The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is an event that certainly has some scope, an event with so much ground to cover it often becomes difficult to truly do justice to the matter in hand or please a very demanding audience. Over the past six months we have seen a huge range in terms of actual celebration, from celebrating the founders and innovators of the show with An Adventure in Time and Space to whatever it was The Day of the Doctor celebrated, there have been hits and misses (hello After Party) along the way and of course many memorable moments.

Yet for us, the truest and best celebration of Doctor Who didn’t [...]

1967: Year of Haight and Ashbury, Country Joe and the Fish, and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis.

Everyone has their own theory of when “Doctor Who as we know it” began. Is it An Unearthly Child (The actual beginning)? The Daleks (It’s got Daleks in it)? Marco Polo (The regular cast start to get along)? The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Returning monster, companion leaves)? The War Machines (Contemporary Earthbound adventure)? The Tenth Planet (Hello Regeneration)? The War Games (The Time Lord reveal)? Or even The Green Death (The Doctor mopes over Jo leaving)?

I think it begins with The [...]

Well, it appeared after months of rumours three months ago, and it’s still weird to say this…….

At the ripe age of thirty-seven, I can watch (nearly) all of The Web of Fear! It carries on past Episode 1! I blink and it doesn’t disappear from my iTunes! It lives!

The five year old version of me with his well-thumbed Target novelisation would have gaped. The fourteen year old me who nagged his Uncle to tape the orphaned episode 1 as part of the Who weekend on BSB (remember them?) would’ve possibly burst. The late-twenties me who saw Web 1 repeated on a BBC4 night about the London [...]

Doctor Who’s 1970 season is perhaps better remembered for stories such as The Silurians with its moral ambiguity and Inferno’s journey into a parallel universe. Yet between those two stories is a forgotten little gem dealing with astronauts, manipulation and the threat of interstellar war. A story called The Ambassadors of Death.

The story can be seen an alien invasion take on The Silurians. Both stories have similar beginnings with UNIT helping out a UK scientific establishment which brings the Doctor and Liz into a crisis. Both stories have scientists in the establishment being involved with the aliens at the heart of [...]