understanding. Now there is only Wisdom, the capacity to take a step, to act, to do something. In the beginning, and thus in the end, is the word.

The Doctor, in the entire story, takes three actions that matter at all – he lands his TARDIS atop another Police Box that turns out to have been a trap, he lands it within a city of words, and he sends a CVE out into Cassiopeia. All three are the same action – the positioning of an emboitment at a crucial moment. This, in the end, defines the Doctor’s actions. If the TARDIS chooses the moment, which as we later learn, she does, it is still the Doctor who injects her into them, who actually puts the box into place.

We are returning to first principles here, but this is inevitable.

…

February 8, 2012

You Were Expecting Someone Else 8 (Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Work)

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Let us first stipulate that there is relatively little reason to care about these particular comics on their merits in either Alan Moore’s ouvre or the Doctor Who canon. Bits of them – particularly “Black Death,” may have credible cases for placing in any given top ten list of Doctor Who comics, but they’re not self-evidently the best Doctor Who comics ever or anything, as one might hope from the combination of Alan Moore and Doctor Who.

On the other hand, there’s something fundamentally irresistible here. I mean, obviously there is – I wouldn’t do a post like this if there weren’t. But I’m also hardly the only one. Russell T. Davies himself namechecks Alan Moore’s Deathsmiths of Goth in a text piece published about the Time War. Miles and Wood argue that it was Moore’s take on Time Lord history in “Star Death” that shifted the consensus view of the relationship between Rassilon and Omega. And more generally speaking, starting from 1987 and continuing to the present day, Alan Moore has been a massive influence on the show whether directly or indirectly. (For the purposes of this statement remember that Neil Gaiman is in many ways the quasi-authorized successor to Alan Moore) Much like Douglas Adams before him and Neil Gaiman after him, Alan Moore carries a massive fanbase that is separate from Doctor Who, and thus the intersections between the two of them carry odd and peculiar resonances.

This doesn’t change the fact, however, that we are talking about a mere 28 pages of comics here, all drawn with David Lloyd, later to be Moore’s artist on V For Vendetta. His first two stories consist of four two-page installments, and then he did a set of three interconnected one-parters at four pages each. That is it. We are necessarily not talking about a huge contribution to Doctor Who here. Furthermore, all of these were published in 1980 and 1981. These predate anything that it would be fair to call a major work of Moore’s. This is Alan Moore, in other words, before he was even one of the very goods, little yet before he was one of the greats.

It shows, most particularly in his second offering, “Business as Usual.” He’s reliant on clunky and awkward thought bubbles to convey exposition, for instance, having a character explore an industrial plant and think “This must be the warehouse section. It seems to be full of kids’ toys. I suppose it figures… after all, our reports say that toys are Galaxy Plastic’s main product…” It’s a case of poor mechanics – simply put, Moore isn’t using the medium well enough to get the exposition out organically. The pacing, similarly, is badly flawed. This is one of Moore’s first multi-part stories, and he hasn’t yet figured out how to make each two-page installment a distinct experience. It’s really an eight page story with four cliffhangers as opposed to a story comprised of four two-part installments.

But although Moore’s mechanics are still clunky at this phase, even in this – by far the weakest of his Doctor Who efforts – there’s quite a bit that’s sharp.

…

February 6, 2012

You Were Expecting Someone Else 7 (Doctor Who Weekly Comics)

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When talking about the British comics industry in the 1980s it is key to note that despite the vast number of important creators coming out of it there were only a handful of actual significant British comics magazines. IPC had other publications beside 2000 AD, but most could be counted on to fold after a few issues and be folded into 2000 AD. Humor publications like The Beano and The Dandy existed, but in their own almost wholly parallel dimension. Dez Skinn had 26 issues of Warrior out that were hugely influential and high-quality but that were, after all, only 26 issues. And Marvel UK had a motley of titles that combined repackaged US comics with original UK-market material. But that was about it. It was a very small industry into which a very large amount of talent was packed.

As a result, when Dez Skinn created Doctor Who Weekly for Marvel UK it was almost inevitable that it would attract some A-list creators. And so it is that Doctor Who comics have been created by Pat Mills and John Wagner (creators of Judge Dredd), Steve Moore, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Bryan Hitch, John Ridgway, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, and Alan Moore. We’ll deal with the latter of these on Wednesday in his very own feature because, well, duh. And those that didn’t work on the Fourth Doctor strips will obviously wait as well. But that still leaves us plenty to look at here.

The story that gets most of the attention is the first one, The Iron Legion, and the third, The Star Beast. Both are penned by Wagner and Mills, with art by Dave Gibbons (who handled the overwhelming majority of the Fourth Doctor strips). This is actually a bit unfortunate. Neither is actually very good. I mean, they’re fine comic stories – Wagner and Mills are competent plotters, and Gibbons is obviously a fantastic artist. But the tone is all wrong. Wagner and Mills are action writers who belong on 2000 AD and their attempts to fuse Doctor Who to a straightforward sci-fi action sort of space militarism make Eric Saward’s efforts of the mid-80s look positively coherent by comparison.

It’s not that they make any of the obvious mistakes. Their characterization of the Doctor is imperfect, certainly, but far from disastrous. He gets a couple of good moments throughout the strips. But for the most part he feels like a passenger in Mills/Wagner strips, generally tagging along with some anti-authoritarian rebels with lots of guns as they blow things up and have elaborate chase scenes. It’s obvious that the writers are enjoying their cyborgs, alien chariot races, and bizarre alien parasites more than they’re enjoying the actual star of the strips. Combined with a clear commitment to violent action (there’s a cheeky yet revealing panel in the first installment of The Iron Legion in which a shopkeeper is gunned down and several cans of baked beans are shown exploding in front of him in lieu of actual blood and gore) this just… is off tone for Doctor Who.…

February 3, 2012

That Jackanapes (The Keeper of Traken)

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His coat contains a furnace where there used to be a guy.

It’s January 31st, 1981. John Lennon is down to two top ten singles – “Imagine” at number one, and “Woman” at number two. “Woman” takes the number one a week later, holds it for two weeks, and then yields to Joe Dolce Music Theater’s “Shaddap You Face.” John Lennon’s posthumous chart success going down to “Shaddap You Face” has to, upon reflection, be one of the better metaphors for the fall of civilization ever. Ultravox, Slade, Dire Straits, Blondie, and Stevie Wonder also chart.

In real news we’re a bit thin on the ground. Gro Harlem Brundtland becomes Prime Minister of Norway, while Wojciech Jaruzelski becomes Prime Minister of Poland and immediately begins trying to find an excuse to impose martial law. And the Stardust Fire happens in Dublin, killing 48 and teaching everyone an important lesson about not locking the fire exits that continues to periodically and fatally be ignored. On a related note, 21 people die in the Karaiskakis Stadium disaster in Greece, likely because of a failure to open an exit gate enough.

While on television it’s The Keeper of Traken, a story that threatens to be overshadowed by its continuity significance. This story also marks a personal milestone for the blog – from this story on I have seen every episode of the series at least once, although sometimes only that and nearly 20 years ago. These two facts are not entirely unrelated. For the archive-centered Doctor Who fan the primary appeal of The Keeper of Traken, superficially, is a triple-header of events: the introduction of Nyssa, the introduction of the Anthony Ainley version of the Master, and the beginning of the loose trilogy of stories covering the Doctor’s regeneration.

Every single part of this is horrifically misguided. One of the more tedious debates available in fandom is whether or not Nyssa counts as a companion in this story. It’s tedious because it’s a classic pitched battle not merely over no stakes whatsoever but over a technicality of an invented concept. There is no doubt that Nyssa is a companion, there is no doubt that she debuts in this story, but because she doesn’t join the TARDIS crew this story and is instead brought back in the next story there’s a debate over whether or not she’s a companion in this story. Personally I advocate the far more entertaining fandom debate – if we take Asylum seriously and assume that the Doctor knows Nyssa is a companion from the start, does the Doctor’s not taking Nyssa with him at the end of this story constitute a deliberate attempt to alter history?

(There’s actually an entertaining theory to be spun here. The fact that the Doctor knows he meets Nyssa in his fourth incarnation means that he cannot regenerate until he does. This corresponds perfectly with his cockier and more domineering demeanor in the Williams era. And after meeting Nyssa in this story he becomes deeply sulky and funerial, as if he knows the jig is up.…

February 1, 2012

Going To Be Alone Again (Warrior’s Gate)

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The Tharils’ extensive facial hair makes them

resemble lions.

It’s January 3rd, 1981. St. Winifred’s School Choir is at number one with “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma,” which is unfortunate. One week later John Lennon takes number one with the posthumous rerelease of “Imagine,” one of three number one hits he had that week along with “Happy XMas/War is Over,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” and, later on, “Woman.” ABBA, The Police, Adam & The Ants, Queen, and Phil Collins also chart.

In real news, the Salvadoran Civil War starts to get ugly as the FMLN launches a major offensive against the US-backed military government, which, over 1980, murdered nearly 12,000 people, upping it to 16,000 unarmed civilians in 1981. Ulster Defence Association gunmen shoot and wound former MP Bernadette Devlin McAliske. The first DeLorean is made in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, of interest to fans of lesser time travel narratives, and in one of the great “fuck yous” of international politics Iran releases its American hostages minutes after Ronald Reagan is inaugurated to replace Jimmy Carter.

While on television there is a castle with a ruined feast hanging in an empty void on the edge of the universe. Mechanized suits of armor stalk the halls as noble lion men fight to regain their freedom. While the noblest Roman strikes off on her own, finally ridding herself of her own chains, forged less out of dwarf star alloy than out of red and burgundy wool.

Warrior’s Gate is a strange beast. A story structured with overt poetry, where thematic associations link the very fabric of the world together as much as scientific reason. In this regard it is the biggest test case of the Bidmead approach – a poetic setting extrapolated from science. On one level is the frame that has been holding the last three stories together – the so-called “E-Space Trilogy.” In truth these trilogy linkings are less useful than we might hope. The thematic “reworking past eras” trilogy of Meglos, The Leisure Hive, and State of Decay and the three science fairy tales at the end of the season are far tighter trilogies than three stories into which the idea of a miniature external universe with negative coordinates was shoehorned in.

The idea of E-Space is simple enough. The CVE is essentially a wormhole, E-Space as basic a parallel universe as they come. But here finally we have the idea explored as more than a mere plot hook (although there is something to be contemplated in the idea that Alzarius is actively the inversion of Gallifrey). If E-Space is to be understood as negative space and the normal N-Space as positive then what of the zero point between the universes? What would that be like?

But from this start exploring the more or less scientific concept the story opens up onto a more eccentric vista. I used the word poetic, but there’s an obvious oddity to this term when applied to television. Typically when we use the word “poetic” we really mean “lyrical,” that is, essentially working according to a non-narrative structure.…

January 30, 2012

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Thrill Power 25 (2000 AD)

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There are, of course, many ways in which British culture has jumped over and influenced American culture. But the British Invasion in the comics industry remains one that it’s easy to miss the significance of, in part because its three leading lights – Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman – have largely sucked the oxygen from the event, obscuring the fact that for a significant period of time the overwhelming majority of significant comics writers and artists in the US were, in fact, British. Consider the following list: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, Andy Diggle, Mike Carey, Andrew Cartmel, Paul Cornell, Mark Millar, Lawrence Miles, Warren Ellis, Tony Lee, Alan Davis, Barry Kitson, Dave Gibbons, Glen Fabry, Kevin O’Neil, Bryan Talbot, Gary Erskine, Frank Quitely, Trevor Hairsine, Sam Kieth, John McRea, Frazer Irvine, Brian Bolland, Garry Leach, Steve Yeowell, Steve Dillon, John Ridgway, Carlos Ezquerra, Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jock, John Bolton, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mark Buckingham. Aside from one or two Doctor Who names I threw in there because this is a Doctor Who blog after all, these are some of the biggest names in comics, whether because they are or at some point were superstars or because they were on one or two massively famous projects. But more significantly, everyone on that list has published at least one thing in either 2000 AD or its spinoff Judge Dredd Megazine. And for the majority of them that was some of their earliest work.

So if you want to suggest that 2000 AD is one of the most important British science fiction publications ever, period, you’re not exactly short on ammunition for your case. On the other hand, generally speaking, if you want to argue that it was one of the best… well, now you’re in a bit of a harder situation. Because as vital as 2000 AD was and at times still is, it’s not exactly… good.

First some background. In late 1975 an editor at IPC Magazines got an inkling that science fiction might hit it big soon and hired Pat Mills to develop it. Pat Mills had overseen two previous comics aimed at the same age group – Battle Picture Weekly and the infamous Action, which was sufficiently violent and blood-soaked to as to piss off Mary Whitehouse. 2000 AD was a stunning example in the same vein. There were five strips in its first issue – sorry, prog – Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Flesh, and M.A.C.H. 1. Almost all of them are gloriously and tastelessly violent – only Dan Dare, reimagined as a more properly “futuristic” strip, displays even a glimmer of basic taste. Harlem Heroes is about a sport that combines “football, boxing, kung fu, and basketball,” while M.A.C.H. 1 was an ultraviolent Six Million Dollar Man ripoff. Invasion was about working class British men violently resisting Soviet… sorry, Volgan occupation. And Flesh, perhaps the greatest of all of them, was about time traveling dinosaur farmers and a particularly murderous T-Rex.…

January 27, 2012

Fish From Space (State of Decay)

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Peter Murphy had to tone it down a bit before Bauhaus

really took off.

It’s November 22nd, 1980. Blondie remains at number one with “The Tide is High.” A week later ABBA take over the spot with “Super Trouper,” their last number one hit on the UK charts. It remains at number one for the remainder of the story. The Police, The Boomtown Rats, Kool and the Gang, UB40, and John Lennon also chart. Meanwhile, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, and Devo lurk about in the lower portions of the charts, the latter with “Whip It,” which peaks in the 50s, which is probably considerably lower than people would guess if pressed.

In real news, we should probably start with the murder of John Lennon, which, a week later, causes his then declining single “(Just Like) Starting Over” to suddenly jump from 22nd to number one and prompting a hurried rerelease of “Imagine.” Because for an anti-capitalist pacifist legend John Lennon and Yoko Ono were nothing if not shrewd businesspeople. A massive earthquake kills nearly 5000 in southern Italy. And Jean Donovan, and American missionary, is murdered in El Salvador along with three Catholic nuns. Her singles, of which there are none, do not chart as a result.

While on television, it’s 1977. Those who enjoy the ways in which the musical charts and Doctor Who oddly parallel will be bemused that 1977 was by most standards the peak of ABBA’s popularity, and that the last time ABBA was at number one was during The Invasion of Time, the last story of the season that was meant to begin with The Vampire Mutations by Terrance Dicks. Unfortunately the BBC was busy doing a high-profile adaptation of Dracula at the time and Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald commenced the first of a long series of butting heads with Graham Williams and ordered the script spiked for fear that Doctor Who would be seen as “sending up” the BBC’s more serious adaptation. It was replaced by Horror of Fang Rock.

Then came Bidmead, who as we’ve seen had a distinctly different take on what the program should be than his predecssor. Bidmead viewed Doctor Who as a more or less straight drama, whereas Adams, though not the cavalier jokester his detractors portray him as being, clearly preferred a mixture of comedy and drama. Beyond that, Bidmead preferred structures where real scientific concepts were transformed and expanded into the fantastic where Adams preferred to work with stock sci-fi ideas that didn’t need explanation. The result was that Bidmead saw little value in anything Adams had commissioned save for Christopher Priest’s “Sealed Orders,” which didn’t quite work out due in part to Romana needing to be removed from it. (Bidmead did commission another script from Priest, but that one fell afoul of Eric Saward, creating one of the great “what might have beens” of Doctor Who’s history) The best option he could find, then, was to go way back into the program’s archives and dust off The Vampire Mutations.…

January 25, 2012

That’s The Lion King (Full Circle)

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But I want a television in my tummy!

It’s October 25, 1980. Barbra Streisand is at number one with “Woman in Love,” which lasts for three weeks before Blondie unseats her with “The Tide is High.” David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, and The Police also chart, while Air Supply, Kate Bush, and XTC lurk about the lower reaches of the chart.

In real news, six IRA prisoners in Maze prison begin a hunger strike that lasts through December. El Salvador and Honduras resolve to put a border dispute to the International Court of Justice to decide. The border dispute stemmed from the 1969 “Football War,” the first war to be directly caused by a football result. The Polish government reluctantly recognizes Solidarity, Jimmy Carter gets his ass kicked by Ronald Reagan, and Voyager I flies by Saturn.

While on television things begin to get interesting. Some people suggest that this is the true beginning of the John Nathan-Turner era. This claim, however, is based on the difficult to defend assertion that there is a unitary John Nathan-Turner era. Nathan-Turner oversaw four script editors, three of whom deserve to have eras named after them. And one of those – Eric Saward – oversaw the bulk of five seasons and two Doctors, stretching the notion of the era to something in the vicinity of its breaking point there alone.

No, the Nathan-Turner era, inasmuch as such a creature can be said to exist at all, firmly began with The Leisure Hive and the ostentatious drive for change that it entailed. Nevertheless, there’s clearly something that shifts here. The most superficial aspect of it is Adric, who I suppose I have to deal with. Like so much of the John Nathan-Turner era, however, it is difficult to deal with Adric in the correct order. His first moment on screen is haunted by what’s to come. A commenter way back in Planet of the Spiders observed that the story is far better when Jon Pertwee regenerates into a funny looking man with curly hair instead of into Tom Baker. A similar principle applies here. Knowing what becomes of Adric makes every moment he is on the screen resonate oddly and in a way it could not possibly have at the time.

Added to this is the difficulty of Matthew Waterhouse himself. It is difficult to find any creative figure associated with the show that fewer people have anything good to say about than Matthew Waterhouse. He is notable for being, one of only two living leading actors on Doctor Who to have never reprised their roles (the other being Jackie Lane). It is a challenge to find kind words from any of his co-stars about him. One ought be fair – he was eighteen when he took the role. That the work I did and the gossip of people who knew me when I was eighteen is not how I am primarily known to the world can only be called a blessing. But Waterhouse is difficult to like even now, and his autobiography about his time on the series is an… interesting document to say the least.…

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