Hello. Welcome to my blog about British archive television. This will highlight programmes I’ve been watching whilst my Twitter feed – embedded in the blog and also directly accessable via @archivetvmus71 – contains many more archive treats.
The posts are broken up into categories (by decade and type – comedy, drama, etc). You can also explore via the tags lower down the page. Many of the programmes which have multiple posts can also be accessed via the top of the main menu (BBC/ITV/Christmas TV/Doctor Who/Grange Hill).
These top menu options have the posts re-arranged from oldest to newest (WordPress blogs display the newest posts by default). So if you’re looking to read about, say, The Day of the Triffids episode by episode, then selecting it via the BBC button next to the Home button is the best option – since the posts will be in the correct order!
If you notice any broken links or have any comments or suggestions then please leave a message on the relevant post or drop me an email at archivetvmusings@gmail.com
I also have a theatre related blog at Theatre Musings.
Archive Television Musings 
The device that Eddie showed Hilda and Stan came out in the 1950s when nobody had colour television.
It was in 1977 that households with colour tvs outnumbered households with black and white sets only. I know some people who didn’t get colour tv until the eighties, and I even knew someone who said that the first time she watched a colour tv was when she watched Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding. (The most boring news story of 1981.)
There was a black and white edition of Tomorrow’s World where they showed a fake tv commercial, and they used some sort of optical illusion to make it look as if it was in colour.
As you can see from the Coronation Street clip, in those days if they filmed a black and white television on a colout tv camera the picture looke blue.
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Hello, seeing as you are a Welsh citizen, I wonder what you think about the BBC adaptation of “The Old Devils” that will be on BBC4 (and then IPlayer) tonight? It’s one of my very favourite novels, but – you probably know the feeling – when you see a book adapted for TV it usually disappoints, because it’s not quite how you imagined the characters looking. Also, as the book consists almost entirely of the characters’ thoughts, feelings and daydreams, I really can’t see how it could be transferred to TV. I will watch, but I’m ready to be disappointed !
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I’ll certainly be watching with interest as I don’t think I’ve seen it since its original transmission. I can sympathise with the irritation felt when a well-loved novel doesn’t quite translate as you’d hope to the screen – but hopefully the excellent cast in this one will be some compensation …
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The interview with John Nathan-Turner was too spoilerific. He told Doctor Who Magazine that he’d like to do a werewolf story, and was considering, and he stressed considering, bringing back an old monster in the new series. But he said it wouldn’t be the Daleks because he wanted to give them a rest. And the Cybermen appearing at the end of part one of Earthshock was a surprise.
During the Peter Davison and Colin Baker eras they brought back the Cybermen, the Daleks and Davros, the Yeti, the Silurians and Sea Devils, and the Sontarans, and if Michael Grade hadn’t messed about with the series, they were going to bring back the Autons and Ice Warriors. And that was over a period of four years.
In the twenty-first century when the series came back they brought back the Autons, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, Davros, the Silurians, the Ice Warriors, the Great Intelligence, the Zygons, and only last year brought back the Sea Devils. And that was over a period of seventeen years.
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Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of BBC’s breakfast tv. But the best breakfast tv programme was Channel 4 Daily.
Going back a few days to when you celebrated Michael Aspel’s 90th birthday. Who was the actress who played to tea lady in Crackerjack?
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Happy 89th birthday to Tom Baker.
Has that clip from Seaside Special been used in any Doctor Who DVDs? The Miss World leading the parade is Wilnelia Merced who later married Bruce Forsythe. The theme song for Seaside Special was written and sung by Mike Batt.
Come to that has the clip of Tom Baker in George and the Dragon appeared on any Where Were They Then type programmes?
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Happy 89th birthday to Tom Baker.
Has that clip from Seaside Special been used in any Doctor Who DVDs? The Miss World leading the parade is Wilnelia Merced who later married Bruce Forsythe. The theme song for Seaside Special was written and sung by Mike Batt.
Come to that has the clip of Tom Baker in George and the Dragon appeared on any Where Were They Then type programmes?
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I don’t think the Seaside Special clip has appeared on the DVDs – although I haven’t seem them for a while but I could be mistaken.
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47 years ago yesterday the last episode of The Brain of Morbius was shown for the first time. The episode’s main claim to fame is the mind battle between the Doctor and Morbius. First of all we see the Morbius brain creature on the screen, and then Morbius as he was before the Time Lords caught him. And then we see Tom Baker’s face, followed by Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell, and then the faces of several members of the production team.
Until a few years ago there were endless debates between fans as to whether these were earlier incarnations of the Doctor or Morbius. (If they’d made this serial a decade or more later they wouldn’t have needed to use pictures of members of the production team, but only three actors had [played Doctor Who on tv before Tome Baker.)
In The Five Doctors, which Terrance Dicks wrote, and The Three Doctors, made when he was script editor, it was clearly stated that the William Hartnell Doctor was the earliest Doctor, but then in the second Jodie Whitaker serial it was revealed that he wasn’t the original, and there were many versions of the Doctor Who existed before the William Hartnell version, but he’d lost his memories of those incarnations.
The picture of Richard Davies in a striped blazer was from the Doctor Who serial Delta and the Bannnermen. A Doctor Who story set in a fifties holiday camp was just the sort of original idea they could have done with a year or two earlier.
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ps Somebody mentioned Richard Davies appearing in a comedy sketch. He made a guest appearance in an episode of Not the Nine O’Clock News where they did a parody of Question Time.
pps Have you tried playing last night’s goodnight clip with the sound turned down while listening to Fire Brigade by the Move?
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Another Saturday with Doctor Who.
At Panopticon 1993 (possibly the best Doctor Who convention ever) Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward said that The Armageddon Factor was a tedious story to make, they thought it was too long. (Mary Tamm’s favourite was Androids of Tara.) The only other six part story Lalla Ward made was Shada, and at the same convention she said that she was sad that it wasn’t completed as they’d put so much work into it.
Keys of Marinus was a forerunner of the Key to Time series. If they’d made the Key to Time series during the Hartnell era there would definitely been a purely historical story in there.
Yesterday’s clip included a profile of Diana Dors’ husband Alan Lake and mentioned his appearance in Doctor Who: Underworld. I have no memories at all of seeing the last two stories from the 1977-78 series of Doctor Who. I wasn’t even aware that Leela had left until The Key to Time series started and Radio Times printed a feature on the new assistant.
It’s true that Underworld isn’t a very memorable story. It’s supposed to be based on Jason and the Argonauts, but it doesn’t have monsters in it. Whatever people say about Horns of Nimon, the story based on Theseus does feature a monster that looks like the Minotaur. And there was a three week gap between The Sunmakers and Underworld. But I don’t know why I didn’t see these serials. It was on just after Jim’ll Fix It, which I had gone off at that time, and it was on the same evening as the New Adventures of Batman cartoon series which I did see. I don’t see how I could have not known it was on. I don’t know what was on ITV at the time, but I don’t know why I wouldn’t have watched Doctor Who when I had watched and enjoyed the first four stories of that season.
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Sylvia Sims was also a guest actress in Doctor Who. She played Mrs Pritchard in Ghost Light.
She also played Tony Hancock’s wife in The Punch and Judy Man.
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They did have a repeat of Robots of Death on New Year’s Eve which might have given the impression that Doctor Who was taking a break. But it still seems odd that I have no memories of the last ten weeks of season fifteen.
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Forty-one years ago Peter Davison’s first series perked up with the third story, Kinda. And likewise a year later his second series perked up with Mawdryn Undead.
Nicholas Courtney became the first actor to work with the first five Doctors. The series included a montage of clips from earlier programmes (something which got overdone in the early JNT series) with Doctors and monsters from the UNIT stories, including a clip of William Hartnell from The Three Doctors.
I heard that the story was originally to have featured Ian Chesterton, now teaching in the private sector, but William Russell was unavailable so it was rewritten to feature a career changing Brigadier, and playing havoc with the dating of UNIT stories.
This was the story that introduced Turlough who was the last male assistant the Doctor would have during the original run.
But having Doctor Who, The Waltons and Crossroads at the same time was asking for trouble.
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If you looked at a Monday in January of February in 1982, then the next two days you would do a Wednesday in 1983, and a Friday in 1984, and get one episode from each of Peter Davison’s three series of Doctor Who.
39 years ago it was part three of Frontios in which we find something about Turlough’s past. One episode ended with the Doctor believing the Tardis had been destroyed. I told a total lie and said that they were writing out the Tardis and giving the Doctor a new omne because people no longer knew what a police box was.
One year later it was the first part of Mark of the Rani which was shot at the Ironbridge Museum in Shropshire. (I’ve never been there.)
Mark of the Rani was the second attempt to introduce a regular villain to Doctor Who. It was a mistake to have had the Master in this story, they didn’t seem to know what to do with him after the first Peter Davison series, and the Rani should have been the main villain.
They were planning to bring back the Rani the following year in a story called Yellow Fever, the story JNT most regretted not making, which would also have featured the Autons and was to have been made in Singapore. But that story got cancelled when Michael Grade messed about with the series.
Kate O’Mara played the Rani in only one more proper Doctor Who story, Time and the Rasni, Sylvester McCioy’s first one. And she also appeared in the Children in Need sketch Dimensions in Time.
Michelle Gomez should have been cast as the Rani. The Missy storyline would have made more sense if she’d been the Rani instead of the Master. (Time Lords changing sex when they regenerate was Steven Moffat’s worst contribution to Doctor Who.) If you watch Kate O’Mara as the Rani you’ll see what I mean.)
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Hazel Holt reviewed Doctor Who: Robots of Death. Robots of Death is now regarded as one of the classics. Chris Boucher died last year, and was the at the time of his death the earliest surviving Doctor Who writer, and the last surviving Doctor Who writer of the seventies. It think the earliest surviving Doctor Who writers now are John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch who wrote Meglos.
Hazel hot preferred that series of Docyor Who (The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, The Face of Evil, Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng Chiang) to the prebvious one (Terror of the Zygons, Planet of Evil, Pyramids of Mars, The Android Invasion, The Brain of Morbius, and The Seeds of Doom). They were both good series.
The Mandrells should not be confused wit mandrills which are old world monkeys. They appeared in the 1979 serial Nightmare of Eden. When Doctor Who Magazine was Doctor Whoo Weekly they ran a serries of articles look at Doctor Who Monsters. Usually it was old monsters, but one issue had a feature on the Mandrells. The cover of Doctor Who Weekly usually advertised several feature in the magazine, but this issue juast had “Inside: The Mandrells”.
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58 years ago today. The episode of Doctor Who called Inferno was the fourth part of The Romans and not the Jon Pertwee serial with the Primords.
In a Doctor Who Magazine interview Dennis Spooner said that The Romans was an expiriment to see how far they could go with comedy in Doctor Who. The Wen Planet was an experiment to see hoe far they could go with being weird.
According to Doctor Who Weekly after the first series of Doctor Who it was found that viewers preferred the science fiction stories to the historical episodes, and after the French Revolutution serial there wouldn’t be any more purely historical stories of more than four episodes. But in fact after the first series none of the William Hartnell series were more than four episodes long apart from the Dalek serials and The Web Planet.
And when the BBC wiped the Doctor Who tapes it was the historicals that got it. The second William Hartnell series is the nearest to a complete series from the sixties. The only missing episodes are two episodes from The Crusade (one of only two purely historicals from that series.) The only missing episodes from the first series are Marco Polo and two episode of The Reign of Terror. It was the last William Hartnell series and first Patrick Troughton series that were really badly decimated, and with the exception of The Gunfighters, which exists in its entirety, all the historicals from Thje Myth Makers onward are completely missing. And apparantly The Highlanders was the first series that was wiped, proving my point.
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43 years ago today I saw the beginning of Instant Enlightenment, and then got tired and went to bed as was the way with Play For Today.
I remember seeing part of another play in the early eighties about some tv or film critics who were invited to see a documentary about the history of human technology called From the Pyramids to the Microchip. But instead they are shown a surreal black and white film featuring themselves (or actors who look just like them, the actors in the film were played by the actors who played the critics).
The only person who isn’t watching the film is the oldest of the men who falls asleep. In one scene a cook, who looks like the oldest woman in the group, brings the character who looks like the oldest man a birthday cake, and he indicates for her to take it away. The cook looks sad, and the female critic also feels sad.
When the film ends the critics find that they’re the only people in the viewing room, their host have left the room, and they find that they’re locked in the room, and they can’t wake the man who fell asleep, he’s either passed out or died.
Does anyone know the name of this play?
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For a long time part one of The Web of Fear was the only episode the BBC had in their archives. Was there a message from the Doctor before the episode was broadcast?
Now only part three is missing. And unfortunately the missing episode is the first one with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. There is a good supporting cast including Derek Pollitt as Driver ‘Tobacco Tin’ Evans.
Apparently this was the last story from the Troughton era to feature the Doctor’s recorder, and the next was the first to feature the sonic screwdriver.
I remember the edition of Blankety Blank with Jon Pertwee. He described Terry Wogan’s microphone as a half suck licorice lollipop. The Rip Van Winkle question was a hard one. It could have been any tv programme, although I probably would have said Blankety Blank.
If I’d fallen asleep in 1979 and woke up twenty years later I would be horrified to find that Doctor Who wasn’t still on.
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There was a specially shot trailer with Patrick Troughton for The Web of Fear that was broadcast the week before – the audio still exists.
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Is the audio introduction on the Web of Fear DVD?
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I remember the Radio Times cover with the Three Doctors. I went with my family to see some friends at Christmas and they had the new year edition of Radio Times. I knew that the man in the middle was Doctor Who, but I didn’t know who the other men were. And the oldest daughter explained that they were the actors who played Doctor Who before Jon Pertwee. And I said there was another actor Who played Doctor Who before Jon Pertwee. He was in the film version of Doctor Who.
Actually Patrick Troughton was the Doctor when I first saw it, and I remember seeing one of the first Jon Pertwee stories and noticing that the Doctor looked different, but I qickly forgot about it, and didn’t realize that one of the actors on the New Year issue of Radio Times was the actor who played the Doctor when I first saw Doctor Who.
I rewatched The Three Doctors on the fiftieth anniversary of the first programme. One thing that sticks out is that the second and first Doctors don’t appear until towards the end of the first episode. And at the end of part one they get split up, with the third Doctor and Jo going to Omega’s realm, and the second Doctor on Earth with the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton.
William Hartnell only gets a few minutes on screen in each episode. In part three his only appearance is when he has a conversation with the Time Lords, and that feels as if it was put in just so that he could get a credit in the closing titles.
The only time the first three Doctors met at the same time was when they did the Radio Times cover and other publicity photographs.
Richard Franklin was unavailable for The Three Doctors, so his part in the story was rewritten for John Levene, and Sergeant Benton’s role in the story went to Corporal Palmer. In the original version Captain Yates would have gone to Omega’s world with the Brigadier and the Doctors, while Sergeant Benton would have led the attack on the Gel Guards and would have last been seen in the story when he saw UNIT HQ disappear.
So it was Benton who left Earth once, while Yates never did instead of the other way round. And Sergeant Benton had already met the second Doctor.
The best scene with someone entering the Tardis for the first time was when Benton goes inside the Tardis in The Three Doctors. When the Doctor asks if he’s going to say that it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside Benton replies “Well it is rather obvious. And anyway nothing about you surprise me now, Doctor.”. But that was originally meant to be Captain Yates’ line.
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The monster flashback was the best bit of The War Games.
49 years ago it was the last episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. The Doctor tells the Operation Gold Age people to make a better world of the world they’ve got rather than go back to some mythical golden age. Two stories earlier the Doctor did meet some people who were trying to make a better world of the world they’d got when he visited the Nuthutch. I could imagine a rehabilitated Mike Yates joining the Nuthutch.
The story end with the Doctor trying to persuade Sarah to join him on a trip to the planet Floriana. By the following episode she has agreed to go with him, but they get diverted to the planet Exxilon where they meet the Daleks.
The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ claim to fame is that it was the first story to feature the Whomobile. However the Whomobile would only be used once more in Doctor Who, in Planet of the Spiders. I think the Whomobile appeared in more other programmes than it did in Doctor Who. It was in Blue Peter, Billy Smart’s Children’s Circus (a clip of which is included on the DVD of Invasion of the Dinosaurs). Jon Pertwee drove the Whomobile in the wonderful documentary Thirty Years in the Tardis. They superimposed some dinosaurs over the shot, but instead ob BBC dinosaurs they used the then brand new animatronic dinosaurs from the Natural History Museum.
One of the interesting editions of Forty Minutes featured a man who was a serious home movie maker who used to produce the local newsreel. One of his films was of the local fete which Jon Pertwee opened, in his Doctor Who outfit, and brought the Whomobile with him. (This was in 1975 when he’d actually left Doctor Who and Tom Baker’s first series had been broadcast.)
The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ claim to infamy is that part one was the only Doctor episode from the seventies to get wiped, and apparently as a result was one of the few stories not shown abroad. Part one was called The Invasion so as not to give away the appearance of a dinosaur at the end, and it got wiped along with some episodes of the Cybermen story called The Invasion. Of course the BBC shouldn’t have wiped the first UNIT serial. In the early eighties a copy of The Invasion did turn up, but it was in black and white. And when it was first broadcast the majority of viewers saw it in black and white.
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TV Tornado ran from 1967 to 1968. It featured comic strip versions of The Man From UNCLE, Bonanza, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Tarzan (Ron Ely version), and a Batman text story. Issue number one gave away a free Batchute. During its run it incorporated Solo, a comic featuring mostly Disney comic strips, and was eventually incorporated into TV-21.
Issue 59 featured Doctor Who and an Ice Warrior of the cover, and a photo-feature on Doctor Who inside, despite the fact that the Doctor Who comic strip was running in TV Comic at the time.
The pictures of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton are the same ones that were used in the star profiles in the first two issues of Doctor Who Weekly. But then a lot of photographs that appeared in the early issue of Doctor Who Weekly were the same ones because there was only a standard set of photographs available.
The Sensorites were among the monsters who appeared in the Doctor Who trump card game in the late seventies. The Sensorite had a brown beard and wore a red tracksuit, when in fact they had white beards and greyish blue tracksuits. And they weren’t the villains.
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Furthermore the photographs of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton used in TV Tornado and the star profiles in the Fantastic First Issue and Smash Second Issue (it was still the seventies) of Doctor Who Weekly were also the same ones printed in Radio Times when they did The Five Faces of Doctor Who. The picture of Jon Pertwee used by Radio Times for The Five Faces of Doctor wasn’t the one used for the star profile of Jon Pertwee in the Thrilling Third Issue of Doctor Whoo Weekly. Doctor Who weekly used a picture of the third Doctor wearing a jewellers’ lens.
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Contrary to what Martin Wainwright said Doctor Who wasn’t originally planned to run for just twelve weeks. (The first series ran for 42 weeks.)
The reason the Daleks didn’t appear much during the Tom Baker era was because Philip Hinchcliffe didn’t like using old monsters. His (and Tom Baker’s) first series featured the Sontarans, the Daleks and the Cybermen because those stories were commissioned by Barry Letts, but he preferred to use new monsters such as the Wirrn, the Zygons, the Krynoid, and the Robots of Death. Graeme Williams produced stories with the Sontarans and the Daleks, but he was more interested in science fiction concepts and the Key to Time season had little room for monsters.
The only monsters introduced during the Tom Baker era who were featured more than once were Davros and the Zygons, and the latter didn’t reappear until nearly forty years later.
Forty-six years ago it was the last episode of The Robots of Death. That’s a good one. It was good enough to repeat the following New Year. It was very clever the way the Doctor defeated the main villain by using helium to make his voice higher so that the robots would no longer recognize his voice pattern and stop obeying him. Is doing helium dangerous?
The Robots of Death were the last classic monsters. Is that a controversial thing to say?
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Jack Howarth was an exact contempoary of Arnold Ridley, they were both born in 1896 and died in 1984. Albert Tatlock is mentioned in the Skids’ song TV Stars, the B-side to end of term disco favourite Into the Valley.
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TV Mirror was not Britain’s best viewing guide, Radio Times was.
But yesterday you managed to pick another listing with a tv landmark, the first edition of one of the essential comedy series of the eighties. The pre-credits sketch on the first Spitting Image sets things up for the rest of the series. The title sequence later had sound effects added.
I remember Nicholas Courtney’s guest appearance on Harry Hill’s programme. Peter Davison was a guest in the first series. Harry Hill’s Channel 4 series was considerably funnier than the later series he did on ITV.
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The article about Doctor Who was published during the eighteen months that Doctor Who was off the air. But the BBC had got round to shooting the delayed series, and it had been announced the Bonnie Langford would be joining the show.
But it’s a rather sexist article because it only mentions the female companions.
Doctor Who came back in September 1986, but Trial of a Time Lord was my least favourite series of Doctor Who. There isn’t anything especially bad about it, but there’s nothing outstandingly good either. We had to wait eighteen month for a new series, and when it came back it was a shorter series than usual. And there was a sour not afterwards when Colin Baker was fired.
But then Doctor Who shouldn’t have come off for eighteen months. Doctor Who was a high profile show at least up until the twentieth anniversary. But after it got taken off for eighteen months it didn’t get the high profile back. I went on holiday during the summer of 1989 and met people who didn’t know Doctor Who was still on, not that they would have watched it if they had known. And one of them was a media studies teacher.
The sub-heading “Survival” seems oddly prescient.
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Patrick Troughton was in the 1950 Disney film version of Treasure Island as well as the 1977 Sunday serial. (Walt Disney moving onto live action films was career move lunacy.)
My mum preferred Alfred Burk’e portrayal of Long John Silver to Robert Newton whio she thought was too hammy (although a lot of people think he was hammy because they’re actually remembering Tony Hancock’s impression of Robert Newton). She thought Ashley Knight (later Metal Mickey’s minder) was more believable as Jim Hawkins than Bobby Driscoll who she thought was too pretty.
They’re quite old pirates. Alfred Burke was 59 at the time, Patrick Troughton was 57, Talfryn Thomas was 55.
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Today’s good morning picture is obviously from Destiny of the Daleks because Romana is wearing the feminine version of the Doctor’s outfit. Lalla Ward’s Romana never wore the same outfit twice. Even Mary Tamm wore a different outfit in each serial.
The majority of Doctor Who cartoonists draw Romana in the Destiny of the Daleks outfit. I went to a Doctor Who convention where two girls dressed as the two Romanas, one wore the long white dress from The Ribos Operation, and the other wore the schoolgirl outfit from City of Death.
The Sea Devils is a good one. BBC2 showed it in 1992 as part of their Doctor Who retrospective season. (It’s a shame you don’t show cuttings of tv listings from the nineties.)
Some people say that the scene with the Master watching The Clangers proves that the UNIT stories were set in the present rather than the immediate future, but the BBC were still repeating The Clangers in the late seventies. What does date the episode is when the Master asks for a televsion and adds “Colour of course.”
A lot of people know that The Sea Devils features a clip of The Clangers, but not so many people know that the prison governor who catches the Master watching The Clangers was played by Clive Morton who played the prison governor in Kind Hearts and Coronets. Clive Morton and Barry Letts had worked together before when they appeared in Scott of the Antarctic, starring John Mills. Clie Morton played the expedition’s film cameraman Herbert Ponting, and I can definitely recommend Herbert Ponting’s documentary The Great White Silence.
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One of my friends had used to have the poster from the Doctor Who Monster Book on his bedroom wall.
Both editions of The Making of Doctor Who. The first was published by Piccolo in 1872, the second by Target in 1976. Rather bizarrely the episode guide went up to The Sea Devils, half way through the third Jon Pertwee series. The summary of the Doctor’s adventures for the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras took the form of the Doctor’s defence at his trial at the end of The War Games, and for the Pertwee era it was the Brigadier’s reports of the UNIT stories and Time Lords’ archives for the Doctor’s missions to other planets.
The episode guide in the second edition, which went up to The Hand of Fear, took a more conventional approach. The photographs of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton in the 1976 edition were the same stock photos used in TV Tornado and the photo-files in Doctor Who Weekly. Photographs in the 1972 edition included some Sensorites.
The edition of Z Cars with Patrick Troughton would have featured the secon version of the thme tune.
I remember Patrick Troughton’s guest appearance in The Goodies, and episode called The Baddies, my mum told me that Doctor Van Petal was Doctor Who, but I thought it was Jon Pertwee in disguise. In the early series of The Goodies they did spoof ad breaks, and the second half of The Baddies Doctor Van Petal locked the Goodies up in a dungeon, and to show they were there a long time a caption appeared on screen saying “End of Part Two”, followed by captions saying “Part Three”, “End of Part Three” and “Part Four”, and they escaped in part four.
Jon Pertwee did appear in Doctor Who in Wacky Wales. They were the only two Doctors who appeared in The Goodies, but Tom Baker would have been a great guest.
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Jam,es Towler reviewed Mind of Evil. In Terror of the Autons the Autons played second fiddle to the new regular villain, and in Mind of Evil the Master really came into his own. This is the only story where the Master smokes. William Marlowe (who later appeared in Revenge of the Cybermen) married Roger Delgado’s widow. He wasn’t felated to Fernanda Marlow who played Corpporal Carol Bell in Mind of Evil and Claws of Axos. She was one of the few UNIT personnel to appear in more than one story (and was in some of the Doctor Who novels).
The fishing episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads features Carole Ann Ford as Valerie the barmaid.
Ray Lonnen is definitely wearing Jon Pertwee’s cast offs, and Ronald Fraser is wearing Patrick Troughton’s. Perhaps they were at a Doctor Who convention.
33 years ago today I would have watched Mastermind and Ripping Yarns: Roger of the Raj. When I was living with my parents they tended to switch the tv off or over whe Mastermind came on but I got hooked on it when I started living on my own.
Dear John was awful. Some comedy series could take a sad situation and make it funny, but Dear John failed abysmally.
Casino Royale is too long.
The Sunday Mirror tv listings page looks more upmarket.
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The picture of Frankie Howard with Paul McCartney and Wendy Richard was a still from Help. Frankie Howerd’s scene was cut from the film and I believe the footage was destroyed.
One of the other actors in the Parkinson clip was Brian Forbes. I don’t know who the man with the beard was.
Is there any chance of a complete list of Buddy star profiles?
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George C Cooper’s guest appearance in Steptoe and Son was broadcast the day before his 47th birthday. It would have been nice to have had a picture of him from Doctor Who: The Smugglers. It would be even nicer if The Smugglers existed.
If you’d carried on doing the tv listings from the nineties then yesterday yo would have printed the listings for Friday the 6th of March 1992 which included a repeat of part one of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils. But instead we got a clip today from The Silurians. It was a bit too topical. Peter Mi;les went on to play Nyder in Genesis of the Daleks.
The shot of the Doctor driving Bessie for the first time on screen in part one of The Silurians feels like the Jon Pertwee era really kicking in. I think I prefer the Silurian design from Warriors of the Deep to the original, but I didn’t like the Samauri look of the Sea Devils in the eighties story, and much preferred the original. I didn’t like the design of the Silurians from the Matt Smioth erea.
Was Norman Hartnell any relation to William Hartnell.
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The picture of Bruce Forsyth as a ghost reminds me of a joke I’ve been meaning to post on this website for some time.
Jackanory used to run a competition each year where they’d get viewers to send in their own poems and stories. One year one of the themes was science fiction. One viewer wrote a story where a strange alien creature suddenly appeared in her bedroom, and after a short conversation it just as quickly disappeared again. So she went to the telephone and asked to be put through to Spike Milligan.
Another story was about a library where people could borrow famous people from history. The narrator was studying English Literature and decided to borrow Godfrey Chaucer. All sorts of funny things happened, for example they went to the cinema sand Godrfrey Chaucer thought the people on screen were real, and he thought his ice cream cornet was a trumpet and tried to blow it and the ice cream landed on the head of a bald man in the stalls below, so they got thrown out of the cinema. And when the narrator took him back to the library he was overdue and she had to pay a fine.
The joke I’m going to tell is about the library. Another literature student was reading Macbeth, but wanted to find out about the real Macbeth, so he went to the library of historical characters. He went to the section on Scottish kings and looked in one of the rooms, and he saw a Scottish king stading on one leg with the other leg in front of him, and his hands balled into fists, one pointed towards his forehead and the other behind his back. And he was saying “Nice to see you, to see you nice!”. And the student said “You’re not Macbeth.”, and the king replied “No, I’m Robert the Bruce.”.
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Englebert Humpadink or On the Buses. Eglelbert because the Goodies had a slot on it.
That’s a classic photo of Carole Ann Ford. When the article was published the latest Doctor Who serial was Marco Polo.
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The cartoonist Bill Tidy has died.
Apparently his comic strip The Fosdyke Saga was adapted for tv in the late seventies.
His main contribution to television were appearing as a contestant on the now largely forgotten Quick on the Draw, and as a panelist on Blankety Blank.
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48 years ago it was part two of my favourite Doctor Who story Genesis of the Daleks. It’s one of the three Doctor Who stories I’ve watched most often, along with An Unearthly Child and The Five Doctors.
It was also one of the most repeated serials on tv. I think they showed an omnibus version the following Christmas. It was one of the serials shown in the summer of 1982 as part of Doctor Who and the Monsters, although this was a heavily edited version, the six part serial was cut down to the equivalent of four parts. It was shown in it’s entirety on BBC2 in early 1993 as part of a season of Doctor Who serial featuring all of the first seven Doctors. The last time it was shown on BBC Television was on BBC2 in early 2000.
(They also showed a clip of Doctor Who in the Saturday morning children’s quiz show Play It Again. (Play It Again was a bit like Screen Test but with clips of tv shows instead of films.))
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There’s an old tv trivia question “Who was Mel Smith’s other comedy partner?”.
The answer was Bob Goody, who died earlier this month aged 71.
Mel Smith and Bob Goody were comedy partner’s long before Mel Smith’s long running double act with Griff Rhys Jones. They first met at drama school. In 1980, around the same time as the third series of Not the Nine O’Clock News, they had a children’s series on ITV called Smith and Goody which was supposed to be about books, but was really a series of comedy sketches. The Christmas special had nothing to do with books. One of his Smith and Goody characters was a yobbish schoolboy called Malcolm who Mel was trying to introduce to the pleasures of reading.
Only one series of Smith and Goody was made. After that Bob Goody was a presenter on Thames Television’s children’s magazine programme Ace Reports. Partway through the last edition of Ace Reports the programme got hijacked by Jim Sweeny and Steve Steen as the presenters of the pirate tv show CBTV.
Bobb Goody’s other tv acting roles included Danny the caretaker in the underrated Crime Traveller.
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Today’s archive tv listing was another tv landmark, but also a sore point.
The opening shot of Logopolis was a policeman outside a police box, a deliberate echo of the first shot of An Unearthly Child. And of course An Unearthly Child and Logopolis were the first and last stories in The Five Faces of Doctor Who.
The end of the Tom Baker era was a good natural break for the BBC to do a season of vintage repeats, and for Jean-Mar L’Officier to write his Doctor Who episode guide.
Part four of Logopolis included flashbacks from previous stories, something that got overdone later in the JNT era.
But it was a sore point because when Tom Baker’s last episode was first broadcast I missed it because I was on a field trip as part of my A-level biology course, and then I failed my exams at the end because the stupid school couldn’t teach A-levels.
One evening while I was doing my homework my brother called me from downstairs because Ask Aspel showed the regeneration. And of course I saw the whole programme when it was repeated in The Five Faces of Doctor Who. But I also missed the first parts of Carnival of Monsters and The Three Doctors because the biology class visited London Zoo (interesting) and went to see an electron microscope (boring). The school has a lot to answer for.
One time Doctor Who Magazine editor printed a list of Doctor Who episodes that he’d missed for various reasons. The crappiest reason he had for missing Doctor Who was one Saturday when his parent wouldn’t let him watch it because he wouldn’t eat his broad beans at lunch time. (Needless to say he still hates broad beans.)
The crappiest reason I had for missing an episode of Doctor Who was when I missed Tom Baker’s last episode when I was on that stupid field trip.
The crappiest reason anyone had for missing Doctor Who was all those children who missed the Sylvester McCoy series because their parents watched Coronation Street.
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A year and a day after Tom Baker’s last episode of Doctor Who was first broadcast it was the first episode of the last serial of Peter Davison’s first series. (If you picked a listing for a Saturday in January of February 1981 then the next four days would be a Monday in 1982, a Wednesday in 1983, and a Friday in 1984 and all four Days would have Doctor Who, an episode from Tom Baker’s last series and an episode from each of the Peter Davison series.)
Unfortunately Time Flight was, by a long way, my least favourite story from one of my favourite series. It was an end of season, end of budget serial.
In one of the first scenes the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa are talking about the death of Adric. This scene is included In the novelisation of Time Flight, but it should have been the epilogue to Earthshock. Adric makes a (rather superfluous) cameo appearance. This was either for contractual reasons so that he appeared in every story in the series, or so that he would get a credit in Radio Times so as mot to spoiler the end of Earthshock.
Most of the stories in the first Peter Davison series made references to the previous story (something which fell by the wayside during the eighties), so it was nice to have Tegan mention their visit to Castrovalva.
The best thing about this serial was the appearance of the Master in the second or third cliffhanger, which surprised me at the time, but it shouldn’t have done. The Masterreturned at the end of the previous series, the Doctor saw him off in the first serial of the new series, so it was right that he should turn up at the end. (Alythough I felt they didn’t know what to do with the Master after the first Peter Davison series.)
Mike Read used to talk about Doctor Who on his Radio One Breakfast Show. After the last episode of Time Flight one listener wrote and said Doctor Who was getting really horrible lately. First of all Adric got killed, and then Tegan got left behind. Although the latter was a plot device to give Tegan a different costume and hairstyle.
It was Mike Harding’s eyes.
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Today you celebrated the 103rd anniversary of the birth of Patrick Troughton with a clip of Tomb of the Cybermen, and behind the scenes stills from The Abominable Snowmen, and the Blue Peter Doctor Who monster competition.
Yesterday you printed a review of Fury From the Deep. I can’t comment on this story as I haven’t seen it. It is the last Doctor Who story that’s completely missing. The previous story, The Web of Fear, was the last story from the Troughton era to feature the Doctor’s recorder. Fury From the Deep was the first to feature the sonic screwdriver. Symbolic?
What happened to Victoria. Deborah Watling thought that after Victoria settled down in the twentieth century she thought hear early life in the nineteenth century and her travels with the Doctor were a dream, and she became an author and wrote about her adventures. She did appear in the spin-off video downtime where Victoria was a writer.
You showed a poignant clip from Tomb of the Cybermen. I first saw Tomb of the Cybermen at Tombwatch at the BAFTA Centre in 1992 just after all four episodes were found in Hong Kong. Frazer Hines, Deborah Watling and other members of the cast and crew answered questions from the audience.
I don’t know who the actors in the Yeti costumes were, but it wasn’t John Levene. He played a Yeti in The Web of Fear and The War Games. He played three Doctor Who monsters, he played a Cyberman in The Invasion as well as playing John Benton for the first time, and in Inferno Sergeant Benton’s parallel universe counterpart got turned into a Primord.
The picture that Patrick Troughton’s holding up in the second Blue Peter photograph is a half human half Dalek creature. This was over seven years before Davros appeared in Doctor Who.
I think there’s a clip of the winning designs in the documentary More Than Thirty Year in the Tardis. The winners were the Steel Octopus, the Hypnotron, and the Aquaman. Patrick Troughton didn’t actually appear on the programme at the time. He didn’t appear on Blue Peter until seventeen years later when he went on to promote his second greatest contribution to television, Box of Delights.
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The next time Blue Peter ran a competition to design a Doctor Who monster the winning entry actually appeared in Doctor Who. The winner was the Absobalof who appeared in the seminal Love and Monsters.
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By the way the never mentioned that Peter Purves used to be in Doctor Who until 1971, four years after he joined the programme. Someone wrote in and asked if it was true that he used to be in Doctor Who, and he replied that he was, and they showed a clip of Daleks Masterplan, and a couple of Daleks came on and he said they would be in the next series of Doctor Who staring in the New Year.
And a clip of Peter Purves with the Daleks was one of the clips of Blue Peter from 1971 shown in the first programme of the year 2000 when they dug up their Year 2000 Box.
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Patrick Troughton was exactly thirteen years younger than John Laurie.
My favourite Dad’s Army moment is Private Frazer’s story of the old empty barn. The clip you downloaded was from A Wilson (Manager)? which was the episode the BBC repeated as a tribute to John Le Mesurier when he died.
John Laurie and Ian Lavender were close friends. Who is the actress with John Laurie and Victor Spinetti, and where does the picture come from? The Dickensian picture is from a Christmas special but I don’t know which one. One of your correspondent sent in a still of John Laurie, Peggy Ashcroft and Robert Donat from The 39 Steps. I saw that at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead as part of a double bill with The Lady Vanishes.
I’m not a fan of Shakespeare in modern dress. What put me off Shakespeare in modern dress was just before Christmas 1976, to tie in with the release of the new version of King Kong, the BBC showed the original version, but I wasn’t allowed to watch it because my parents insisted on me going out to do something else which I didn’t want to do and was a complete waste of time. During the new year our local cinema showed the new version, and my brother went to see it, but I refused to see it because I didn’t want to see the poor imitation version, I wanted to see the original version. I said that King Kong is supposed to be set in the thirties, whereas the new version was set in the present (ie the seventies), and my mum pointed out that they do Shakespeare plays in modern dress. And pointing out that they do Shakespeare in modern address as an attempt to justify the 1976 remake of King Kong put me off Shakespeare in modern dress.
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Yesterday I forgot to say that it was the eighteenth anniversary of Doctor Who: Rose, the first episode of the Christopher Ecceleston series of Doctor Who. On the eighteenth anniversary of the first William Hartnell episode of Doctor Who the BBC showed part one of The Three Doctors as part of The Five Faces of Doctor Who which bridged the gap between Time Baker and Peter Davison.
Speaking of Doctor Who. Julian Glover was a guest in two Doctor Who serials. The two missing episodes from The Crusade are high on my list of Doctor Who episodes I’d like to see returned to the archives. The clip you showed didn’t look like a clip from Doctor Who. The historical stories had a different style of acting to the science fiction ones.
Julian Glover later played Richard I in an adaptation of Ivanhoe. My dad’s cousin went to a fancy dress party where the theme was literary characters. He wore his normal clothes and carried a hoe round with him and went as I’ve an hoe.
City of Death was the standout story from the penultimate Tom Baker series. I think it was the current serial when Doctor Who Magazine was first published. The end of part one where Scarloni removes his mask to reveal a Jagaroth underneath was my sister’s favourite cliffhanger. If Mary Tamm had continued as Romana then this would have been a good story to start the series as it’s a “What we did in the holidays” story like The Leisure Hive or Nightmare Fair.
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The Brigadier in a beret doesn’t seem right. It’s got to be the peaked cap. Liz Shaw was an underrated assistant.
I believe the still is from The Ambassadors of Death, which was on 53 years ago today. In the titles sequence the word “The Amassadors” appear on screen, and then “of Death” appears underneath. I believe it was the first serial to use the sting at the end of the episode that segued into the them tune. And I think it was introduced part way.
But I think Ambassadors of Death is too long, and most of the time feels like a normal action adventure series rather than Doctor Who.
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33 years ago today.
By that time I’d only see Diane-Louise Jorfdan’s first Blue Peter. They stopped doing the Sunday morning repeats in January.
Spike Jones and his City Slickers, on BBC2, was a rarity.
BBC1 served up two dreadful sitcoms, Brush Strokes and Birds of a Feather.
Unfortunately the two best programmes overlapped and I didn’t have a video recorder. Crystal Maze was one of the first classic shows of the nineties. And they played more games in the early shows than they did in the recent revival because there were fewer and shorter commercial breaks.
But instead I watched French and Saunders, which I believe was the one with the Excorcist parody. The two films I would most like to have seen parodied by French and Saunders were Toy Story with Dawn French as Buzz Lightyear and Jennifer Saunders as Woody, and Battle Royale.
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On Top of the Pops that week it was:
Don’t Miss the Partyline by Buzz
All I Want to Do is Make Love to You by Heart
Strawberry Fields Forever by Candy Flip
This is How it Fells by the Insprial Carpets
Read My Lips by Jimmy Sommerville
Ghetto Heaven by the Family Stand
Another Day in Paradise by Jam Tronik
The number one record The Power by Snap
Mama Give Birth to the Soul Children by Queen Latifah and De La Soul played over the closing credits
I had long stopped watching Top of the Pops by that stage, although I did watch ITV’s Chart Show. Candy Flip#s version of Strawberry Fields was awful. But indie groups like The Isnpiral Carpets were finally getting into the main charts, and along with the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays they paved the way for the Britpop boom a few years later.
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32 years ago it was Easter Saturday. I was away that weekend and I’d set my video recorder to tape a film the previous day. It was my first video recorder which I bought second hand.
The best bit of Live and Kicking was Trevor and Simon’s bit. Otherwise I didn’t like it as much as Swap Shop or Superstore. A couple of years later I thought it was starting to get good, and then it finished.
BBC2’s Animation Now was usually a slot for arty cartoons, but this week it was Tom and Jerry. And speaking of MGM there was another chance to see Gone With the Wind.
And speaking of cartoons. Tony Robinson’s Stay Tooned was a better vehicle for cartoons than Rolf Harris’ Cartoon Time, but it did get over-analytical later on.
It was Davro on ITV, not Davros.
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The Servant was on as well. I saw it at the cinema a couple of times. It was about what was happening to Britain in the early sixties.
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One of the rising stars of the nineties was Paul O’Grady.
I first saw him as Lily Savage on Channel 4’s late Friday entertainment show Viva Cabaret. He was very savage about Cilla Black and Surprise Surprise. Although he was in fact friends with Cilla Black. A bit like Morcambe and Wise and Des O’Connor.
One of the routines he did on Viva Cabaret was You’ve Gotta Have a Gimmick from the musical Gypsy with Gayle Tuesday and another singer. He later did the same song with Cilla Black and Barbara Windsor.
One edition of Viva Cabaret finished with a medley of duets, Lilly Savage sang duets with Gayle Tuesday and a camp male singer Bob Downe, and Bo Downe sang a duet with Gayle Tuesday.
Trevor and Simon were also guest on Viva Cabaret.
Later Lily Savage got her own show on BBC. When they did the Doctor Who sketch, instead of raiding the BBC costumes and props departments for the monster costumes, the production team had to contact the Doctor Who Appreciation Society as the BBC had sld off the Doctor Who costumes and props to private collectors.
The sketch would have been even funnier if they’d got John Leeson to do the voice of K-9.
The series also included a parody of The Avengers with Simon Williams as John Steed and Lily Savage as Emma Peel.
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31 years ago today I would have started the day with Channel 4 Daily.
BBC brought back Pebble Mill after they senselessly axed the show in 1986. For some reason the lunchtime programme for younger viewers was now on BBC2. Today it was Mr Benn. And that was followed by In the Post which was first shown in 1979. Essential viewing for stamp collectors.
Almost a decade after Tina Heat Patricia Routledge read Lizzie Dripping for Jackanory. Was Maid Marian and Her Merry Men a repeat. They used to show them in the week and repeat them on Sunday mornings so it got a following among adults.
I saw the cartoon Inside Job. It was set in a dentist’s surgery an the only shot was of the patient’s mouth.
Despite what some some people said ITV was still showing The Benny Hill show in the early nineties, and less than a month before he died.
Without Walls was pretentious, especially the J’accuse strand.
I saw some of KYTV. A lot of sketches were previously performed on Radio Active. Atellite Television.
Quantum Leap was the episode MIA. Sam Quanums into 1969, and Al tells him that his mission is to save his marriage instead of telling him what he’s supposed to be doing. But Sam did save Al’s marriage in the last episode.
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I think I’ve talked about The Ark already. The Monoids were the first Doctor Who monsters to be voiced bu Roy Skelton. You can see a Monoid glove puppet in Matt Smith’s last episode. Having the single eye where the actor’s mouth was was a stroke of genius. Daphne Dare was one of the unsung heroes of Doctor Who.
Fifty years ago Roger Delgado made his final appearance in Doctor Who. His only appearance with the Daleks was right at the end of Frontier in Space. I don’t think we have had a proper Master and Daleks story.
The Master just disappeared from Doctor Who at that point. Apparently there was one more serial with the Master planned which would be the final showdown between the Doctor and the Master, and would end with the Master getting killed and the Doctor being badly injured and regenerating.
That’s actually what happened with the last Tom Baker swtory. except this was the introduction of the new Master. But if Roger Delgado had lived and had made the final Jon Pertwee story, they still would have brought the Master back as a skeleton, and we would have got the Anthony Ainley Master in the eighties.
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I’m a bit confused about the Leonard Rossiter clip. It appears to be set in his house, yet it’s the other man’s daughter who come in asking for help with her homework.
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Panorama was broadcast at 8.30 pm, but you’re only supposed to do April fool’s jokes before midday.
Meanwhile in 1993.
Channel 4 were doing something called Gimme Shelter. What was that about?
I would have watched Blue Peter (John Leslie, Diane-Louise Jordan and Anthea Turner) on the Sunday morning. And that Sunday was a tc landmark as it was the first UK screening of Rugrats. Blue Peter launched their search for the Museum of the Year.
BBC2’s lunchtime programme for younger viewers was Brum, narrated by Toyah Wilcox (whose first acting role was Andy Pandy). I’m sure Brum was the son of Bessie.
I would have watched Crystal Maze and taped French and Saunders, which this week parodied Thelma and Louise.
I saw some episodes of Staggering Stories of Ferdinand de Bargos.
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Thirty years ago todaty Top of the Pops featured:
U Got 2 Know by Capella
Fever by Madonna
I Never Felt Like This Beffore by Mica Paris
Pressure Us by Sunscreem
The Top 40 Breakers slot with clips from:
One Voice by Bill Tarney
Tennessee by Arrested Development
Wrestlemania by WWF Superstars
Go Away by Gloria Estefan
Lucky Town by Bruce Springsteen
Copacabana by Barry Manilow
The number one record Young at Heart by the Bluebells played over the closing credits.
Top of the Pops broadcast on 1st of April 1982 included C’est Seulement Une Wynd Oop by Champagne d’Orange.
Do BBC4 still show old episodes of Top of the Pops? How far have they got?
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Yesterday’s cutting was actually from the 4th of March 1968, not the 4th of April.
I looked up what was on BBC television on the 4th of April 1968. Two programmes that stood out were children’s programmes. Jackanory was Clement Freud reading his own Grimble stories. In the books each story ended with a recipe, and on Jackanory he did a cookery demonstration.
The other programme was a series I used to watch but I’d forgotten about, and that was Whistle Stop with Roger Whitaker. Each programme featured a slot with Larry Parker and Theodore Rabbit.
Speaking of Jon Pertwee, I liked the montage someone sent in last weekend of all the stories with Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen. Whographica has a complete guide to each of the velvet jackets the third Doctor wore in his adventures.
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If you’d gone back to 1965 two days later, then yesterday’s archive tv listing would have been from 1971, the first day that The Two Ronnies was broadcast.
It would be interesting to see all of the first programme to see how similar or different it was to the later series. The customs officer sketch at the beginning reminded me of the first sketch the Two Ronnies did on Frost Report (“Hello Super.”, “Hello wonderful.”) which they showed at the beginning of Twenty Years of the Two Ronnies.
Ronnie Barker’s Lord Rustless and General Futtock characters were based on his comedy hero Fred Emney.
Graeme Wood’s Radio Times cuttings were interesting. The Two Ronnies appeared on the cover of Radio Times twice in 1971. They also appeared on the cover of the Christmas issue. It was the first Radio Times Christmas issue to feature the stars of one series, something of an achievement for a series that only started that year.
It was interesting to see what else was on that day, Easter Saturday. The Two Ronnies clashed with Elizabeth R. When TV Heaven looked at 1971 they showed a couple of clips from Elizabeth R, and then showed a clip from Nationwide about families having rows when the last episode clashed with a major sports event.
One thing I do remember watching that day was The Banana Splits, which I saw round someone else’s house and saw it in colour.
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Doctor Who that day was part one of Colony in Space. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks weren’t happy with the new, restrictive, format that had been imposed on them by a stop-gap producer who wanted to move away from adventures in time and space. And they got around it by having the Doctor go on missions for the Time Lords. The Brigadier only appears for a few minutes in this serial, at the beginning and the end, and soon the UNIT officers would become semi-regulars.
Somewhere there is an alternative version of Doctor Who where at the end of The War Games the Doctor is forced to regenerate and then has to go on several missions for the Time Lords. Starting with Colony in Space where the Doctor is joined by Jo Grant/Jo Ashe/Mary Grant/Mary Ashe (delete as applicable) played by Katy Manning/Helen Worth (delete as applicable).
One of the ideas mooted for a Doctor Who spin-off was a UNIT series, after UNIT was dropped from Doctor Who in the mid-seventies. But if there was a UNIT series it would have been the first Jon Pertwee series minus the Doctor. So the Autons and Silurians would have been UNIT monsters rather than Doctor Who monsters.
Helen worth would have been a good Doctor Who assistant.
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I was surprised to read in Radio Times for week commencing 10th of April 1971 that Top of the Pops would be playing the new (and best) single by the Rolling Stones. I thought they wouldn’t know what the line-up would be when the magazine went to press.
The complete line-up was:
Something Old, Something New by the Fantastics
Mozart 40 by Waldo de los Rios
Rosetta by Alan Price and Georgie Fame
Rain by Bruce Ruffin
Mary in the Morning by Guy Fletcher
My Little One by Maramalade
Cherry Red by the Groundhogs
If Not For You by Olivia Newton-John
Pan’s People dancing to Remember Me by Diana Ross
Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones
The number one record Hot Love by R-Rex
It Don’t Come Easy by Ringo Starr played over the closing credits
This episode was wiped. Whenever they show a clip of the Rolling Stones doing Brown Sugar on TOTP2 it’s always from the Christmas edition, although the Christmas edition probably used a clip from the April programme.
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Happy Birthday to Peter Davison.
The picture was from Resurrection of the Daleks. People complained about the violence in the first Colin Baker series, but there were some violent episodes in the last Peter Davison series like Resurrection of the Daleks, parts of Warriors of the Deep and The Awakening, and the much acclaimed Caves of Androzani.
I watched the three eighties Dalek stories on New Year’s Eve, On Christmas Day I watched attack of the Cybermen, the story where Lyton was killed off, and I then felt like watching his introductory story. The previous Christmas I asked for The Seeds of Death on DVD, and I got the revisitations boxed set comprising Seeds of Death, Carnival of Monsters and Resurrection of the Daleks. It would have been more logical to have released Resurrection of the Daleks in a boxed set with Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks.
On the video release of Resurrection of the Daleks it’s shown as a four part serial, as it was originally conceived and as it was shown abroad. But on the DVD it’s shown as two double length episodes as it was shown on the BBC when it was rescheduled because of the Winter Olympics. I preferred that format, because usually I’d be watching Doctor Who and would be really getting into it and then it would end. And it seemed other viewers like that format because the first Colin Baker series was double length episodes. Officially Resurrection of the Daleks is a two part story, which means that Matt Smith’s last episode was the 800th episode.
Whenever I watch Resurrection of the Daleks I always rewind the bit where the Tardis materializes. If you look carefully you will see cars crossing Tower Bridge disappearing.
Any chance of a complete list of Buddy profiles? Not so much with the Peter Davison profile, but a lot of these profiles show that the celebrity hated lessons at school.
I checked out the episode of Tales of the Unexpected episode with Peter Davison and Liza Goddard. It was from the last series. It was a classic hotel farce. Tales of the Unexpected was an influence on Inside No 9.
Am I the only person who gets affronted when I watch videos on the internet and they get interruped by adverts. It should be illegal.
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Liza Goddard previously worked with Peter Davison when she played Lira in Doctor Who: Terminus. Both programmes had theme tunes written by Ron Grainer.
Peter Davison himself wrote the theme tune to Button Moon. Before they got taken over by Cineworld, UGC cinemas’ refreshements stalls gave the ice creams names based on film titles such as Chocky Horror Show, Bring Me the Head of Cherry Garcia, and the butterscotch ice cream was called Butter Moon, which was actually a play on Bitter Moon, but I thought it was a play on Button Moon.
(Can you guess what they called the ice cream that was a mix of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate?)
One time I went to a convention where Peter Davvison talked about his musical career, which included working with Dave Clark, as mentioned in the Buddy Strip. Peter made a record which Dave Clark produced. The former drummer of the Dave Clark five recommended the Peter take the royalties instead of the flat fee, but he would have been better off taking the fee as the record was not a hit. Or someting.
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