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THE

YEARBOOK 2018

A
very important part of being
a Doctor Who fan involves
learning to accept change.
The adventure in space and
time would have ground to
a halt in 1966 if its previously
loyal viewers hadn’t forgiven
William Hartnell for handing over to Patrick
Troughton. Goodness knows there have
been plenty of surprises since then, but even
though the show keeps moving we should
still allow ourselves a little sentimentality
when something brilliant comes to an end.
I know everyone has their own opinions,
and as the DWM editor I should try to be
objective about each and every era in the
series’ long history. But I’ve got to say that
reliving the most recent episodes in the pages
of this Special Edition has made me realise
that this was a vintage year. When Doctor
Who resumed in 2017 it managed to top even
the best of what we’d previously seen from
showrunner Steven Moffat and Twelfth Doctor
Peter Capaldi. Episodes such as Knock Knock
were deeply moving, while in the haunting
Oxygen the programme rediscovered its ability
to tell truly disturbing science-fiction stories.
Nothing, however, prepared me for the
revelations in World Enough and Time, The
Doctor Falls and Twice Upon a Time, a trilogy
that delivered two Masters, three Doctors,
nightmarish Cybermen and a devastating
final challenge. I’ve been watching Doctor Who
since I was four years old, and these were
some of the greatest episodes I’d ever seen.
As you read this issue, incoming
showrunner Chris Chibnall is plotting
a new course for Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth
Doctor. There are exciting times ahead, and
I predict that by the end of this year Doctor
Who will have gained a lot of new devotees.
I also predict that in the future many
of those newcomers will discover episodes such
as World Enough and Time and recognise them
as belonging to a golden age of Doctor Who.

Top: Missy (Michelle

Gomez), ‘Cyber Bill’
(Liam Carey) and the
Master (John Simm) at
the tragic conclusion
of World Enough and
Time (2017).
Below: Director Rachel
Talalay, executive
producer Steven Moffat,
Peter Capaldi (as the
Twelfth Doctor) and
David Bradley (as the
First Doctor) on the set of
World Enough and Time.

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 3

 CONTENTS
38 Shop of Horrors
Some of the 2017 series’ most striking
aliens were realised by the visual effects
experts at Millennium.

6 One Direction 42 Extremis

Rachel Talalay directed three consecutive episodes Blinded during his ordeal at Chasm Forge,
of the 2017 series, including the Christmas Special. the Doctor nevertheless agrees to read
EDITOR
a most unusual book.
MARCUS HEARN
10 The Return of Doctor Mysterio
DEPUTY EDITOR In present-day New York the Doctor encounters 44 Whovians
PETER WARE a real-life superhero with intriguing links to his past. Behind the scenes at Whovians, the Australian
ART EDITOR/DESIGNER panel show hosted by comedian Rove McManus.
PERI GODBOLD 12 Setting the Scene
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Matthew Clark highlights the work of graphic 48 The Pyramid at the End
EMILY COOK designers on the latest series of Doctor Who. of the World
DESIGNER
The corpse-like Monks offer to save the Earth
MIKE JONES 16 The Pilot from imminent disaster, but their protection
Bill Potts’ life is transformed when she meets her comes at a price...
Managing Director MIKE RIDDELL new personal tutor and discovers an unusual puddle.
Managing Editor ALAN O’KEEFE 50 Scientific Advisor
Head of Production MARK IRVINE
Production Assistant JEZ METEYARD
18 Wet Look Rachel Denning played Erica, the resourceful
Circulation and Trade Marketing Controller Stephanie Hyam played Heather, Bill’s mysterious scientist who helped the Doctor save the
REBECCA SMITH lover, in The Pilot and The Doctor Falls. human race.
Head of Marketing JESS TADMOR
Marketing Executive JESS BELL
20 Smile 52 The Lie of the Land
THANKS TO: The Doctor and Bill arrive at Erehwon, an Earth The Monks have brainwashed mankind into
Chris Allen, Peter Bennett, Joe Browning,
Peter Capaldi, Chris Chibnall, Ysanne Churchman, colony where robots are the ruthless complete subservience. So why is the Doctor
Matthew Clark, Matthew Cox, Rachel Denning, enforcers of happiness. appearing to help them?
Sally de St Croix, James Dudley, Matt Evenden,
Mark Gatiss, Roger Gerrish, Derek Handley,
Nicholas Hayden, Pete Hely, Stephanie Hyam, 22 Adventures in Time and Spain 54 Killer Queen
Gareth King, Eliza Luczynska, Adele Lynch, Jimmy
Mann, Dominic May, Christine McLean-Thorne,
A visit to the futuristic Spanish location that Adele Lynch recalls the challenges of portraying
Rove McManus, Brian Minchin, Steven Moffat, doubled as a city maintained by nanobots in Smile. Iraxxa, the series’ first female Ice Warrior,
Simon Moore, Georgina Ogilvie, Gary Pollard,
Amy Reiha, Cathy Robinson, Gary Russell,
in Empress of Mars.
Marco Sano, Paul Sawyer, Matt Strevens, 26 Thin Ice
Rachel Talalay, Alexandra Tynan, Kate Walshe,
Jodie Whittaker, Kirsten Williams, Nikki Wilson,
Is Regency England most threatened by the 56 Empress of Mars
Catherine Yang, BBC Wales, BBC Worldwide creature lurking in the Thames or its human captors? Beneath the Red Planet the Doctor
and bbc.co.uk discovers an Ice Warrior hive and – most
BBC WORLDWIDE, UK PUBLISHING 28 The Warlords improbably – a squad of 19th-century soldiers.
Director of Editorial Governance
NICHOLAS BRETT The sculptors and artists at Warlord Games are
Director of Consumer Products and Publishing recreating some of the Doctor’s epic battles 58 The Hermaphrodite
ANDREW MOULTRIE
Head of UK Publishing CHRIS KERWIN in miniature. Civil Servant
Publisher MANDY THWAITES Actress Ysanne Churchman came out
Publishing Co-ordinator EVA ABRAMIK
UK.Publishing@bbc.com 32 Knock Knock of retirement to reprise her role as the
www.bbcworldwide.com/uk--anz/ukpublishing.aspx
The grand house that Bill and her friends are voice of Alpha Centauri.
Like our page at: renting seems like a bargain. But then, one by one,
www.facebook.com/doctorwhomagazine
they start to disappear... 60 The Eaters of Light
Follow us on Twitter at:
www.twitter.com/dwmtweets
The mystery surrounding a lost Roman
34 Noises Off legion brings the Doctor, Bill and
Follow us on Instagram at:
www.dwm_panini Cathy Robinson describes the ‘binaural’ process Nardole to second-century Scotland.
Advertising that was applied to the soundtrack of Knock Knock.
Madison Bell 62 In Memoriam
Telephone
0207 389 0859
36 Oxygen Tributes to the cast and crew
Email jack.daly@madisonbell.com At the Chasm Forge mining station oxygen members who passed away
Subscriptions See page 83
is a precious commodity but the crew members between December 2016
are expendable. and November 2017.

Doctor Who Magazine™ Special Edition #48 – The 2018 Yearbook Published January 2018 by Panini UK Ltd. Office of publication:
Panini UK Ltd, Brockbourne House, 77 Mount Ephraim, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN4 8BS. Published every four weeks. All Doctor Who material
is © BBCtv 2018. Doctor Who logo ™ & © BBC 2018. Daleks © Terry Nation. All other material is © Panini UK Ltd unless otherwise
indicated. No similarity between any of the fictional names, characters persons and/or institutions herein with those of any living or dead
persons or institutions is intended and any such similarity is purely coincidental. Nothing may be reproduced by any means in whole
or part without the written permission of the publishers. This periodical may not be sold, except by authorised dealers, and is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not be sold or distributed with any part of its cover or markings removed, nor in a mutilated condition. All letters sent to this magazine will be considered
for publication, but the publishers cannot be held responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or artwork. Writers’ Guidelines are available by sending
an SAE to the editorial address. Newstrade distribution: Marketforce (UK) Ltd 020 3148 3333. ISSN 0963-1275

4 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

70 World Enough and Time 78 Captain Lethbridge-Stewart 80 Twice Upon a Time
The Doctor faces enemies from his past, while Mark Gatiss shares his feelings about the From the South Pole to the ruins of an alien
Bill is subjected to the horrors of an alien true identity of his character in the 2017 city, two Doctors and a seemingly doomed
operating theatre... Christmas Special. soldier come to terms with their fate.

72 The Finale Countdown 82 Letting Go

More than 50 years after Alexandra In December Peter Capaldi bid a poignant
Tynan designed the first Cybermen, farewell to his colleagues and his starring
she returned to the UK for role in Doctor Who.
a special celebration.

76 The Doctor Falls

The Doctor makes his
last stand with the
besieged colonists
– but will Missy
and the Master
join him?

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 5

 THE
DWM
INTERVIEW
One
Direction
Over the past three years, Rachel Talalay has joined
the pantheon of Doctor Who’s greatest directors.
But is she about to call it a day?
INTERVIEW BY BENJAMIN COOK
I
t’s been quite a year for Rachel
Talalay. Few directors
could have taken on three
consecutive episodes of
Doctor Who, but she did –
the first person to tackle such
a challenge since Toby Haynes
in 2010/11. “When I was very
tired in post-production, the editor reminded
me that it was like I’d shot three feature films
in an eight-month period,” says Rachel, with
a laugh. “So I was allowed to be tired.” But
it’s meant spending most of 2017 in the UK
– where she misses her family, who are back
home in Canada. “That’s been tough,” she says.
“It’s always tough being away.”
You might have thought that having signed
up to direct Series 10’s two-part finale,World
Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, Rachel would
have turned down the 2017 Christmas Special,
Twice Upon a Time, so she could take a job closer
to home. But she points out that this was
showrunner Steven Moffat’s final episode. And
executive producer Brian Minchin’s. And Peter
Capaldi’s, of course.
6 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
“They made it clear to me how much they
wanted me to do Christmas,” says Rachel,
“to complete the whole story, and Steven and
Brian said they’d do anything to make that
work. And I had huge support from them.”
Still, the production schedule was gruelling.
“What was really difficult was trying to finish
the finale, because I was shooting Christmas
the week those episodes aired, and we were
still making last-minute changes. It worried
me a bit, because we were so rushed. And I was
nervous because, to me, my pinnacle is Heaven
Sent [2015]. I can never top that, in my head.”
She must have been thrilled, though, with
how enthusiastically the fans received her
Series 10 two-parter? “Actually, because I was
so busy filming Christmas, I didn’t want to
think about that too much. I just thought,
‘Okay, well, that’s two down, but I can still
disappoint fans at Christmas.’” Does she read
her reviews? “Well, the big ones. And I do
know… I mean, my daughter’s on [internet
forum] Gallifrey Base, so she’ll give me some
of that. And people tweet me. It’s all been
ridiculously positive. I’m so overwhelmed.”
Rachel insists that her episodes are only
this good because of Doctor Who’s “frankly
incredible” cast and crew. “They’re phenomenal
artists, all of them. They make me look better.
They’re why I’ve been able to succeed so much
– I think succeed. Been able to get through.”
She reserves special praise for producer Peter
Bennett (“my partnership with Pete has been
tremendous”), editor Will Oswald (“he exceeds
what I hope for, every episode”), and the main
man, Peter Capaldi: “Isn’t he amazing? My
husband, when he saw the finale, said, ‘The
problem is, Peter’s so good that, even with
everybody being so good, you still end up going,
“Peter, Peter, Peter!”’ I said, ‘That’s the way it
should be.’” Also, Michelle Gomez and John
Simm: “They’re so watchable. I love watching
Missy and the Master. I mean, I could just
watch them forever. They could have their own
show together. I’d direct that.”
I
t’s mid-November, and we’re chatting over
Skype because Rachel is finally back in
Vancouver, shooting an episode of Riverdale.
‘I’m always happy to talk about Doctor Who,’ she
Opposite page:
Peter Capaldi and
Rachel Talalay pictured
during the recording
of Twice Upon a Time
in summer 2017.
Far left: Shooting
a scene with Peter
in Rachel’s favourite
episode, Heaven Sent
(2015).
Left: Pearl Mackie (as
Bill), David Bradley
(as the First Doctor) and
Peter (as the Twelfth
Doctor) confer with
Rachel over a scene
in Twice Upon a Time.
 “They made
it clear to me
how much they
wanted me to
do Christmas,
to complete the
whole story.”

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 7

 THE
DWM Rachel Talalay
INTERVIEW
Above: Peter Capaldi,
between takes in Twice
Upon a Time.
Inset: The Doctor
regenerates at the end
of the episode.
PRODUCTION NOTES
“I
’d have taken Rachel for
every episode of Doctor
Who she could do,” says
former showrunner Steven Moffat,
whose final episode was Twice Upon
a Time. “She can’t do that many,
because she has to go and make
proper money on shows that actually
pay people, but she’s been, for the
last few years, my automatic first
8 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
emailed us earlier this
week, but added that
she’s ‘feeling properly
weird about the fact
they’re shooting
with Thirteen now’.
In July, Rachel became
Jodie Whittaker’s first
Doctor Who director,
when they recorded the
Thirteenth Doctor’s half
of the regeneration scene that
closes Twice Upon a Time. Four months
later, filming on Whittaker’s first series is,
indeed, underway…
“That huge changeover feels weird to
me, because I’m aware of how weird it is
for Steven, and Brian, and Peter,” explains
Rachel. “That vibe makes me much
more aware of it.” At the time of our
interview, she’s still putting the finishing
touches to the Christmas Special, from
Canada. “Chris [Chibnall, Doctor Who’s
new showrunner] is supervising the Jodie
portion of the regeneration, so I’m talking
to him a lot. And I’m talking to Steven.
I’m doing both. Yet there they are, starting
with Jodie… so yeah, it’s kind of weird.
“I was dying to see the new costume,”
she continues. “I was trying to work
out how to worm my way into getting
pictures early. But I had to wait – same as
choice. I’d have her for anything. director. But if you’re going to have
She’s superlative. She’s a tremendous a moment of chutzpah, it’d better
asset to us. I think she’s a phenomenal be relevant. What’s clever about
Doctor Who director. She’s brilliant.” Rachel is, she’s both innovative and
So what did Steven look for in narrative-led. I mean, a conductor,
a Doctor Who director? “You want when they conduct an orchestra, isn’t
imagination, and vision, and surprise, supposed to make up new notes, but
and enthusiasm, and new ways they are supposed to make you hear
of shooting that console room. You the music as if it were brand new.
want all of that. That is the job of the That’s what Rachel does. Every time.”
On the set of the First
Doctor’s TARDIS in
Twice Upon a Time, with
David Bradley, Peter
Capaldi and Mark Gatiss
(as the Captain).
everyone else. I’m used
to that.” She wasn’t
even told, ahead
of time, who the
new Doctor was.
“I really didn’t know.
Everybody keeps
telling me that I lied
and I knew it was Jodie.
Like, no!” Rachel found
out with the rest of us, on
Sunday 16 July. “I mean, Chris had
thrown a lot of hints my way, so by the
Friday I’d decided that that’s probably who
it was, but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even
sure that Chris wasn’t playing games and
that it was absolutely 100 per cent going
to be a woman. That’s how much I didn’t
know. Chris has sort of got this theory
that these things should just happen; that
they should come out of nowhere.”
R
achel talks us through the
Twelve-to-Thirteen regeneration
in issue 521 of Doctor Who
Magazine. But that wasn’t Twice Upon
a Time’s only regeneration scene: the
First Doctor’s dying seconds, as depicted
in The Tenth Planet (1966), were recreated,
too. “It was fun shooting that,” Rachel
says. “It was slightly less pressure,
because matching [the Tenth Planet
footage] shot-for-shot simplifies things
in some ways.”
Earlier moments from the 1966 serial
were also restaged, on a replica of the
Snowcap base seen in The Tenth Planet.
However, Rachel wasn’t so happy with
this material: “We shot it sort of 1960s
style, and that, in colour, kind of didn’t
look great. Then again, if you lit it to
look super contemporary – in the moody,
interesting way that you’d light that set
nowadays – it would have sort of ruined
it; it wouldn’t have looked like the set it’s
supposed to. So I don’t think I found that
balance very well.”
Much of this footage – including an
explosive, stunt-laden Cybermen
battle – was excised in the edit anyway.
“We had to cut it down to this tiny
montage. The episode was so long – much
longer than we’re allowed on Christmas
Day – so a lot of the Tenth Planet work we
did isn’t in there, because that’s not really
what the episode’s about. Steven always
wanted there to be just enough to tease
you, but no more.” It sounds like Twice
Upon a Time is crying out for a director’s
cut. “Well, so much was cut out – more
than any other episode I’ve done – so
maybe one day, yeah. There’s much more
on the cutting room floor, as they say.”
Asked what Twice Upon a Time’s most
demanding scenes were to shoot, Rachel
doesn’t hesitate: “Doing a big World
War One battlefield, although it wasn’t
a battle per se. Everything about it was
difficult. It’s hard to shoot in wet, muddy,
in-the-middle-of-no-place locations. And
the more moving parts you put in, the
more complicated and time-consuming
it is. I now joke, ‘Doesn’t anybody know
that my specialty is one-handers? My best
piece of work was Heaven Sent. Couldn’t
I always have just one person in the
frame?’ One of the hardest things was
finding angles, because behind it all [the
field in South Wales that was doubling
for the battlefield] everything was green
– and you don’t want to turn every single
shot into a visual effect. Also, Steven
wanted daytime and a dusk look, so
managing that was hard. Then he wanted
snow, when it turns out to be Christmas.
All these things add up.”
The battlefield shoot lasted four days.
They were joined on one of them by 100
supporting artists – a rare luxury for
Doctor Who. “The extras were absolutely
wonderful. When we were doing the
coming together, the truce… I mean,
people on set were crying. Just seeing that
“Our job was to get the strongest
moments, without turning it into
a bad, soppy Christmas ad.”
moment was so strong. It was beautiful.
Everybody embraced that. Everybody
knew it. Everybody loved it. And that’s so
rewarding. People really respected that –
that whole storyline. Our job was to get
the strongest moments, without turning it
into a bad, soppy Christmas ad. A little bit
surreal for a BBC Christmas, but not over
the top – an interesting balance for me.”
W
ith Capaldi, Moffat, Minchin,
et al, off to pastures new, might
Twice Upon a Time turn out to
be Rachel’s Doctor Who swansong? “I have
very mixed feelings. Right now, I’m not
set to do more. I mean, I have loyalties to
Above left: The First
Steven and Peter – I would follow Steven to and Twelfth Doctors at
the ends of the Earth – but I loved working the South Pole in Twice
with Chris and Jodie too, and I hope that Upon a Time.
I get to work with them in the future. Above right: On
“Having done three in a row and location for Twice Upon
been away in Cardiff for nine months, a Time’s challenging
battlefield sequences.
my number one priority was to be home
Below: Rachel received
with my family,” she continues. “I love a gift at the end of
Doctor Who, and I really want to see where
the Twice Upon a Time
Chris is taking it, but I’m kind of looking schedule. She is flanked
around and seeing what makes sense.  by showrunner Steven
Moffat and producer
And that doesn’t take away from my love Peter Bennett.
of Doctor Who, but it might just be that
I’ve had my run and it’s time to move on.”
Hey, isn’t it about time Doctor Who shot
an episode in Canada? “Yeah,” she says,
chuckling. “Don’t they want to
travel?!” DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 9
 Christmas Special 2016

The Return of
Doctor Mysterio
FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

The Doctor is in New York when he encounters

a seemingly inexplicable phenomenon. Is it a bird?
Is it a plane? No, it’s an actual, living superhero –
and it’s all the Doctor’s fault…

“T
here’s lots of ‘Doctors’,” notes
voracious superhero comics reader
Grant, demanding to know which
of them the mysterious stranger on
the rooftop of his parents’ New York
apartment is. “I’m the main one,” he replies.
“The original. I started it. They’re all based on
me. Now everyone who wants to sound clever
calls themselves ‘Doctor’. Bandwagon!”
Young Grant isn’t wrong; there are indeed
lots of Doctors. Heroic Doctors include,
in the Marvel universe, surgeon turned
‘Sorcerer Supreme’ Doctor Strange; and in
the DC universe, Doctor Fate, a title claimed
by various individuals in various teams,
among them the Justice League. Sorry to
say, however, that ‘Doctor’ is far more often
a qualification given to super-villains. The
best-known Marvel universe examples are
doubtless robotic inventor Doctor [Victor von]
Doom and Spider-Man’s metal-armed enemy
Doctor Octopus; not to mention a great many
less familiar Doctors, among them Doctor
Angst, Doctor Demonicus and even Captain
America’s gangrenous adversary Doctor
Necrosis. DC universe examples include
(confusingly) Captain Marvel’s arch-nemesis,
Doctor [Thaddeus Bodog] Sivana; plus, for
example, Wonder Woman’s rival Doctor
Cyber, the Justice League’s reality-warping
opponent Doctor Destiny and Green Lantern’s
magnetism-manipulating antagonist Doctor

BBC One, 25 December 2016

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Ed Bazalgette
Guest cast: Justin Chatwin (Grant), Charity
Wakefield (Lucy), Tomiwa Edun (Mr Brock),
Aleksandar Jovanovic (Dr Sim), Logan Hoffman
(Young Grant), Daniel Lorente (Teen Grant), Sandra
Teles (Reporter), Tanroh Ishida (Operator), Vaughn
Johseph (Soldier)
Rating: 7.83m
Appreciation Index: 82

10 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
Aboard a space freighter turned giant bomb, the Doctor realises
why Harmony Shoal has placed its bombproof HQ in New York.
Doctor: “What do the rich old men always do when
the fighting starts? They’ll find the safest place to hide
themselves away, and send all their young people to die.
And where’s the safest place in every capital city now?
What’s the only part of New York still standing?”
Nardole: “Harmony Shoal.”
Doctor: “New York isn’t a capital city. It’s a shop window.
‘When the world is in danger, come hide with us.’ Harmony Shoal
will open its doors to the terrified leaders of the world.”
Dr Sim: (On screen) “And they will come running.”
Doctor: “A few hours later, every politician and commander-in-chief will have a zip in their head.
An alien sitting inside their skull. In one day of terror, the executive authority of planet Earth will
pass to Harmony Shoal. It’s a good plan. I like it. How come our side never gets plans like that?”
Polaris. And that’s without counting several
of Batman’s many criminal foes – including
Doctor Death, Doctor Double X and chemist
Doctor Phosphorus.
Which raises the question: is the Doctor
whom young Grant names ‘Doctor Mysterio’
actually one of the bad guys? Because had Doctor
Mysterio not turned up outside the boy Grant’s
window one Christmas Eve, and handed him
one of only four intuitive gemstones in the
universe – the Hazandra, the Ghost of Love
and Wishes, which “knows what you want and
draws energy from the nearest star to make
it happen” – then Grant’s childish desire
to become a superhero would never have
been fulfilled, the Ghost would never have
come into being, and Grant’s life would
never have been ruined by the reflex need
to employ the powers he’d been given.
Admittedly, the Doctor didn’t actually mean
for Grant to swallow the Hazandra, but
nonetheless: he started it, just like he
started the whole ‘Doctor X’ thing.
He’s the radioactive spider that
bit Peter Parker; the lightning
strike that made Barry Allen the
fastest man alive; the mugger
who shot Bruce Wayne’s
parents. Metaphorically,
we might even say that the
Doctor killed young Grant; after all, only the
dead can become a ghost.
The moral of the story, then? Be careful
what you wish for, especially at Christmas.
But perhaps there’s another, one that applies
equally to the Doctor as it does to the Ghost:
to be a hero isn’t a blessing, but a curse. “With
great power comes great responsibility,” the
Doctor chides the ostensibly grown-up Grant,
quoting a maxim established in the final panel
of Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), the first ever
Spider-Man story. So it’s only right that,
with the malevolent machinations of the
brain-swiping Harmony Shoal outfit
at last defeated, the Doctor volunteers
to relieve Grant of all world-saving
responsibilities: “I’ve been away for
a while, but I’m back. I’ll take care
of anything that comes up.”
Because maybe The Return
of Doctor Mysterio isn’t actually
the story of how the Ghost
came to be. Maybe it’s
actually the story of how
bad Doctor Mysterio did
the right thing, in the end,
and came back… so that the
boy Grant could finally put
aside his comics, and at last
become a man. DWM
DATA FILE
l At the Harmony Shoal press conference, Brock
tells the assembled reporters that “Any questions
after today can be handled by Miss Shuster or
Miss Siegel” – some relation, surely, to Superman
creators Joe Shuster (1914-92) and Jerry Siegel
(1914-96)?
l When Nardole rescues the Doctor from the point
of Mr Brock’s gun by materialising the TARDIS
around him, he says he made a few “accidental
stop-offs along the way” – including
12th-century Constantinople, where
he claims to have “ruled firmly, but
wisely”. If we’re to take Nardole at his
word, he most likely took the place of
one of the Emperors of the Komnenid
Dynasty: the military leader Alexios I
(Byzantine Emperor from 1081 to 1118); or his son,
John II (1118-43), known as ‘John the Good’; or
John’s son, the extravagant Manuel I (1143-80).
l In the preceding adventure, The Husbands of River
Song (2015), the Doctor encountered empty-headed
Scratch (Robert Curtis), a representative of ‘the
Shoal of the Winter Harmony’ – a people devoted to
River Song’s other husband, Hydroflax, “our distant
and loving King, who once visited our world in blood
and joy…” The Husbands of River Song, however,
was set in the year 5343, when Scratch knew the
Doctor as “a legendary being of remarkable power
and an infinite number of faces”.
So what we see at the end of The
Return of Doctor Mysterio, when
the UNIT Soldier who claims to
have discovered the open-headed
body of Dr Sim is shown to have
been, er, ‘Shoaled’, is possibly
a lead-in to the previous story:
somehow, Sim escapes into
space… and, some 3,327 years later, Harmony Shoal
has become the Shoal of the Winter Harmony.
REVIEWS
‘The Return of Doctor Mysterio wears its affection
▼
on its sleeve… wisely not dancing around its
similarities to the Superman story but instead
addressing them, head-on, from the off.’ Digital Spy
‘… a delicious mash-up of Doctor Who, Christopher
▼
Reeve’s Superman and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man,
condensed into an hour that never drags.’ Radio Times
‘This is more romcom than superhero caper, and
▼
no worse for it.’ The Guardian
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 11
 THE SCENE
As the 2017 series proved, graphic designers
like Matthew Clark make a subtle but important
contribution to Doctor Who.
FEATURE BY JONATHAN HELM

T
he role of the graphic designer
in TV production isn’t as
obvious as that of a costume
designer or a visual effects
artist, and that’s kind of
the point. Their skill lies in
crafting the intricate details
that sit in the background and tie
the episode to a certain era – past or
future. On Doctor Who, this could be
anything from a Victorian street sign
to a spaceship schematic.
“Graphic design for TV shows has
changed tremendously in the last ten
years or so,” explains Matthew Clark, who
worked as a graphic designer on Doctor
Who for the 2015 and 2017 series. “Back
in the day, it would have been a lot of
hand drawing, using things like Letraset,
whereas now it now covers almost
anything on screen that isn’t a purchased
prop. I do anything that needs to be
printed – posters, tickets, newspapers,
signs – and I also do the majority of video
screens, mobile devices and alien control
panels. Thanks to newer technology like
laser cutting and large format printing,
I’m also responsible for constructed
3D graphics.”
Matthew’s work on an episode begins
at an early stage of the production
process, working closely with the
director and production designer
to examine the scripts and break
scenes down to identify where a
graphic art element is needed
for the set. “I get involved at
the same time as the rest of
the Art Department – which
is fairly early, usually as
Top: Graphic designer soon as a complete,
Matthew Clark on the working draft of the
set of the TARDIS.
script is ready to go,”
Right: Matthew took
says Matthew. “From
this picture of Peter
Capaldi as the Doctor there we all prep
for The Pilot (2017), to by doing research
add to the photos he for the era/setting
took of Rosie Jane as
of the episode,
Bill’s mother.
creating some

12 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

“We spent a day with
Rosie Jane [Bill’s mum],
taking photos of her in
various parts of the BBC
Roath Lock backlot.”
rough designs to send onto the director,
working out what things will cost, lead
times etc. As the script evolves, so do
the graphics – sometimes the night
before shooting! We then tend to run
alongside the first two weeks of the
shoot – hopefully everything will be
done by then – before prepping for the
next episode.
“Each episode is wildly different,”
he continues. “Most episodes are future
or space based, which involves
complicated graphics work. The average
spaceship will need several motion
graphic screens, Perspex-printed control
panels, vinyl decals, foil decals etc. There’s
a lot to create. Keeping each episode’s
look fresh is also a challenge. We’re often
forced to reuse props and set pieces, so
it can come down to the graphics to make
it look different. In Series 9 [2015]the
same control desk appeared two or three
times with completely new graphics in it
each time.”
If an episode requires a special
photoshoot, that tends to be the
responsibility of the graphic designer. One
memorable example of Matthew’s work in
this area featured in the 2017 series
opener The Pilot, in the scene where
the Doctor travels back in time
to provide Bill with photos of her
mother who died when she was young.
“We spent about a day with Rosie Jane
[who played Bill’s mum], taking photos
of her in different costumes in various
parts of the BBC Roath Lock backlot,”
recalls Matthew. “Some were taken in
the Casualty pub, others on the street set
of [Welsh-language soap opera] Pobol y
Cym. I also did the shots of Peter Capaldi
to superimpose onto the photos. Peter Top left: Bill (Pearl
was great – he took the photoshoot very Mackie) looks at photos
seriously and gave me all kinds of dynamic of her mother in
poses. That was one of the highlights of The Pilot.
working on Doctor Who for me.” Top right: Matthew’s
design for the stained-
Smile (2017) presented Matthew with
glass windows in the
a number of challenges. The script Doctor’s room at St
described the Emojibots giving victims Luke’s University…
badges that reflect their moods in the Above: … and the
form of emojis which only other people, finished windows,
and not the user, can see. “My original created for The Pilot.
emoji concepts were black and white – Left: Prop photos taken
for The Pilot showing
they had a pixelated, high-contrast feel,
Bill’s mother (Rosie
a bit like a dot-matrix LCD screen but Jane). In the photo
more high-tech. The original idea was on the far left, the
that these would be printed onto Perspex Doctor can be seen
in the mirror.
and then backlit to enhance the feel of
it being a screen. I think my brilliant
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 13
SETTING THE SCENE

in rooms, corridors, power conduits,

ladders to other decks, etc. I left the scale
ambiguous so if the shape of a room on
the map didn’t quite match the set (or in
this case, the location), you could make
the argument that it’s actually a huge
room and you just can’t see the walls!”
Matthew had a number of talented
collaborators on the 2017 series.
“I worked closely with Tom Munday, who
is a fantastic animator,” he says. “I
started working with Tom on the
first episode of Series 9 and
we’ve worked together ever
since. I designed all the
screens in Photoshop and
Illustrator, based on the
script notes, and created a
Above left: The ship
schematic from Smile
“A lot of the time very basic graphic layout
to show [production

the faces were added

(2017) was influenced designer] Michael Pickwoad
by Rick Sternbach’s as well as the director,
technical drawings
Lawrence Gough. From there
for Star Trek: The Next
Generation.
Above right: Emoji
in post-production.” I would send Tom the Photoshop
file with notes inside it, suggesting
concept drawings movement, filters to use, effects and the
for Smile. assistant Jack Bowes and I came up with ship schematic was strongly influenced like. Tom always knows what I’m after
Centre: One of the nearly 50 emojis. As different versions by Rick Sternbach’s technical drawings – even when I explain it badly – and his
episode’s emoji smiles. of the script were issued we had to for Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he says. animation work is superb. I then take his
Below left: Some of continuously go through it and update “He used bold line work and very clean, finished files to set and we fine-tune it.
the authentic-looking our emoji spreadsheet! Only about five graphic symbols, which is what I tried to It’s a very collaborative process.”
flyers that Matthew
created for Thin Ice or six styles were actually printed for the do on the ship schematic. It’s always hard One of the most impressive sets in the
(2017). Emojibot faces and about ten for the doing things like that because you have 2017 series was the Frost Fair in Thin Ice.
Below inset: A mug small emoji badges. A lot of the time a to be a little bit vague as when you’re Incredibly, the vast set was painstakingly
created for Thin Ice. plain yellow badge was used and the faces designing it you don’t have the finished created inside the Roath Lock studios in
Below right: Part of were added in post-production.” sets or locations to work to. I took a basic Cardiff. “The Frost Fair called for a lot
Thin Ice’s expansive A big science-fiction fan, Matthew took outline of the ship and started working of inter-departmental co-ordination,”
Frost Fair set.
inspiration from another of his favourite
shows when it came to designing a core
set component for Smile. “The style of

14 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE


says Matthew. “I worked closely
with Henry Jaworski’s construction team
to prep all the large-format signs for
the fair. Adrian Anscombe’s prop buyers
managed to find all kinds of souvenir
pieces for the fair – the signature mugs,
the gingerbread etc – and they all needed
graphics applying to them.”
Every aspect of the set was carefully
designed and constructed but many
of the smaller details were only seen
fleetingly in the episode. “It’s frustrating
when something you spend ages on
only gets a few seconds on screen,” he
continues. “I spent a few days getting
the Frost Fair flyers to feel authentically
printed in the period manner. In the end
only a section of the flyer was seen and
only for a second!”
The Frost Fair set was so huge that it
butted right up against the TARDIS set.
“We actually had to take a
wall out of the TARDIS
to be able to film on the
set,” recalls Matthew. “It
was incredibly detailed;
the huge bridge was lovely,
and when you were in the
middle of it, it felt completely
convincing. All the stalls had
individual items, signs, posters
and loads of hired props. It was
a wonderful space to explore.”
SIGNAGE OF THE TIMES
The design of the outer shell of
the TARDIS has been evolving
since 1963. This trend continued
in the 2017 series. “I wanted to
make the TARDIS feel slightly more
‘classic’, but only through small,
gradual tweaks,” says Matthew.
“We didn’t want to suggest it was
a new TARDIS. The police box has
changed gradually over the years
so we thought we’d do it in small
increments. For the ‘Pull to Open’
plaque on the front, we retained
the three-font layout that had been
used since 2005, but I changed all
the fonts to be slightly more period.
After spending weeks putting it all
together, was it heartbreaking to see it all
come down in a matter of hours? “You
have to learn not to get too attached,” he
says, philosophically.
I
t was back to the future for
Matthew’s final contribution
to the 2017 series. “My
main job on Oxygen was
figuring out how the wrist computers
would look along with the general
branding of the Ganymede Company,”
he says. “Once Adrian’s team had chosen
a device to use inside
the prop casing – we
went for iPhone 5s in
the end – I created an
operating system design
and worked out a screen
layout that contained all
the information specified in
the script. The screens were
actually quite small so the main
challenge was getting all the visual
information into a tiny area so it
The ‘Pull to Open’ was changed
from VAG Rounded to one of the
Transport family of fonts. When we
got the script for it mentioned the
close-up on the plaque so it was
definitely worth doing. same typeface as before – Gil Sans
“We also changed how the Police – but I ‘unstretched’ the ‘Public Call’
Box signs were made. The look had section of the sign and softened the
been achieved a number of different corners on the lettering to suggest it
ways over the years – usually with may have been hand painted.”
black vinyl on Perspex – but With such subtle changes,
I wanted to make the signs look like Matthew says, “The difference
painted glass. We printed the black probably isn’t really obvious to most
directly onto opal Perspex that is viewers. But it was all part of a
translucent white. The text was the gradual transition.”
would be legible on screen – and not
require post-production work.
“I also designed the signage systems
for the corridor walls, which were made
from thick-cut Perspex frames, with vinyl Top left: The Doctor
lettering inside them,” he continues. examines one of the
emoji badges in Smile.
“This meant we could produce five or
six of the frames, and then simply relabel Above: Matthew
designed the writing on
the deck or section number when we the TARDIS signs in the
wanted to use the corridor to suggest 2017 series.
a different area.” Left inset: A Ganymede
Other work commitments meant Systems logo created
that Matthew reluctantly departed for Oxygen (2017). This
design was not used.
Doctor Who during production of Oxygen.
Below left: A Smartsuit
“Series 9 was a great experience but
oxygen monitor
Series 10 [2017] was even better,” he from Oxygen…
says. “Everyone really hit the ground Below right: … and
running and we created some really the monitor as it was
incredible sets. I think the end result seen on screen.
was wonderful.” DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 15
 Episode 1

The Pilot FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

University canteen assistant Bill Potts discovers

that her new personal tutor is a time-traveller
from another planet. Together they investigate a
mysterious puddle in the university grounds, only
to discover that it has subsumed Bill’s girlfriend
and will stop at nothing to take Bill too…

I
t usually takes a couple of episodes
to warm to a new companion,
but Bill Potts had us at chips.
Specifically, it was the story she told
about a girl she fancied, serving her
extra chips in the university canteen until the
girl finally looked at her. “D’you know what
I realised?” she asked the Doctor rhetorically.
“She was fat. I’d fatted her. But that’s life,
innit? Beauty or chips.”
The Pilot was an unusually understated series
opener that began with a lengthy pre-credits
sequence comprising a single conversation
between Bill and the Doctor in his university
study. No extreme camera zooms, flashy visual
effects or enormous sets filled with hundreds
of extras – just a cosy room with a police box
in the corner and two people talking. And
yet it was the perfect introduction for Pearl
Mackie, whose beautifully naturalistic and
confident performance as Bill surely charmed
all but the most dispassionate of viewers long
before her amusing subversion of the series’
longest-standing joke: “I can’t just call you
‘Doctor’ – Doctor what?”
Indeed, the whole episode’s focus was so
firmly on Bill and her gradual discovery of the
Doctor’s true nature that their first adventure
together – chased through time and space
by a puddle of sentient alien liquid that has
conjoined with Bill’s new girlfriend Heather –
appeared relatively superficial. Of course, that
perception was to prove erroneous before series
end, but for now the most exciting aspect of

BBC One, 15 April 2017

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Lawrence Gough
Guest cast: Jennifer Hennessy
(Moira), Stephanie Hyam (Heather),
Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Daleks)
Rating: 6.68m
Appreciation Index: 83

16 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
Bill turns away from the police box doors and takes
in the TARDIS interior for the first time.
Bill: “Is this a knock-through?”
Doctor: “Well in a way, yes.”
Bill: “Look at this place. It’s like a…”
Doctor: “... spaceship.”
Bill: “... kitchen.”
Doctor: “A what?”
Bill: “A really posh kitchen – all metal. What happened with
the doors though? Did you run out of money?”
Doctor: “What you are standing in is a technological marvel in
science beyond magic. This is the gateway to everything that ever was or ever can be.”
Bill: “Can I use the toilet?”
Heather’s tale, at least for long-term viewers, was
the all-too-brief appearance of the Movellans,
android enemies of the Daleks last seen on screen
38 years ago in Destiny of the Daleks (1979).
The Doctor’s new home at the fictional St
Luke’s University in Bristol was represented by
Cardiff University with the Grade II-listed Main
Building at the Cathays Park campus doubling
for the facade where the Doctor has
his study. The university’s School of
Biosciences, with its distinctive frontage
of colourful hexagonal windows, can
also be seen when Heather first takes
Bill to see the strange puddle. But
scenes of the refectory where Bill serves
chips were shot at the Atrium Café
in the School of Management
building at the Llandaff
campus of Cardiff Metropolitan
University, while the Doctor’s
discourse on the structure of
time was filmed in the Reardon
Smith Lecture Theatre at the
National Museum Cardiff
building in Cathays Park.
The nightclub where Bill
meets Heather was shot at
Clwb Ifor Bach on Womanby
Street in central Cardiff,
a focal point for the city’s music
scene and Welsh-language
speakers. The sequence filmed
there originally featured the
Doctor playing his electric guitar on stage,
performing a song he called I Forget – actually
Murray Gold’s theme for Clara Oswald, titled
Clara? on the Series 7 soundtrack album. In
the broadcast episode, this track was replaced
by Joy Division’s 1980 single Love Will Tear Us
Apart, previously heard in the series in School
Reunion (2006) where it was playing in the Da
Vinci Coffee House near Deffry Vale High
School while the Doctor repaired K9.
Clara’s theme does appear in The Pilot
though, beautifully punctuating the
Doctor’s decision to allow Bill to keep
her memories in the closing scenes. This
comes just after Bill invites the Doctor
to imagine how it would feel if
someone wiped his memory, the
melody reminding us that he
doesn’t need to imagine that
feeling: he lost his memories
of his previous travelling
companion at the end of Hell
Bent (2015). It also poignantly
reminds us that the Doctor’s
most recent companions
have all left his company
under tragic circumstances,
and while we share Bill’s
delight when the Doctor
finally invites her to join him
in the TARDIS, we might have
good cause to worry for our new
friend’s longevity. DWM
DATA FILE
l In his study at St Luke’s University,
the Doctor has Rembrandt van Rijn’s
Self-Portrait with Two Circles (circa 1667)
hanging over the fireplace and busts
of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
and William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
standing in front of the windows. His
desk displays portrait photographs of his wife River
Song and his granddaughter Susan, as well as a
magnifying glass, an assortment of quill pens, an egg
timer and a collection of his old sonic screwdrivers.
l The Doctor has apparently
been lecturing at the university
for the last 50 years and
possibly since the mid-1940s
– according to Nabeela in
the office. Although his main subjects seem to be
physics and astrophysics, the university allows him
to deliver lectures on whatever topic he likes. He
makes no distinction between physics and poetry.
l Under the Doctor’s personal tutelage, canteen
assistant Bill Potts scores high marks for papers
on ‘The Cosmic Far Ultraviolet Background’ (97 per
cent), ‘Quantum Statistics of Light’ (88 per cent)
and ‘Laser Cooling of Ions: Atomic Clocks and
Quantum Jumps’ (92 per cent). Her student
reference number is ST 129823.
l When the TARDIS arrives in the middle of the
Dalek-Movellan War, the Doctor tells Bill this is the
past – presumably meaning some time before
Bill’s present in the 21st century. The Movellans are
a race of androids, but this doesn’t prevent them
from vocalising their ‘pain’ when injured.
REVIEWS
‘Through the eyes of newcomer Bill Potts, The
▼
Pilot explores afresh the mysteries and joys at the
core of this 54-year-old show.’ Radio Times
‘It’s not perfect but overall it’s a punchy first
▼
episode that’s well paced and covers all the ground
it needs.’ Daily Mirror
‘The whole story is basically about building up the
▼
relationship between the Doctor and Bill, and both
characters are given plenty of breathing space to
really get to know each other. The leisurely approach
may put off some fans who like their openings fast
and furious, but it’s very reminiscent of 1970s Who
– and that’s a good thing.’ Metro
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 17
 THE

DWM

WET
INTERVIEW

LOOK
Stephanie Hyam played
Heather, the enigmatic
student, spooky puddle and
love interest of Bill Potts.
INTERVIEW BY SIMON GUERRIER

W
hat response do
you get when you
play a sinister
puddle in Doctor
Who? “People
I know said it was
the perfect part
for me,” says Stephanie Hyam, laughing.
Stephanie, who played Heather in
2017’s The Pilot and The Doctor Falls,
says it had been evident when she was
training as an actor at the Mountview
Academy of Arts what sort of roles
might suit her. “I remember we had to
sit in a circle and say what we thought
everyone else would be cast as. My best
friend there, Sophie Spreadbury, said,
‘You’re never going to play Juliet – you’ll
be the haunted, creepy girl in things!’”
When Stephanie auditioned for the
part of Heather in 2016, the production
team “didn’t say much about what the
part was, just that it was some kind of
ethereal creature. I was excited anyway
because I’d never been up for Doctor Who

18 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

before. I met the director [Lawrence
Gough], producer [Peter Bennett] and
casting director [Andy Pryor] and it
was a really fun audition. We did the
puddle scene where I’m talking to
Bill and she’s saying, ‘Look at your
reflection.’” Because Stephanie only
saw this scene, not the whole of the
script, she didn’t know Heather hadn’t
yet been possessed. “I did it as a slightly
haunted girl.”
W
hen it came to recording
the episode in June, Gough
“wanted to keep that
other-worldly, enigmatic thing about
her,” says Stephanie, “which I think
was good. She’s more than this normal
student who gets possessed and becomes
a monster. She was always a bit misplaced
and didn’t feel she belonged anywhere.
You don’t often get to play a part like
that, where the subtext is so important.
It’s more interesting if she is enigmatic
even at the beginning, and that’s the
allure for Bill.”
A bond forms quickly between
Stephanie’s character and Bill Potts,
played by Pearl Mackie. “I think we had
a chat about that on the first day of
filming,” says Stephanie. “Her character
is obviously much more sociable,
forward and confident. That gave space
for my character to be quieter and
hiding things.”
Indeed, we’re never even told
Heather’s surname and learn little
about her life. “I had to fill
that in,” says Stephanie.
“Otherwise, I’d feel
nervous and empty when
I’m filming.” So what did
she come up with? “Just
things like whether she’s
got friends at university,
what her family is like,
where she’s come from, even
what she’s been doing before
each of the scenes. I went for something
similar to my own background – except
I didn’t go to university. There was
a time I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,
and I that saw in Heather’s character.
That void in her is why the puddle picks
her and can manipulate her in that way.”
“I had a lovely team of people with
watering cans and bottles, which it
wasn’t always possible to warm up.”
Heather has a distinctive star-shaped many different means of wetting me
defect in one eye, so the production down. The furthest thing from glamour
team wanted Stephanie to wear a special – but whatever. That’s why I enjoy this
contact lens. “That didn’t go so well. It job. You get to try everything. It was fun.
was this huge plastic goggle thing. We I really enjoyed it.”
tried to put it in and it was The episode finished recording on
scratching my eye, which 28 July 2016. “I had no idea I’d be back,”
I couldn’t even open. I just says Stephanie. “I mean, Heather had
had tears streaming from a fairly deep connection with Bill,
this bright red eye with even in that short space of time, and
the star in the middle. I hoped, if just for Bill, that she’d find
The producer said, ‘This Heather at some point. But I didn’t
isn’t a horror story!’ So know what happened in the rest of the Opposite page:
they used CGI, which was series, or what the writers or producers Stephanie Hyam as
much better for everyone!” were thinking.” the enigmatic Heather
When possessed by the It was therefore “a complete surprise” in The Pilot (2017).
puddle, Heather appears to when she was asked to return for season Opposite page below
be soaking wet – which was achieved finale The Doctor Falls. “I didn’t find out left: Stephanie is
drenched in preparation
practically. “I had a lovely team of until maybe a month before I started for her next scene.
people with watering cans and bottles, filming,” she says. This was in about Opposite page below
which it wasn’t always possible to warm February 2017. “It was amazing, to be right: Bill Potts (Pearl
up, and they’d drench me before I went there at the end when they go off into Mackie) meets Heather
on set. Then I’d have spray-on water and space together. I think that’s a beautiful at St Luke’s University.
all these hoses.” She laughs. “There were tie-up for Bill’s story.” DWM Top: Stephanie clutches
a hot water bottle to
keep warm while crew
members create her
wet look.
Inset: The star in
Heather’s eye was
achieved using CGI.
Far left: Heather rises
from the water
in the Doctor’s study
in The Pilot…
Centre left: … and
follows Bill to another
planet.
Left: Heather and Bill
are reunited at the
end of The Doctor Falls
(2017).
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 19
 Episode 2

Smile FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

The Doctor and Bill explore Erehwon, an Earth

colony in the far future where a utopian city has
been constructed by Vardy microbots. But the city
is deserted and the time-travellers soon discover
that the Vardy will kill anyone who isn’t happy…

A
merican author Isaac
Asimov (1920-1992) was the
undisputed master of the
science-fiction mystery story,
and his work in that genre
was always at its most compelling when it
involved robots. Asimov had a keen interest
in the thought processes that might develop
in the positronic brains of sentient robots
programmed with his own three laws of
robotics, the foremost of which stated that
a robot may not injure a human being or,
through inaction, allow a human being to
come to harm. Many of his robot stories –
notably those in his episodic 1950 novel
I, Robot – explored the circumstances that
might lead a robot to contravene that first law.
Doctor Who has occasionally referenced
elements of Asimov’s oeuvre in the past, most
memorably in 1977’s The Robots of Death, but
Smile proved to be the series’ first presentation
of a strictly Asimovian robot mystery. The
Doctor and Bill investigate why the robots on
an Earth colony have killed an advance party
of settlers, and the solution is not intervention
by a villainous third party but the robots’
own logical response to an unforeseen event.
Whether this Asimovian approach to artificial
intelligence developed by accident or design,
scriptwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce provided
a thoughtful and timely tribute to one of the
20th century’s greatest science-fiction
writers: the episode’s UK broadcast premiere
came just a couple of weeks after the
25th anniversary of Asimov’s death.

BBC One, 22 April 2017

Writer: Frank Cottrell-Boyce
Director: Lawrence Gough
Guest cast: Kiran L Dadlani (Kezzia),
Mina Anwar (Goodthing), Ralf Little
(Steadfast), Kaizer Akhtar (Praiseworthy),
Kalungi Ssebandeke (Nate), Kiran Shah
(Emojibot 1), Craig Garner (Emojibot 2)
Rating: 5.98m
Appreciation Index: 83

20 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
The memories of the Vardy are wiped when the Doctor
reinitialises the entire command structure.
Doctor: “Once, long ago, a fisherman caught a magic
haddock. The haddock offered the fisherman three
wishes in return for its life. The fisherman said, ‘I’d
like my son to come home from the war and a hundred
pieces of gold.’ The problem is, magic haddock – like
robots – don’t think like people: the fisherman’s son came
home from the war in a coffin; the king sent a hundred gold
pieces in recognition of his heroic death. The fisherman had
one wish left. What do you think he wished for?”
Equally worthy of applause was Smile’s
eye-popping location photography which
showcased the stunning architecture of Ciutat
de les Arts i les Ciències, the City of Arts and
Sciences in Valencia. One of the 12 Treasures of
Spain, this futuristic cultural and architectural
complex was designed by Santiago Calatrava
and Félix Candela and comprises seven separate
structures within a huge sunken park. It was
previously seen on screen in the Disney film
Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (2015), another
science-fiction mystery tale.
Four of the City of Arts and Sciences
buildings appear prominently in Smile as the
environs of the Erehwon colony (see pages
22-25). The establishing effects shots of
the Doctor and Bill approaching the
colony through wheat fields combined
multiple versions of each of these
structures and arranged them in
a circular formation.
The City’s Umbracle doubled for
the colony’s botanic nursery where
the Doctor picks up a locket
containing a hologram of
Praiseworthy. One of the
scenes recorded there was
trimmed from the pre-credits
sequence: Goodthing
attempts to hide from the
Vardy in the gardens but
is discovered by an angry
Emojibot and reduced to
a pile of bones, leaving only
her locket for the Doctor
to find later. The scene would have confirmed
that Goodthing was Praiseworthy’s mother, as
she was only very briefly seen wearing the locket
in the final cut of the episode.
The UESC Erehwon space cruiser interiors
were shot much closer to home, inside
Uskmouth Power Station at Nash in Newport,
which has previously been seen in the series in
The Age of Steel (2006), A Good Man Goes to War
(2011), The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
(2011) and Into the Dalek (2014). There the crew
erected the ship’s Fleishman cold fusion engine
block, named after the British electrochemist
and cold fusion pioneer Martin Fleischmann
– although the engine’s kelvin
calorimeter reveals that the Fleishman
company of the 29th century spells
the name with just one ‘N’ and no ‘C’.
Cottrell-Boyce also name-checked
another scientist in his script,
acknowledging the advice he received
from Andrew Vardy, Associate
Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering at
the Memorial University
of Newfoundland. In the
minds of Doctor Who
viewers, Vardy will now
be forever associated
with this episode’s
ferocious microbots
and their endearing
Emojibots. No doubt
that put a smile on
his face. DWM
DATA FILE
l Whatever his true age, the Doctor still considers
himself to be over 2,000 years old. Having two
hearts gives him really high blood pressure. He
always wins at chess and once met an emperor
made of algae who fancied him.
l The Erehwon colony on Gliese 581 D is 20 light
years from Earth. The city is a vast extension of
the United Earth Colonisation Team space cruiser
Erehwon, designated UESC 190484, which has
systems designed to respond to a human presence
and reanimate the cryogenically frozen colonists.
l The colony’s structures
are formed from billions of
interlocking Vardy microbots,
tiny robots that work in
flocks. Versatile, hardworking
and good at learning skills,
the Vardy are the worker
bees of the Third Industrial
Revolution. They interface
with humans via Emojibots,
small androids with circular
screens for faces which
communicate by displaying
childish ideograms.
l The Doctor tells Bill he has previously
encountered a few other ships that left Earth
when the planet was evacuated. He appears
to be referring to Space Station Nerva (The Ark
in Space, 1975) and Starship UK (The Beast Below,
2010) which both carried evacuees escaping from
the devastation caused by solar flares in the
29th century.
REVIEWS
‘This was a textbook Doctor Who romp: travel
▼
to strange world, uncover mystery, get into scrapes,
solve everything and hop back into the TARDIS
for the next one. No dark narrative arcs or over-
complicated plotting, just a self-contained adventure.
We’re enjoying this ‘soft reboot’ and return to classic
Doctor Who enormously.’ The Daily Telegraph
‘Smile presents interesting ideas but, as drama,
▼
is as bland and inspid as emojis themselves.’
Radio Times
‘... it proves without a doubt that, in Capaldi
▼
and Mackie, we have one of the best TARDIS teams
in ages.’ Digital Spy
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 21
 ADVENTURES
IN TIME AND SPAIN
When it came to finding a suitable setting for the futuristic city in Smile,
the production team looked further afield than sets and CGI...
FEATURE BY ALISTAIR McGOWN

I
t’s doubtful that many viewers
realised that the colony world
Gliese 581 D, as imagined
in Smile, came courtesy
of a Spanish location shoot.
Smile’s key location recording
took place in Valencia, Spain’s
third-largest city (after Madrid and
Barcelona), near the east coast of the
country. On the south-east outskirts of
the city, stands the Ciudad de las Artes
y de las Ciencias – the City of Arts and
Sciences, a cluster of futuristic buildings The park is the work of famed structures coming into use gradually from
of bright white, ceramic-covered concrete local architect made good Santiago 1998. Calatrava’s work has been lauded
and steel, surrounded by shallow lakes Calatrava, who was born in Valencia in as a wonder of modern architecture by
of water. 1951. Calatrava’s soaring structures for some, but for some Valencians the park
Smile director Lawrence Gough and everything from train stations to sports has incited angry politicised argument.
Doctor Who producer Peter Bennett stadia have been constructed all over the The park’s original €300 million budget
Above right: A CGI
conducted a reconnaissance of the world, from Spain, Italy and France to swelled out of proportion, eventually
shot of the colony world area in February 2016. In issue 512 of the USA, Canada and Brazil. costing possibly three times that sum.
Gliese 581 D in Smile Doctor Who Magazine Gough recalled The City of Arts and Sciences is built Critics see the park as a folly Valencia
(2017). why he was drawn to the City. “I just on the drained bed of the former River could barely afford.
Below left: The City thought it looked incredible, so me and Turia, which catastrophically flooded The main shoot for Smile took place
of Arts and Sciences
appears on this
Pete flew out there and had a look and Valencia in 1957. A large recreational over four days in late July 2016. The
postcard. it was just an instant ‘yes’ really. In every park designed for sports, jogging and small retinue of principal cast members
Below right: The way it was perfect. It was almost like it cycling has been created within the required included Peter Capaldi, Pearl
Emojibot caretakers of was purpose built for Doctor Who. It was old basin that surrounds the eastern Mackie, the diminutive actors Kiran
Gliese 581 D. just a matter of time before someone outskirts of the city, often referred to Shah and Craig Garner (donning the
discovered it.” as the ‘Green Lung’. Emojibot costumes) and guest cameo
Building began in players Mina Anwar (Goodthing) and
1996, with its principal Kiran L Dadlani (Kezzia).

22 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

“It was like it was purpose
built for Doctor Who. It was a
matter of time before someone
discovered it.” Lawrence Gough
The location secret was out when
a when a ‘selfie’ publicity shot of the
Doctor and Bill posing with her camera
phone was posted to Twitter at 10.49am
on the first day of shooting, Monday 25
July 2016. Recording continued over the
next three days, before being completed
with Scene 213 on Thursday 28 July. Cast
and crew flew back to Gatwick Airport
on 29 July.
Smile’s location shoot
used four key sections of
the park area, detailed
further in this article. The
Oceanografic aquarium
attraction at the far east
of the park site was not
seen in the episode.
The city’s surrounding wheat fields were
achieved by digitally matching footage
gathered on location closer to home, using
field exteriors shot at Gileston Farm in the
Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales, a few days
before the crew headed out to Valencia.
The opening shots of the TARDIS’ arrival
utilised a CGI long shot of the city, derived
from the Valencia site but made to appear
larger – notice, for example, that there now
appear to be two modified Opera Houses,
one at each end of the city!
The spaceship Erehwon’s ‘wet brain’
interiors of steam pipes and the like were
recorded at Uskmouth Power Station in
Newport – its surviving coal-fired
B Station, to be precise.
For those intending
to follow in the Doctor
and Bill’s footsteps,
many UK airports fly direct to Valencia,
with a 20-minute train journey to the Above left: The crew,
Peter Capaldi as the
city’s central train station from there. To Doctor and Pearl Mackie
reach the park, take a bus, hire a bike and as Bill rehearse a scene
cycle through the parklands, or simply for Smile.
walk; it should take just half an hour on Above right: The
foot from the city centre. back door of the Opera
House in Valencia’s City
While shooting in late July, the Doctor of Arts and Sciences.
Who crew experienced temperatures Photo © Alistair McGown.
that were over 30 degrees by 9.00am. Below left: The Doctor
Similarly, when DWM visited in and Bill pose for a selfie.
mid-September 2017, there were This image was used
as a Smile publicity
regular daytime highs of 30. So Capaldi shot and revealed the
cosplayers beware – and don’t forget episode’s location.
the Factor 50! Below right:
The Science Museum
A: PALAU DE LES can be seen on the left
of this picture.
ARTS REINA SOFIA Photo © Alistair McGown.
(OPERA HOUSE)
Opened in October 2005 and dedicated to
Queen Sofia, wife of King Carlos, this was
the last of the park’s major buildings to
be completed. Welcoming visitors to the
western end of the park, this spectacular
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 23
ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPAIN

Opera House resembles the helmet of

Above left:
In a picture from the an ancient warrior, with a plumed tail
completed episode, the – or ‘feather’ as it’s often referred
Doctor descends the to – reaching the ground at the rear.
remarkable stairwell. The Opera House contains no fewer
This sequence was
recorded in the than four performance auditoria.
Opera House. World-class opera and ballet shows take
Above right: place on its enormous main stage to
The exterior of the
Opera House.
capacity crowds of 1,470 people.
The building is principally built of The building is principally
concrete, with two huge, curved
Photo © Alistair McGown.
concrete, with two huge, curved-steel
Below:
side coverings. This impressive structure
A happy Emojibot.

steel side coverings. This

is 75 metres high, with 14 storeys above
ground and three below.
Both interiors and exteriors are used
widely in Smile. The impressive,
glass-fronted exterior is first clearly
seen shortly after the Doctor
and Bill enter the city, as they
gaze overhead at a swarm of
nanobots at approximately
six minutes 27 seconds into
the episode. The shot
immediately afterwards, at
6.35, of the pair walking
towards a bridge, was
taken through the
windows of the Opera
House’s front foyer.
The same vantage
point is reused at
17.30, when the
structure is 75 metres high.
two run back in the opposite direction.
This exhibition and performance space,
sometimes used for private dining events,
is open to the public via a fee-paying
guided tour, costing around €10.
After meeting their first Emojibot, the
Doctor and Bill are ushered into another
room where they eat blue jelly meal cubes
(9.47). This room is at the very top of the
Opera House and looks out over the rear
aspect, though it’s largely hidden by the
plumed tail overhead. This is a private
space which may not be included in your
guided tour.
The front of the Opera House is briefly
seen again in shots at 17.35 and 40.13,
the first showing digitally composited
Emojibots in the windows.
Behind those windows can be seen
the four levels that surround the main
auditorium. This area of curved walkways
is used for several interior shots – at 19.24
the Doctor convinces an Emojibot he is
happy and at 20.20 he is found by Bill as
he descends a spiral staircase. Strips of
painted wood were used to achieve these
curves, since concrete couldn’t be cast in
such curved shapes.

CITY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SITE MAP

A. Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia (Opera House) * Plus
KEY

B. Hemisferic (IMAX Cinema) * 1. El Pont de l’Assut de l’Or aka Serreria Bridge

C. Principe Felipe Science Museum * 2. L’Agora
D. Umbracle 3. Oceanografic Aquarium

C
3
A B 1 2

* Admission fee required to visit interiors

24 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE


B: HEMISFERIC
This relatively small building is used
extensively in the episode. Opened in
April 1998, the Hemisferic was the first
building completed and houses an IMAX
cinema and planetarium. Its outside shell
is designed to represent ‘Eye of Wisdom’,
and the sides of the buildings can be
opened via a system of awnings, rather
like an eyelid.
The Hemisferic’s structure creates
an echoing interior. In the middle
of the space is the large, white ‘Ominax’
projection dome, which shows
educational films on topics such as
ocean life and dinosaurs.
In the centre of the main park, a large,
elevated road bridge called Pont de
Montolivet passes across the former river
basin, cutting a path between the Opera
House to its west side and the Hemisferic
to its east. The bridge wasn’t closed to
traffic during the Smile shoot and any
passing vehicles had to be removed
digitally in post-production.
The pre-credits sequence of the deaths
of both Goodthing and her sister Kezzia
were shot here – the women enter the
building via one of its triangular west-
end entrances. The Hemisferic is also
used when the Doctor and Bill meet their
first Emojibot and receive their badges.
In addition, there’s a brief shot at 23.28
where a number of Emojibots are seen
assembled inside.
LOCATION HUNTERS
T
he ‘selfie’ publicity shot tracking shots with very carefully
posted on Twitter on positioned cameras. We were trying
25 July 2016 garnered to cordon off as many areas as we
huge advance publicity but also could out of frame.”
prompted unforeseen problems. For scenes shot outside the
Alerted by social media, several Science Museum, fans were kept
hundred fans – locals and tourists behind cordon tapes under the
from as far afield as the US – came Umbracle opposite, while for shots
to the location on each day of of the Doctor and Bill approaching
recording, hoping to see the stars the Hemisferic, fans were
at work. shepherded in front of the Opera
“That was a challenge,” admitted House. Their patience was eventually
director Lawrence Gough in DWM, rewarded with autographs and
“so we used lots of frames and selfies with the show’s stars.
Scenes of the two time travellers
walking and running between the
Hemisferic and the Opera House were
shot on 26 July.
C: PRINCIPE FELIPE
SCIENCE MUSEUM
The Science Museum was completed
in 2000 and is the largest building on
site. It measures 220 metres long – about
the length of two football pitches
– and resembles the skeleton of a whale.
The museum is filled with hands-on
science exhibits on four floors, including
ground level.
Surprisingly, the building’s exterior
doesn’t appear much in the finished
episode. When the Doctor and Bill first
approach the city, they’re seen walking
along a triangular ‘corridor’ made up The gang of armed colonists led
of angled struts beside a lake – this is by Steadfast (Ralf Little) are later seen
the side of the Science Museum at running along the same walkway at 38.30.
ground level facing the centre of the site.
The same side of the building has D: UMBRACLE GARDEN Top left: The Hemisferic
IMAX cinema.
a long elevated walkway emerging from Though it might appear to be a covered Photo © Alistair McGown.
its second floor – the Doctor and Bill glasshouse during its brief appearance
Top right: Peter Capaldi
are seen trying to escape from here at on screen, this elevated garden meets fans and poses
17.16. This walkway is seen at 17.41 and (completed 2001) has a ‘roof’ made for pictures.
23.30, with the fin-like Agora concert hall only of parabolic curved metal struts Above: The Principe
seen in the background, behind the cable and is otherwise open to the elements. Felipe Science Museum.
structures of the ‘Pont de l’Assut de l’Or’. Covering 17,500 square metres it Photo © Alistair McGown.
contains palm trees, orange trees and Below left:
The Umbracle garden.
other plants indigenous to the region as Photo © Alistair McGown.
well as housing various environmental
Below right:
sculptures, including one by Yoko Ono. The Doctor and Bill,
The Doctor and Bill can briefly be in a scene shot in
seen walking through the Umbracle the garden.
at 12.10. DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 25
 Episode 3

Thin Ice FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

In Regency England the Doctor and Bill

discover something sinister lurking under
the ice at the last great Frost Fair. Something
with a taste for human beings. Something
that’s being exploited by human beings…

T
hin ice is only dangerous above
deep water, and the episode
Thin Ice similarly conceals deep
and murky undercurrents.
Most of the Doctor’s
companions would have viewed a landing
in London in 1814 as an excuse for a jolly
bonnet around Jane Austen’s England. Bill,
however, sees not a chance to parade, and
instead fears prejudice: “Slavery is still totally
a thing.” From the moment she steps out
into the thronging Frost Fair, Bill senses
danger in a trip to the past – danger of a more
abstract kind, too: “Every choice I make in
this moment, here and now, could change
the whole future…” It’s just time travel, the
Doctor tells her: “Don’t overthink it.”
In fact, this particular outing will present
them, and us, with a procession of points to
ponder. Soon, frozen into inaction by their
own inability to prevent the inevitable, they’ll
bear witness to the death of boy pickpocket
Spider – dragged down under the ice by some
unknown force – and Bill will have cause
to question the Doctor’s values when her
seemingly uncaring mentor simply moves
on. Death is a fact of life for the Doctor (as
it is, perhaps, for destitute children in early
19th-century London), who instructs Bill to
‘unlearn’ her horror, because more children
will die if they don’t move on: “Do you want
to stand here stamping your foot? Because
let me tell you something. I’m two thousand
years old, and I have never had the time for
the luxury of outrage.”

BBC One, 29 April 2017

Writer: Sarah Dollard
Director: Bill Anderson
Guest cast: Nicholas Burns (Sutcliffe),
Asiatu Koroma (Kitty), Peter Singh
(Pie-Man), Simon Ludders (Overseer),
Tomi May (Dowell), Austin Taylor (Spider),
Ellie Shenker (Dot), Kishaina Thiruselvan
(Harriet), Badger Skelton (Perry)
Rating: 5.61m
Appreciation Index: 84

26 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE DATA FILE
The Doctor baits the unscrupulous Lord Sutcliffe, who’s
feeding people to the monster that’s made his family’s millions.

Doctor: “What makes you so sure that your life is

worth more than those people out there on the ice?
Is it the money? The accident of birth, that puts you
inside the big, fancy house?”
Sutcliffe: “I help move this country forward. I move
this empire forward.”
Doctor: “Human progress isn’t measured by industry.
It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life.
A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river – that boy’s
value is your value. That’s what defines an age. That’s what defines a species.” l The Doctor and Bill arrive beside the frozen
Thames on Friday 4 February 1814 – the fourth
and penultimate day of the final Frost Fair, following
impromptu carneys in 1683-84, 1716, 1739-40
and 1789.

l It’s not impossible that another Doctor, his wife

and a multi-million-selling Motown musician are
also in the vicinity throughout. In A Good Man Goes
To War (2011), River Song (Alex Kingston) described
how the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) had taken her
“ice skating on the River Thames in 1814, the last
of the great Frost Fairs” as a birthday treat – and
he’d brought Stevie Wonder to sing for her, too!
And since the Twelfth offered Clara Oswald (Jenna
Coleman) a trip “to see the Thames frozen over”
back in The Caretaker (2014) – perhaps he’s also at
risk of running into his current self, along with his
previous companion?

l The Doctor reads street kids Dot,

Moving swiftly on, though, means he never
has to contemplate his own past actions,
however appalling. Reviewing Thin Ice, Bill’s
question to the Doctor, “Have you
ever killed anyone?” makes us stop
and think, too – remembering,
perhaps, the Half-Face Man (Peter
Ferdinando) from Deep Breath
(2014), who ended up impaled on
the spire of Big Ben, very possibly
after the Doctor pushed him onto
it. Or the Androgum butcher
Later, when the Doctor lays out Lord Sutcliffe
with a punch, it’s not because he’s been appalled
by Sutcliffe’s racist disrespect of Bill, but
rather to confirm a fact implied by Sutcliffe’s
comment – that the ignoble lord is human, not
alien. So when he tells Sutcliffe that progress
is “measured by the value you place on a life”,
we might, like Sutcliffe, be tempted to dismiss
his speech as just fine words, were they not
backed up by deeds – specifically, the freeing of
the vast unknown creature that Sutcliffe has
had chained up beneath the ice, in order
Harriet and Perry a story about a
“great tall tailor” with “great sharp
scissors” for snipping the digits off
“little boys who suck their thumbs”.
This is part of The Story of Little
Suck-a-Thumb, from Struwwelpeter
– a notorious collection of cautionary
tales for children by the German psychiatrist Heinrich
Hoffmann (1809-94). Struwwelpeter was first
published in 1845, meaning the Doctor must have
brought the book with him. (But since the Doctor’s
audience includes a Harriet, why isn’t he reading
them The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches?
‘So she was burnt, with all her clothes,/And arms,
and hands, and eyes, and nose…’)

REVIEWS
Shockeye (John Stratton) to exploit its highly combustible
from The Two Doctors ‘outflow’ for profit. But that’s
(1985), whom the Sixth something he does after giving
Doctor (Colin Baker) Bill the choice – either to set
smothered to death ‘Tiny’ free, or to let it go. And ‘This Doctor is visibly uncomfortable with the
▼

with a cyanide pad. Or who’s to say whether or not issue of black slavery, calls whitewashing of history
the countless innocent the choice made by Bill out for what it is and for good measure punches
victims of the Time does change the future, a racist in the face. Not subtle, but it is effective...’
War – a war in which preventing some Daily Mirror
the Doctor himself was parallel Earth from
a willing participant. being created? ‘[Bill’s] behaviour and reactions to the Doctor’s
▼

“There are situations So Bill wasn’t world continue to feel wonderfully authentic.’
when the options fretting needlessly Digital Spy
available are limited,” when she exited the
he tells Bill, sounding TARDIS… except ‘It’s never established whether the gigantic
▼

for all the universe like maybe it wasn’t the twisty-turny snake type thing is malevolent or just
he’s giving evidence death of a butterfly that brought her hungry, so the theme here is more the evil that men
before an intergalactic world into being. Perhaps it was her do. And that, I would say, is this episode’s only real
criminal court. reaction to the death of a Spider. DWM weakness.’ The Guardian

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 27

 THE WARLORDS
Ever wanted to see a massive battle which pits multiple
Doctors and companions against an army of monsters
from throughout time and space? DWM talks to the people
behind a new game that offers that opportunity…
FEATURE BY MARK WRIGHT

F
our Daleks advance across rocky
terrain. Suddenly, a line of
Cybermen block their way.
The two enemies open fire,
energy crackling across the
ground separating them.
As if from nowhere, three
Vervoids stalk towards the Cyber
force, stings outstretched. Before they
reach their targets, a Dominator appears
ordering his trio of Quarks into action.
From behind a rock, the Doctor and his
companions watch, waiting for their Action World War Two game. As we all from home, and now we’re in a set of
moment to escape… liked Doctor Who, we thought, ‘Let’s have offices with over 80 staff.”
While this mash up of monsters might a word, see if we can get the licence.’ In the last decade, Warlord has grown
sound like the kind of wish fulfilment And here we are…” to produce some of the world’s biggest
that keeps Doctor Who fans (and During our visit, Warlord’s wargames, from the World War Two-set
showrunners) awake at night, it’s HQ is buzzing with activity; Bolt Action to ancient Samurai gaming
a scenario that can now be it’s two days before the in Test of Honour, Hail Ceasar and the
a made a little bit more real company celebrates its sci-fi wargame Beyond the Gates of Antares.
Top right: Warlord’s
thanks to Exterminate! This tenth anniversary with a Paul’s passion for the games Warlord
Exterminate! game was new Doctor Who tabletop huge onsite event. “Myself produces typifies the company’s approach
launched in 2017. game was launched early in and my co-founder John to its Doctor Who range. “We knew doing
Above right: Painted 2017 by Warlord, alongside Stallard spent many years Doctor Who was going to be so much fun.”
figures from the Twelfth a range of beautifully at Games Workshop,” Inside the Exterminate! game box
Doctor set – Madame
detailed metal miniatures Paul continues. “We were you’ll find everything you need to get
Vastra, Strax, the Doctor,
Clara and Jenny. covering all eras of the series. both made redundant and started, including a double-sided battle
Inset: Studio head and “Most of us here are massive got chatting and decided that map, factions of 12 plastic Daleks and
Warlord co-founder Doctor Who fans,” says Paul Sawyer, because we both have a passion for Cybermen, game manuals, card decks
Paul Sawyer. studio head and co-founder of Warlord military history, we’d start a company and dice. “The design itself was based
Photo © Mark Wright.
Games, when DWM visits the company’s making plastic Romans. It was around on another Warlord product called
Below: Painted figures Nottingham premises. “We’d had a couple John’s kitchen table. Project Z,” explains Roger Gerrish, who is
of Daleks, Davros and
the Genesis Ark.
of smaller licences in the past – one for I was working from responsible for the ongoing development
Dad’s Army, which we did for our Bolt home, he was working of Exterminate!’s rules. “Since the original

28 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

porting of that game, as new figures and
characters have become available, it’s
been my job to develop the statistics, the
cards, all the information that’s required
to actually use those figures.”
With the core game essentially
providing a bit of pest control between
armies of Daleks and Cybermen, how
does the Doctor fit into a game scenario?
“When you see the Doctor’s actions in the
TV series, he’s generally very pacifistic,”
says Roger, “so what you have to do
is create effects like using your sonic
screwdriver to explode a wall panel or
lock a door behind you.
“The original aim was
that a parent could pick
up the game and play with
their children.” Roger Gerrish
“We want to make the game accessible
to casual fans. The original aim was that
a parent could pick up the game and play
with their children. We want to be able
to put out as large a range of miniatures
as possible so you can actually use them
in the game and you’re not stuck using
Daleks, Cybermen or even one particular
Doctor. Exterminate! itself is a conduit
into some really nice miniatures, and
a tremendous amount of work goes into
the creation of those figures.”
Warlord has taken a different approach
to the detail of its Doctor Who miniatures,
as Paul Sawyer explains: “Companies
in the past perhaps followed the
traditional wargames standard which use mimics traditional methods of
came about because of casting abilities sculpting with clay,” he explains, “but
back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Those you’ve got all the advantages of using
figures were shorter, squatter, big hands, software, so you can just go back if it Above left:
big heads. That’s not representative of goes wrong. We start a lot of things Pre-production models
from Warlord’s Doctor
what you see on screen, so we’ve gone from a plain sphere on screen, especially Who range.
for a different approach with Doctor Who. things that we haven’t done before,
Above right: Game-
Through digital sculpting we’ve gone that we don’t have a library for. We playing cards of
as photo realistic as possible.” have libraries of bones, faces, a Draconian (from
The devil is in the detail, and anatomy parts. 1973’s Frontier in
Space) and the Special
that process starts a few desks “With portraits, it’s
Weapons Dalek (from
away at the workstation a matter of getting the 1988’s Remembrance
of digital sculptor Marco features right from the of the Daleks).
Sano. “The software we photo reference. Once Inset: Roger Gerrish
the beginning phase is is in charge of game
set, you get a neutral
pose. For example, with
development.
Photo © Mark Wright.
Below left: A model
the Cybermen we have on village diorama
screen a doll that behaves inspired by The Woman
more or less like an action figure Who Lived (2015),
and it’s easier to address any design featuring Me in her
highwayman outfit.
problems, instead of doing it once
the figures are posed. The Doctor Who Below right: Studio
painter Kirsten Williams.
miniatures are 28mm so 3D scanning Photo © Mark Wright.
doesn’t work that well; you need to
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 29
THE WARLORDS

exaggerate the features to

Above left: Painted translate properly to scale.”
miniatures of the Judoon.
To demonstrate, Marco
Above centre:
A computer graphics
summons a detailed 3D With the digital master figure, it’s sent through to the
render of 1960s rendering of Second Doctor sculpt approved casting department. This area is like
companion Jamie companion Jamie McCrimmon. by studio head a steampunk workshop, with pots of
McCrimmon. “It’s quite artistic and gives you Paul, the figure is molten pewter alloy bubbling away
Above right: Digital more freedom. If this was to be 3D printed before while silicone moulds are stacked high,
sculptor Marco Sano.
an action figure, you would probably go a matte master figure is cast. Once the looking like film cans of missing episodes
Photo © Mark Wright.
and scan the actor’s face, but the smaller miniature has gone through various of Doctor Who. “We run the Doctor Who
Inset: Pete Hely casts
the figures in pewter.
you go, the harder it is to make 3D scans stages of approval with the BBC and the figures in lead-free pewter,” casting
Photo © Mark Wright. work. Frazer Hines [who played Jamie] actors themselves – including a painted supremo Pete Hely tells us, “which
Below: This diorama came to visit us and he was very excited figure by Kirsten Williams (see box is BBC specific. The Doctor Who
from 1967’s The Tomb to see this.” out) – the miniature then goes metal only goes through the
of the Cybermen is due For Marco, his work on the Doctor Who into the moulding and casting Doctor Who pot, so it doesn’t
for release in February
2018. Alongside it is a
miniatures provides a new challenge stage, located elsewhere get contaminated. We try
painted figure of the every day, whether it’s sculpting a Tetrap, in Warlord’s sprawling to get between 300 and
Cyberman Controller a Cyberman or Frazer Hines in a kilt. workshop spaces. 600 figures per mould.
from that story. “That’s why I love it, every day it’s a Once the master Figures like Rose, Donna
different thing. It’s creative, it keeps your mould has been created in and the Vashta Nerada
interest high, it keeps you awake!” high-cure silicon from the are easy as they’re A-frame
figures. They’re a piece of

“We run the Doctor Who cake. But Missy, she’s a darling!
On one side she’s quite solid, and on

figures in lead-free pewter,

the other she’s got the high-heeled shoe,
the tip of an umbrella, and a tiny little
hand. She works against physics and can
which is BBC specific.” Pete Hely break. One of the hardest to get right is
the Ogrons because of the way they sit
in the mould. You can lose the tip of the
gun or a bit of the face.”
Once a miniature has been
removed from its mould its nearly
at the end of its journey as it heads
to the packing department. It’s
here that Warlord’s personal
approach is exemplified by
packer and Doctor Who fan Eliza
Luczynska. “Today I’m packing
Slitheen,” she says happily,
“but I also have Ogrons and
Sea Devils too.” Each box
comes with a tag to tell you
who has packed it, allowing
Eliza to have some fun. “I’m such
a big fan – that’s why I put little
messages on the packing tags.
When I’m packing the Silents
I put tally marks from the TV
episodes on the back. It’s nice
to be part of something
like this.”

30 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 Brush Strokes For those wanting to try their hand at painting miniatures, but
might not know where to start, Kirsten shares her top tips for
achieving great results with a bit of patience and practice…

“
I
’ve been painting
figures since I was
12, so that’s 26 years
now,” says Kirsten Williams,
one of Warlord’s in-house
painters. Kirsten produces
the final painted Doctor
Who miniatures that are
photographed for Warlord’s
packaging. “The BBC insists that all
of our figures match the TV episodes,
so finding photo reference and getting
them to match is a bit of a challenge.
The Tenth Doctor was the one we
had most problems with; although he’s
got a very distinctive face, when you
come to painting, there’s nothing that
really stands out. It’s about
latching onto something. With
a figure like Rose, she’s got
very distinctive dark eyes,
so you can make her eyes
stand out. Same with
Jackie Tyler – she has a
lot of eyeliner! Tom Baker
was fascinating to do.
Every single season his scarf
changed, so I had to match
the patterns on his scarf with
whichever season
the sculptor
had done.”
1. Take care of your brushes by
washing them frequently. Dealing
with the actual paints is fairly easy,
but if you don’t take care of your
brushes then your paint won’t go on
the figure properly.
2. Always have a solid base for
your arms, and if you’ve got
shaky hands then rest them
against each other. Good
light is a must.
3. Check each figure
for mould lines and clean
those off with a file. I would
recommend a spray undercoat. You
can do it easily by hand, but you
must always undercoat. If you’ve got
a solid base for the paint then it will
look much better.
4. Put the base layers on. The Ninth
Doctor was one of the quickest to
paint because there’s a lot of black
leather. With the Eleventh
Doctor, however, I had to
paint all the individual
lines onto the tweed
jacket and that took forever.
5. Once the base layers are on, apply
an ink wash over everything, so all
the recesses get darker. Once the
figure is dry, get a mangled brush
with frayed edges, wipe pretty
much all of the paint off onto
tissue paper, and then
lightly brush all over the
figure to pick out the
raised areas.
6. Practice, practice,
practice… If there’s
a technique you want to
try, experiment with
something else first, even if
it’s just a spare bit of metal or
a plastic sprue. This way you’ll
be able to check how a colour
looks. Give it a go – don’t be
afraid to try things!

Snugly in their boxes, the unpainted
miniatures are now ready to be sent out
across the world to hundreds of specialist
gaming shops, distributors and mail-
order customers. From start to finish,
the miniatures are all created on site at
Warlord’s headquarters.
“There’s a Venn diagram for Doctor
Who that comes out at most of our
meetings,” says Paul Sawyer back in the
studio. “There’s a collectors’ market out
there that we haven’t serviced in the past,
which is why we’re going for as high
quality as possible. We’ve done all the of the N-FX Design Studio to produce
new Doctors and we’ve got the Fourth detailed scenery dioramas, starting with
and Second being done. The Eighth a beautiful Tomb of the Cybermen [1967]
will be in a Night of the Doctor [2013] set set due in February 2018.
featuring Kas and Ohila. There’s also On the eve of the company’s tenth
Above left: Artist
a Christmas Invasion [2005] set on the birthday, Paul is delighted that Doctor Who Kirsten Williams and
way.” Other sets due for release in the is part of the Warlord family, and a painted figure of
coming months include various Doctors is excited to see how Exterminate! and Rose Tyler.
cast in resin, Dominators and Quarks, the ongoing range of miniatures will Above right: A Quark
Movellans, Draconians, Mire and the evolve in the coming years. “We’ve got (from 1968’s The
the game out and we’ve got the expansion Dominators) and
Ninth Doctor and companions. For those
a painted Eleventh
looking for something a little more epic, sets. We have all these things in progress, Doctor figure.
Warlord is partnering with Nik Hull both with gamers and collectors in mind. Below left: Nik Hull
There’s so much to go at and we hope that of the N-FX Design
people like what we do.” DWM Studio works on a
gaming board inspired
by Skaro’s Dalek city.
Find out more about Exterminate!
Below right: The
at doctorwhotimevortex.com
First, Fourth and Tenth
Warlord can be found on Facebook Doctors, cast in resin and
at facebook.com/groups/ professionally painted.
doctorwhotimevortex/

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 31

 Episode 4

Knock
Knock FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

Bill has a life away from her adventures

with the Doctor, and this means finding
somewhere to live. Along with five student
friends she discovers an amazing old
house to share… but what’s the catch?

N
ot much is as depressingly
mundane as the unavailability
of good, affordable housing
– particularly in larger towns
and cities, particularly if
you’re young. There’s nothing weird or alien
about that, as Bill tells the Doctor: “I’ll see
you later for more exciting TARDIS action,
but basically, this is the bit of my life that
you’re not in…”
No, there are no living puddles, weird
robots or big fish in the bit of Bill’s life
that the Doctor doesn’t live in, but that
doesn’t mean it’s free of horrors. Because
when Bill and her five student chums
cross the threshold of the Landlord’s
oddly underpriced but nonetheless roomy
accommodation, they’re crossing out of the
world of the Doctor, of Doctor Who, and into
another realm entirely – specifically, the realm
of the ‘slasher’ horror movie. Bill, Shireen,
Harry, Felicity, Paul and Pavel – like you,
probably, they’ve all seen at least one Scream,
Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street or similar,
in which a half-dozen or so just-past-teenage
types break some rule, or disobey some
warning and get themselves killed, one by
one, by some hellish agency. In this case, the
rule is a common sense one – why’s the house
so cheap? What’s the catch? – and the hellish
warning is contained in the contract that they

BBC One, 6 May 2017

Writer: Mike Bartlett
Director: Bill Anderson
Guest cast: David Suchet (The Landlord),
Mariah Gale (Eliza), Mandeep Dhillon
(Shireen), Colin Ryan (Harry), Ben Presley
(Paul), Alice Hewkin (Felicity), Bart Suavek
(Pavel), Sam Benjamin (Estate Agent), Tate
Pitchie-Cooper (Young Landlord)
Rating: 5.73m
Appreciation Index: 83

32 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE DATA FILE
Prompted by Bill’s insight, the Doctor tells the wooden
Eliza that her memory is at fault – and the Landlord isn’t,
in fact, her father, but her son...

Landlord: (Weeping) “Forgive me. Forgive me.”

Doctor: “When you saw what the creatures had
done, you understood, didn’t you? The lice could keep
yourmother alive if you protected them. Tamed them.
Fed them.”
Landlord: “If you could save the one who brought
you into this world, wouldn’t you?”

l Bill has a whole Spotify playlist full

of Little Mix tracks – including Black
Magic, a UK Number One in 2015.
Another mighty Mix tune can be heard
in the opening moments of the episode:
Weird People, the third track from the
group’s third album, Get Weird (2015).

l Pavel, however, is a vinyl enthusiast, with the

sign, seemingly without checking the small print
for Mephistophelean clauses.
Mobile-dependent Felicity has seen those
films, and realises that it’s not good news for the
group to find themselves cut off from contact
with the outside world: “I just get nervous
when there’s no reception. Like something
bad’s going to happen.” Harry and Shireen
have seen those films, because they send
lumbering Paul to find out what’s happened
to loner Pavel on the grounds that he’s
“physically the biggest” and “the
most expendable”. Paul has
seen those films, because he
film studies students, they’d have identified
Bill from the start. Bill is the ‘Final Girl’ of
the slasher movie, as defined by the feminist
academic Carol J Clover in her seminal study
Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton University Press,
1992): the survivor, who ‘perceives the
full extent of the preceding horror and
of her own peril’; who shows ‘more
courage and levelheadedness’ than her
male friends, and who isn’t available
to them as a girlfriend, either. The Final
Girl, writes Clover, ‘is boyish,
in a word… Lest we miss the point,
opening Adagio from Bach’s Sonata No 1 in G
Minor, as performed by the Israeli-American violinist
Itzhak Perlman (1945-), on his turntable. This isn’t
the first time that the music of German baroque
composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) has
been heard in the Doctor’s world: in The Green
Death (1973), bonkers computer BOSS sang along to
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3; in The Power of
Kroll (1978-79), the Fourth Doctor trilled the opening
of Badinere in B Minor on a reed flute; in Attack of
the Cybermen (1985), the Sixth Doctor played the
first notes of Bach’s Toccata and
Fugue in B Minor on a junkyard
organ; and finally, the Air from the
Orchestral Suite No 3 in D Major,
known in rearranged form as Air
on the G String, was heard playing
in the HQ of the 3W organisation
in Dark Water (2014).
l Harry finds a David Bowie 45 in the cellar –
“Heroes”, which peaked at Number 24 in the charts
on 30 October 1977. In the UK, however, the disc
came in a plain wrapper; the picture sleeve here
actually came with a German 7” pressing, so one of
the Landlord’s 1977 tenants may have been either a
foreign student… or a serious Bowiephile!

REVIEWS
mimes being dragged away it is spelled out in her name:
by some awful presence Stevie, Marti, Terry, Laurie…’ It’s
behind a door… but he’s Bill, the Final Girl, who asks the
too dim to realise that vital question of the Doctor – why
goofing about practically would a father take bugs from the ‘The slangy script bristled with youthful energy,
▼

guarantees that he’ll be garden to a bedridden daughter? targeting younger viewers with a flavour of Who
the next to be taken. – and causes the Landlord to be spin-offs Class and Torchwood.’ The Daily Telegraph
Pavel, Paul, Felicity, revealed as a Norman Bates,
Harry, Shireen – the devoted to the effectively dead ‘The episode is admirably daring when it
▼

loner, the jock, the mother he keeps upstairs. comes to its scares, throwing up some genuinely
panicking girl, the bright A reference, film students disturbing visuals, particularly the sight of
geek, the best friend – all take note, to Alfred Hitchcock’s a pained Pavel half-eaten by the house.’
of them disappear in a Psycho (1960) – which Clover Digital Spy
pretty-much traditional describes as the ‘appointed ancestor
order. Until it’s just Bill, of the slasher film’. ‘David Suchet could have gone larger, camper
▼

facing the monstrously Ultimately, what Knock Knock with this, but doesn’t overplay it. He makes the
recreated Eliza in the tower… tells us is that in the bit of Bill’s Landlord – we never learn his name – plausible,
The thing is, if any of the life that the Doctor isn’t in… almost kindly, just on the verge of sinister.’
doomed housemates had been she’s the hero. DWM Radio Times

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 33

 THE

DWM

NOISES OFF
INTERVIEW

Knock Knock was specially explained the technology in a blog

recorded in unsettling ‘binaural’
sound, using technology provided
by Cathy Robinson and her team...
INTERVIEW BY SIMON GUERRIER
post: “The sounds we hear are affected
by the shape of our head and ears,”
he said, “and the effect varies with
the position of the sound source. Our
auditory systems can recognise these
patterns to localise sounds, particularly
frequency-dependent time and level
differences between the ears.”
Whereas stereo technology on most
TVs enables “simple left-right amplitude

S
panning”, the production tools Chris’
oon after Knock Knock was team have developed “allow sound
Top: Harry (Colin Ryan)
and the Doctor (Peter
broadcast on 6 May 2017, engineers to freely position sounds
Capaldi) explore the a special ‘binaural’ version was in a 3D scene” – with dramatic
Landlord’s house in Knock made available on the BBC’s results. (You can read the full post
Knock (2017).
iPlayer service. This version is at tinyurl.com/BinauralSound)
Above: The Landlord included on The Complete Series Such technology was first applied
(David Suchet) hits
the right note with his 10 DVD and Blu-ray box sets. to virtual reality in the 1990s, but using
tuning fork. Binaural sound offers a more it to enhance broadcast programmes is
Right: The Doctor and immersive, engaging experience. Chris a newer idea. In 2015, Chris’ colleague
Felicity (Alice Hewkin) Pike, a senior scientist working in audio Cathy Robinson worked on a BBC radio
investigate strange noises.
for BBC Research & Development, production of Ring – the Japanese horror

34 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

novel by Koji Suzuki that had already
been made famous by film adaptations.
“We created a normal stereo version
for transmission on Radio 4,” says
Cathy, “and a binaural version from the
same mix to be consumed online. We
then created a comparison study which
intermittently changed from the stereo
to the binaural version, and you really
got the sense of space and immersion.”
Cathy was keen to “bring binaural
audio to a large audience, and it helped
that I built the 3D sound studio at
Broadcasting House in Cardiff. I took
that comparison study to the
post-production sound team at
BBC Wales and they were
soon on board. But we
needed to make sure that
the crafts people were
convinced as well, so they
used the tools within
their existing workflow.”
A
s a result, in 2016
Cathy oversaw
a binaural version of the
prestigious TV drama A Midsummer’s
Night Dream. The producer on that was
Brian Minchin – who saw the potential
of the technology for another series
he produced…
Minchin and his team selected an
episode of the forthcoming Doctor Who
series that they thought would best suit
the binaural treatment. “There is an eerie
sparseness to Knock Knock,” says Cathy.
“The sound is absolutely key to the plot,
with all the creaks from the house, the
knocks in the walls and ceilings, and the
creepy sounds enveloping characters.”
Cathy was able to see the script before
production began on 1 August. “Then
I made plans with [dubbing mixer]
Darran Clement, who arranged the track
lay before it went into the dub with the
spatial mix in mind.” This was important
because “we could only start the binaural
mix once the regular dub was completed.
As soon as we got the go-ahead, I put
the spatial audio system together in the
dubbing suite and we were under way.
“The main challenge for Darran was
not to over-do the mix,” she continues.
“With any soundtrack, if you notice it,
it’s too distracting. For example, with
characters’ voices, if you spatialised the
sound to match the cuts of every shot,
the jump in sound location would jerk
you out of the story.”
Which scenes in Knock Knock
does Cathy think work
best with the binaural
technology? “I really
like the moment
when Bill and Shireen
are knocking on the
bedroom door and
then knocking starts
coming from all around
them. They look around, up
and down in the direction the
knocks are coming from – and the sound
is there, too. That’s incredibly effective.”
The response to the binaural version
was, says Cathy, “fantastic. And having
such a successful show embrace the
technology has brought it to a mass
audience, so more people know what it is
and what it can do. I think there should
be lots more binaural TV out there. The
results on Knock Knock were amazing,
but it’s still early days for binaural TV
and the more we do it the better it will
“The sound is absolutely key to
the plot, with all the creaks in the
house and knocks in the walls...”
get. This episode was specially chosen
Above: The tragic Eliza
[to have the technology applied after it (Mariah Gale) is revealed.
was completed] but I’d love to see one Inset: A Dryad crawls
especially written for binaural audio – across the portrait
as we have done with some radio drama. of Eliza.
“There was also an unexpected benefit Below: Shireen (Mandeep
Dhillan) and Bill (Pearl
to this,” she adds. “When we did the
Mackie) are alarmed
press screening, we invited students
by noises that seem to
from local universities interested in come from all directions.
The binaural sound is
spatial audio. They came to the actual
particularly effective
house in Newport where the episode was in this sequence.
filmed and we gave them each an iPad
and a pair of headphones so they could
go watch the episode anywhere in the
house. One student said afterwards he
usually had to use subtitles as he is hard
of hearing. This was the first time that
he didn’t need to because the sounds
were spread around three-dimensional
space and the dialogue didn’t have
to fight so hard against music and
effects. That’s definitely something for
us to explore in more detail.” DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 35
 Episode 5

Oxygen
FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

Oxygen is considered a commodity at Chasm

Forge, a deep-space mining station in the far
future. The Doctor discovers that the crew are
being murdered by their own spacesuits and the
handful of survivors are running out of air…

I
sn’t that just typical? You wait
three years for a decent robot
story and then two come along
within a few weeks of each other.
On the heels of Smile with its
Vardy microbots and Emojibots, Oxygen offers
a very different type of robot, the Ganymede
Systems Series 12 Smartsuit, a spacesuit
with artificial intelligence that operates with
or without an organic occupant. Both are
killing humans, but whereas the Vardy have
been unable to consolidate grief with their
prime function of keeping everyone happy,
the Smartsuits simply have murder built in:
when the wearer becomes inefficient, the suit
is programmed to dispose of them.
The two stories couldn’t be more different
and yet they complement each other perfectly,
with Oxygen forming the yin to Smile’s yang.
Smile presents a bright, geometric utopia
where the Doctor encourages the Vardy
to get rich by charging rent to homeless
colonists. By contrast, Oxygen is set in a dingy,
cluttered dystopia where the Doctor eagerly
anticipates the downfall of Earth’s corporate
society. In the earlier episode, the Doctor
rectifies everything with a wave of his magic
screwdriver, but here the screwdriver is toast
within 15 minutes, forcing him to come up
with a more creative (and satisfying) solution.
“So how does space kill you?” asks the
Doctor as he lectures on crop rotation at

BBC One, 13 May 2017

Writer: Jamie Mathieson
Director: Charles Palmer
Guest cast: Kieran Bew (Ivan), Justin
Salinger (Tasker), Peter Caulfield (Dahh-
Ren), Mimi Ndiweni (Abby), Katie
Brayben (Ellie), Lauren Pate (Student)
Rating: 5.27m
Appreciation Index: 83

36 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
The reactor core hatch opens and the zombie Smartsuits
file in, led by Bill.
Nardole: “Doctor… Doctor…”
Doctor: “What?”
Nardole: “It’s Bill.”
Doctor: “Of course it’s Bill. Fate and me, we have a thing.
Hello, suits. Our deaths will be brave and brilliant and
unafraid. But above all, suits, our deaths will be... expensive!”
The Smartsuits all immediately come to a halt.
Doctor: “Check your readings. We die, your precious station dies.
The whole thing will blow. The company will make the biggest loss in its history.”
He turns to Ivan and Abby.
Doctor: “A moment ago we were too expensive to live. Now we’re more expensive dead.
Welcome to the rest of your lives.”
St Luke’s University. “The main problem is
pressure – there isn’t any, so don’t hold your
breath or your lungs will explode.” The setting
for this sequence was once again provided
by the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre at the
National Museum Cardiff. There, as in The Pilot,
the Doctor uses a blackboard with an ornate
frame which was previously fixed to the wall
of B03-Physics 1, Miss Quill’s classroom at
Coal Hill Academy in spin-off series Class. The
exterior of the National Museum building also
doubles for the university when the Doctor
and Nardole make their way to the vault.
Once the action has moved to Chasm
Forge, typophiles will have delighted
in the presence of Eurostile Bold
Extended as the Ganymede Systems
corporate typeface, seen on all space
station signage, screens and maps.
Eurostile was designed in 1962 by
Aldo Novarese as a variant of his
earlier Microgramma font (1952)
and it eventually superseded
Microgramma as the most
popular typeface for futuristic
film and television graphics
when digital typography
replaced dry transfer lettering
in the late 1980s. As it
happens, Eurostile’s other
significant screen appearance
this year was in Ridley Scott’s Alien Covenant,
which opened in the UK on the same weekend
that Oxygen aired on BBC One.
Oxygen also ticked boxes for those of us who
enjoy a traditional ‘base under siege’ tale. This
is the type of story where the Doctor and his
companions become trapped with the occupants
of an isolated location (such as a monastery,
a lighthouse or a nuclear submarine) which
then comes under threat from monsters that
want to kill everyone. Introduced in The
Tenth Planet in 1966, this is an approach
that particularly suits a remote space
habitat – as in The Moonbase (1966),
The Ark in Space (1975) and The
Waters of Mars (2009).
The last such story was 2015’s
Sleep No More with its experimental
‘found footage’ presentation and
inconclusive ending. Oxygen
is more straightforward and
clear-cut, but the episode also
cunningly serves to foreshadow
the events of World Enough and
Time/The Doctor Falls. Should
we expect a similar secure
outcome for the Doctor, Bill
and Nardole when they next
find themselves under siege
in outer space? Don’t hold
your breath. DWM
DATA FILE
l Ganymede Systems’ Class A7 Mining Station
Chasm Forge is a rotating wheel space station with
artificial gravity and hatches in the classic design
with pressure seals and hinges. The habitat wheel
has 12 sections arranged around the inner and
outer rings with designated areas including dorms
(Section 05), processing (07), workshop (08), store
(10) and communications (12). The entire structure
is attached to an asteroid via an extended axis,
enabling the crew to extract copper ore.
l There has never been any oxygen
in Chasm Forge. The gas is available
for personal use only at competitive
prices. Unlicensed oxygen is
automatically expelled from the
station to protect market value.
l The Ganymede Systems
Series 12 Smartsuit is
a computer-controlled robot
spacesuit equipped with gyro
stabilisers, magnetic boots
and gloves, and artificial
intelligence with limited
problem-solving capability.
A force field prevents the suit’s
oxygen from escaping, but a helmet
must be worn when venturing
outside as the force field isn’t strong
enough to withstand a vacuum.
l Nardole hasn’t seen his true face in years – he
swapped it for the one he has now while he was
on the run. He once had a relationship with an
actress called Velma who was a bit orange but she
left him for an AI in a call centre. Some of Nardole’s
best friends are blueish.
REVIEWS
‘Oxygen is a treat of an episode that nails the
▼
funny/quirky/scary Venn diagram of what Doctor
Who is.’ Daily Mirror
‘It can only be coincidence for this episode to have
▼
gone out in the midst of a bitter general election
campaign. But Doctor Who is rarely so political and
unapologetically left-wing.’ The Guardian
‘A terrific, tense episode and the ideal warm-up
▼
for the Eurovision Song Contest, scheduled directly
afterwards. “Nul points! Please remain calm while
your central nervous system is disabled!”’
The Daily Telegraph
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 37
 Prosthetic and creature design workshop Millennium FX made
a significant contribution to the alien menaces in episodes such
as Extremis, Empress of Mars and The Doctor Falls.
FEATURE BY MARTIN RUDDOCK

Above: Work-in-
progress head sculpts
of three Millennium FX
creations from the 2017
series of Doctor Who:
a Monk (first seen in
Extremis), Iraxxa (from
Empress of Mars) and
a Mondasian Cyberman
(first seen in World
Enough and Time).
All images in this article
© Millennium FX/Jimmy Mann.
T
he intricate design of
the gruesome Monks
was actually one of
Millennium FX’s
more straightforward
jobs on the 2017 series
of Doctor Who. The
undead creatures featured heavily in
a three-episode stint from Extremis
onwards and proved relatively simple to
realise, comprising prosthetic masks and
hands, with their robes supplied by the
Costume Department.
“Their make-up is a foam latex
prosthetic that’s like a balaclava piece,”
says Millennium’s lead prosthetics
designer, Gary Pollard. “They have
glued-down facial prosthetics, foam
latex hands with extended fingers and
a nice set of dentures.”
The Monk masks were a mixture of
‘hero’ props and background extras,
as special effects producer and
Millennium co-owner Kate Walshe
explains. “It’s so they didn’t all feel
identical, but it’s also a cost and time-
saving measure as TV schedules are
tight. We made four or five different
styles of head, all painted differently,
and two different styles of prosthetic
with regions that allowed [lead Monk
actor] Jamie Hill to talk. We asked this
amazing company called Fangs FX to
create dentures, and they really pushed
out Jamie’s lips over the teeth. That
was quite a dressing.”
Speaking of teeth, for The Lie of the
Land Millennium added an additional,
more sophisticated mask for the Pilot
Monk seen towards the episode’s climax.
“There were ten or so regular masks”,
explains Gary, “but we made sure the
main Monk at the end could move his
jaw. I added hard bone to his face mask
so he could grind his teeth, making it
somewhere between a prosthetic and
a mechanical mask.”
Great care had to be taken with
the Monks’ foam latex masks, which
were vulnerable to damage from
prolonged use and the studio lights.

38 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 Far left: Gary Pollard
adds detail to the head
of a Monk.
Left: Gary works on
a concept model
of a Monk.
Inset: Test make-up
for Iraxxa, ruler of the
Ice Warriors.
Below left:
Millennium’s Jimmy
Mann (centre) with
two partially costumed
Ice Warriors, including
Spencer Wilding (left).
Below right: Concept
images of Iraxxa,
showing how an
actor would fit inside
the costume.

“We made four or five

lightweight fibreglass and the
trousers were foam latex.”
“They were like really
different styles of head, expensive leggings. Space
leggings!” says Kate. “We

and two different styles made hard-shell elements

to stick onto them, but

of prosthetic.” Kate Walshe

didn’t need them in the
end. With Adele’s poise
and performance it felt like
armour, it didn’t feel like
“UV light degrades latex,” explains Kate. Iraxxa’s impressive mane was made space leggings.”
“It turns to biscuit and crumbles, but the from a futuristic-sounding material called “Her hands are soft foam latex so she
main thing is wear-and-tear from Cyberlox. “She had a silicone prosthetic had some dexterity but could hold her
the actor taking them on and off. mouth, and sharp teeth by Fangs FX,” hand in that pincer shape like the original
Major degradation takes a while, continues Gary. “Her breastplate was Ice Warriors,” adds Gary.
but abuse from actors is a lot quicker! made from PT Flex, a liquid-casting
Fortunately they can be repaired.” rubber compound. The upper legs
Empress of Mars was a major episode were foam, the hips were
for Millennium, requiring not
only the brand-new design
for the Ice Warrior
Empress Iraxxa, but
also the creation of
an Ice Warrior army.
“Iraxxa’s suit was
made from a wide
variety of materials,”
says Gary. “Her
helmet was fibreglass,
which was very light.
It was easy to build
in attachments like
her vac-formed eye
lenses and hair.”
“We made two
helmets,” adds Jimmy
Mann, who works in
Millennium’s mould shop
in addition to assisting on
set as a dresser. “One was
too heavy, but we sprayed
that to become the gold
sarcophagus version of
Iraxxa. The other was light
enough for [Iraxxa actress]
Adele Lynch to wear, and
the fabrication team put
in the hair.”

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 39

SHOP OF HORRORS

“It was a lot of work not to

make the guys look like they
were wearing their dads’ Ice
Warrior costumes!” Kate Walshe
Empress of Mars featured male Ice concerts. We had to rebuild some parts slimmed down since for the role of Darth
Above left: Iraxxa’s
costume is constructed Warriors in force for the first time since and make two new suits.” Vader [in the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue
in the Millennium FX The Monster of Peladon (1974). Several The Skaldak costume was built to fit One] but he was still an impossible shape
workshop. costumes were required, constructed 6” 6’ actor Spencer Wilding, who to find a match for, so we had
Above right: The from a liquid polyurethane that cures has played various ‘big suit’ the fabrication team rebuild
Millennium FX into heavy, hard-wearing rubber. roles in Doctor Who since the interior of the suits.
team pose with the
Mondasian Cybermen
Building Iraxxa’s army wasn’t without 2011. Spencer’s unique Because Spencer had
they created for World its challenges. “We already had one proportions proved longer limbs we had
Enough and Time and costume,” says Kate, recalling Skaldak hard to replicate with to shave down some
The Doctor Falls. from the 2013 episode Cold War, “but it the taller, but much elements. It was quite
Inset: Jimmy Mann had been around the world appearing slimmer Ice Warrior a lot of work not
stands alongside an Ice actors. “Spencer has
in a few of the Symphonic Spectacular to make the guys
Warrior on the set of
Empress of Mars. look like they were
Below: The finishing
wearing their dads’
touches are made to Ice Warrior costumes!”
Iraxxa’s costume. she says, laughing.
The 2017 series concluded
with the return of the original
Mondasian Cybermen in World
Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls,
lovingly recreated in their retro
glory by long-term fan Gary
using a variety of materials. “The
masks were stretchy, tight-fitting
cloth,” he says. “I noticed that
it left gaps if the performer had
a narrow face, so I sculpted
a latex face mask to wear under
the cloth. In an earlier mockup
I used a translucent fabric which
gave a greasy, biological look, but
it strobed on camera so we stuck
with plain cloth. The eye-rings
are metal, and the mouth is
ridged latex. The lightweight
fibreglass helmets were
made by veteran model-
maker Chris Trice.”

40 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 For the body suits, Gary was inspired
by the Cybermen’s debut appearance
in The Tenth Planet (1966). “I remember
one of the original Cybermen raising
this enormous arm to the Doctor, so I
decided to place an undersuit beneath
their latex suits to add a certain blank,
physical mass. The back and waist plates
are fibreglass, and the external plumbing
is made from Cyberlox. The limb bands
are simply cut plastic drainpipe.”
Model-maker Joe Browning was
thrilled to be working on the Mondasian
Cybermen as his first professional prop
job. “I made the shoulder pads,” he says.
“They were plastic tube decorated with
chrome trim, painted and weathered to
look metallic.”
The elaborate chest units were
built by respected model-maker Rocky
Marshall, with additional pieces provided
by the team. “I casted little details
like the pieces inside the heart, the
voicebox on the side, and the blue
drip,” says Jimmy.
Joe added a touch of his own
to the chest units after spotting
a detail of Alexandra Tynan’s
original Cyberman design.
“I was flicking through some old
CYBER-MANN
J
immy Mann fulfilled a boyhood have a silver suit, but I had a blue
dream by working on the boiler suit, and a supersoaker, as
Mondasian Cybermen but, as that’s the only gun I could get! The
he reveals, this wasn’t his first time. head and the chest unit I made out
His first attempt at building of cardboard boxes. I wanted
a Cyberman actually to be a Cyber
appeared in Doctor Who
Magazine way back
in issue 298, when
Jimmy was just Leader, which is why he’s got
13 years old. the black handles.”
“DWM published Jimmy’s attention to detail
a picture of my extended to a grisly custom
home-made Cyberman feature for authentic-looking
costume,” he says. Cyber-death scenes.
“I was always interested “I made a tube in the
in making costumes, front of the chest unit
and the David Banks so I could hold some milk
Cybermen book [first in my mouth to spew out
published in 1988] was of the front if I got shot
a bible to me. I didn’t or something!”
pictures and noticed a volume knob Bill finds the injured Doctor on the
on the front of the chest unit, the battlefield. “I was told that the suit
same as the one on my old Fender needed to be dirty, and I didn’t know Top right: Thirteen-
guitar amplifier. I ordered a bag of this was going to happen at all. year-old Jimmy Mann,
as he appeared in
them from eBay, Jimmy cast them, I borrowed the prop boys’ dirty-down issue 298 of Doctor
and we stuck them on.” sprays and ruined the entire suit with Who Magazine in
When the outfits were complete, loads of dirt, ash, oil and burn marks. November 2000.
Kate sent the finished Cyber-army You hardly see it, but the chest unit’s Above: Jimmy and
to the Doctor Who studio cracked and it’s kind of gross,” he friends enjoy David
in Cardiff. Jimmy says with pride. Banks’ 1988 book
Cybermen.
Mann was on set to Working on the 2017 series was
Left and below left:
assist the actors, and a happy experience for the crew at Concept designs and
unexpectedly found Millennium. “The whole series has a test fitting for a ‘top
himself improvising been super fun; the usual panics, knot’ Cyberman.
a last-minute but so rewarding”, says Kate. Below right: Jimmy
Cyber-design “I’m excited and delighted for took this photo of
a female Doctor – bring on the Pearl Mackie and
of his own for
a Cyberman actor
the scene where Thirteenth!” she continues. “I was during location work
the damaged, so happy about Iraxxa, but we need on The Doctor Falls.
Cyber-converted more female monsters too!” DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 41
 Episode 6

Extremis FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

The Pope summons the Doctor to the

Vatican with an unusual request. He
is to read the Veritas, an ancient text
containing a truth so terrible it drives
the reader to self-destruction…

I
s this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Could it be that you – yes, you, the
presumed ‘reader’ right now presumed
to be scanning your presumed ‘eyes’
along this presumed ‘sentence’ in this
presumed ‘Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook’,
and translating these presumed ‘letters’ into
input for your presumed ‘consciousness’ –
exists only in a simulated reality?
A detailed analysis of the so-called
‘simulation argument’ – ie, that we are
‘living’ in a simulation created by ‘posthumans’
– was published by Oxford University
philosopher Nick Bostrom in a 2003 issue of
Philosophical Quarterly (see simulation-argument.
com). Bostrom concluded that ‘the belief
that there is a significant chance that we
will one day become posthumans who run
ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are
currently living in a simulation.’
Now scan that last bit again: ‘unless we
are currently living in a simulation.’
Head-spinning stuff for mere humans,
of course, but it’s not so unusual a situation
for the Doctor to find himself in. After all, the
world of Extremis – ultimately revealed to be
an invasion-planning scenario electronically
conjured up by the mysterious alien Monks
– isn’t so different to the Time Lords’ Matrix,
the computerised vista which the Fourth
Doctor (Tom Baker) ventured inside in The
Deadly Assassin (1976), followed by the Sixth
(Colin Baker) in the final two episodes of
The Trial of a Time Lord (1986). The Monks’
simulation can also be escaped by means of
a magical door, but its limits can’t be perceived
simply by hollering, “I deny this reality!”

BBC One, 20 May 2017

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Daniel Nettheim
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy),
Jennifer Hennessy (Moira), Corrado Invernizzi
(Cardinal Angelo), Joseph Long (The Pope),
Ronke Adekoluejo (Penny), Ivanno Jeremiah
(Rafando), Francesco Martino (Piero), Alana
Maria (Pentagon Woman), Laurent Maurel
(Nicolas), Jamie Hill (Monk), Tim Bentinck
(Voice of the Monk)
Rating: 5.53m
Appreciation Index: 82

42 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
Nardole and Bill return to a white room with portals leading
off to the Vatican, the Pentagon and Cern, among others.
Nardole realises that these are holographic worlds created
by a ring of projectors…
Nardole: “Oh...”
Bill: “Oh?”
Nardole: “Those machines, they… project the simulations.”
Bill: “Yeah…?”
Nardole: “And I’m just wondering… what happens
if we move outside the light of the projector?”
He walks towards the projectors.
“Don’t let me be right. Please, don’t let me be right…”
Reaching behind the projectors, he sees his hand is a wire-frame animation.
Similarly, the impossible architecture of the
Haereticum, the secret library inside the Vatican,
is every bit as un-navigable as the impossible
architecture of the mathematically created town
of Castrovalva (1982) – the fictional world built
by the Master (Anthony Ainley) to trap the
Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison). The truth about
Castrovalva was also to be revealed by careful
study of ancient volumes from a library; and
the scheme was undone by the self-sacrifice of
Ruther (Frank Wylie), who effectively ‘deleted
himself’– rather like one of the “pretend
people… in computer games” who, the alt-
Twelfth Doctor tells the alt-Bill, “think they’re
real. They feel it.”
Then there’s the Land of Fiction, as visited
by the Second Doctor (Patrick
Troughton) in Episodes
2 to 5 of The Mind
Robber (1968). Or
should that read
‘visited’? Because the
first episode of the
subsequent serial,
The Invasion (1968),
established that Episodes
2 to 5 occurred, if they ‘occurred’
at all, within the mind of the
Doctor – since he awoke in the chair
he fell asleep in just before the
TARDIS appeared to break up
at the end of Episode 1. It’s
entirely possible that the
Doctor seen in Episodes 2 to 5
wasn’t actually ‘real’, and nor were his boy and
girl companion; that the real Doctor and his
companions only actually existed in the scenes
either side of the Doctor’s presumed dream.
So it is in Extremis, where the ‘real’ Doctor,
Nardole and Bill exist only in scenes that frame
the story that occurs in the unreal world –
before, after and in flashback. But whereas the
dream Second Doctor had struggled to avoid
turning himself into fiction by inadvertently
writing himself into the story, the recreated
Twelfth Doctor of Extremis is fictional from
the outset.
What Extremis tells us, though, is that the
Twelfth has a greater ally to call on than the
Musketeer D’Artagnan, or Blackbeard the
Pirate, or any other of the Second Doctor’s
actually fictional allies: he can call
on himself. In a story where
belief in the heretical text
of the Veritas leads to
self-destruction,
it’s only right
that belief should
result in salvation,
too. Because when
the alt-Doctor emails his
memories to his real self –
“Dear Doctor, Save Them” –
it’s the ultimate expression
of self-belief.
The Doctor believes
in the Doctor. And that’s
what makes him real. DWM
DATA FILE
l In the real world, between The Husbands of River
Song (2015) and The Pilot (2017), the Doctor was
brought to a planet of executioners in order to
put Missy to death, using technology “precisely
calibrated” for the destruction of a Time Lord
– by stopping both hearts and “all three brain
stems”, then delivering “a cellular shock wave”
to “permanently disable regenerative ability”.
l According to Cardinal Angelo, the Doctor’s
services were recommended by Pope Benedict IX,
writing in 1045 – leading the simulated Doctor to
recall an extraordinary night with said Benedict,
a lovely girl: “I knew she was trouble, but she wove
a spell with her castanets.” A portrait of pretty
Benedict – who said that the Doctor was “more
in need of confession than any man breathing” –
guards the entrance to the Haereticum.
Described by Cardinal Angelo as a
“library of blasphemy”, this secret area
was instituted by Benedict herself.
l Conventional history – in the real
world, that is – records that Benedict
IX (circa 1012-56) was a man born
Theophylactus of Tusculum, who
ascended to the ‘Chair of Peter’ aged
20 by means of bribery. Having served three terms
as Pope between 1032 and 1048, Benedict IX was
later condemned by Victor III (circa 1026-87) for
“unspeakable acts” committed during the course
of a life “so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder
to think of it”. It’s been said that Ben the Ninth’s
reputation may have been coloured for political gain
by his many rivals – but perhaps ‘he’ was painted
that way to silence more blasphemous rumours still!
REVIEWS
‘[Extremis] only fully makes sense at the end, and
▼
then – if your head isn’t hurting too much – it’s hard
to resist the impulse to go back and watch again
from the start.’ Radio Times
‘There were… echoes of films with a simulated
▼
reality theme, such as The Matrix, Tron, Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil, and the writing of Philip K Dick.’
The Daily Telegraph
‘A rhetorical question given the thousands of
▼
years of murderous plotting, but what exactly did
Missy do? There must have been something big to
warrant her execution at the hands of whoever-they-
were…’ The Guardian
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 43
 WHOVIANS
The panel show Whovians, hosted by comedian Rove McManus,
was one of the highlights of 2017 for Australian fans.
FEATURE BY ANDREW PIXLEY
n Australia in 2017, Doctor

I
Who was shown at 7.40pm
on Sunday by ABC1. Each
episode was immediately
followed by Whovians at
8.30pm on ABC2 and ABC
iview. This half-hour panel
show was announced in late
March, when fans were invited to register
as audience members. The format was
proposed by its host, comedian and
presenter Rove McManus.
“When I was a kid, Doctor Who was
a staple of early evening weeknight
television,” explains Rove. “My earliest
memories are of being terrified by the
mummies in a rerun of Pyramids of Mars
[1975]. I also recall the announcement
that Tom Baker was leaving and
watching Logopolis [1981] with keen
interest to witness my first regeneration
– you always remember your first, right?
– at the age of eight.
“The series idea initially came about
because I love to talk about the show
– a lot. People soon learn not to even
bring it up with me if they want to do
something else with the rest of their day.
I discuss and hypothesise every detail
from every episode with my friends.”
Recalling after-shows while living in the
US and the BBC’s own Doctor Who: The
Fan Show, Rove felt that there could be a
viable audience for a themed chat show
in Australia.
“Rove came to the ABC with the idea
for the show,” recalls executive producer
Nick Hayden. “He’s a big Who fan. When
true passion and experience combine
you get great TV, so it was a no-brainer.”
Nick himself was also a devotee. “I was
introduced to Doctor Who by my father.
In the 1980s, the ABC used to screen a lot
of the Tom Baker era. It felt like whenever
I turned on the TV in the afternoon
Doctor Who was on. Thanks Dad. I was
also a huge fan of the post-2005 era.”
To analyse each episode, a panel of
‘superfans’ was recruited. “Fellow
comedians Adam Richard and

44 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

Justin Hamilton and
I have been talking
about Doctor Who with
each other for just
about as long as I can
remember,” says Rove.
“Adam is especially
knowledgeable on the
classic era as well as Big
Finish’s audio adventures.”
The excitable Adam became
a permanent panellist, offering
theories so complex that Rove had to
employ a Dalek-shaped spray to control
his outbursts, having the audience call
“Spray” or “Nay” regarding each notion.
Co-writing with Rove, Justin hosted
a round-up of goings-on in each show’s
pre-recorded How Who Knows Who
News segment.
Another regular panellist was Steven
‘Bajo’ O’Donnell. “I was working with
“I love to talk about the
show. People learn not to
bring it up if they want to do
something else with the rest
of their day.” Rove McManus
Bajo on the video game show Good Game
and knew how much he loved Doctor
Who,” says Nick. “While the others are
seasoned comedians, Bajo brought a
more analytical point of view.” Rove
welcomed the suggestion: “We’d never
actually worked together before. Bajo’s
enthusiasm was a perfect
addition. His unique
perspective brought
many questions
viewers might have
about the series.”
Other guests drew
upon the tight-knit
Australian comedy
community and the
Doctor Who fanbase. “Tegan
Higginbotham and I have crossed
paths on the comedy scene in recent
years,” says Rove. “She’s a true
modern-era fan who pines almost every
day for the return of David Tennant.
Plus, she’s actually named after [1980s
companion] Tegan Jovanka – that’s not
a lie – so if that doesn’t get her in, I don’t
know what does.” Nick agrees: “She’s the
perfect bridge between die-hard Who fans
and the more casual viewer.” Joining in the fun were musician
Opposite page:
Geraldine Quinn with her song Doctor
Rove McManus, the
Who’s Assistant, former senator Stephen creator and presenter
Conroy (Nick: “I knew he used to be part of Whovians.
of a parliamentary Doctor Who fan club”)
and also controversial Federal MP George
Above left: Regular
panellist Tegan
Higginbotham.
Christensen, who once edited the fanzine
Kronos Express. “We wanted to show Above right: Rove
embraces a 1980s-style
that despite people’s differences, Doctor
Cyberman.
Who really is very inclusive,” says Nick.
Below: Some of the
“Excluding someone for their political many contributors to
beliefs seemed to me to go against
the ethos of the show. If you have
someone on your show, you have to
Whovians – Adam
Richard, Jordan
Raskopoulos, Rove
McManus, head writer
treat them with respect. We only asked Justin Hamilton, Tegan
“It’s rare to get such a perfect questions that related to Doctor Who or Higginbotham and
alignment of passion and experience referenced George’s political beliefs in the Steven O’Donnell.
and Rove brought both in hosting series’ context. Most importantly, all
Whovians,” says Nick. “He genuinely panellists were included because they
loves the show, and that became a rule were huge fans.”
for all our panel and guests. We can “Our Whovians title
make fun of the show, but only if you suggests this is a show for
truly love it.” people who are far too
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 45
WHOVIANS

into Doctor Who for their own good,” that they trusted us with an incredibly
Above left: Adam
Richard, Alice Fraser,
explains Rove, “but I wanted it to be important property.” Regular features
Rove McManus, Tegan positive. I’ve listened to podcasts included Villain of the Week, The Vault better understanding. “We wrote all the
Higginbotham and by fans which become very critical about Report (guessing the contents of the scripts and pitched them to the individual
Steven O’Donnell enjoy a show they apparently loved. I wanted Doctor’s mysterious lock-up), plus people,” explains Nick. “Some were fans
a lively debate in
Whovians to feel like a celebration, but not previews and behind-the-scenes reports – like Michael Roland from the Breakfast
the fourth show.
too intensely nerdy so that hopefully it from the BBC. A particularly fun element team – and others had no idea what
Above right: Rove is
attacked by a Voc from could still be enjoyed by non-fans. Much was well-known ABC broadcasters anything in the script meant!”
1977’s The Robots of like enjoying Top Gear without knowing
Death!
Below left: Rove
what a carburettor does.” The chat
captured the thrill of fans seeing “One of my highlights is
shining the spotlight on
meets a young fan. a new adventure in space and time for
Below right: The the first time, blending humour with
promotional trailer

how much we Aussies have

straight-talking tough-love and
for Whovians.
eulogising the show’s values.
“The BBC was fantastic,” adds
Nicholas. “They allowed us to be playful
and occasionally critical which showed
infiltrated Doctor Who in
recent times.” Rove McManus
auditioning to become the next
Doctor. Landscape architect Costa
Georgia dispropagated Krynoids;
breakfast anchor Virginia Trioli
discussed The Tenth Planet; Play
School’s Teo Gebert and Alex Papps
declared, “We know a song about
Zygons don’t we?”; and spiritual
expert Kumi Taguchi declared
that Cybermen’s cultural
differences needed
“One of my highlights was embracing
the Australian connection to Doctor
Who,” says Rove. “Having director Daniel
Nettheim, costume designer Hayley
Nebauer, writer Sarah Dollard and
even Mondasian Cybermen designer
Alexandra Tynan on the show allowed us
to not only get some incredible insights,
but also shine the spotlight on just how
much we Aussies have infiltrated Doctor
Who in recent times.”

46 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

Another contributor 7.00pm if we were fast,” Who did What
was renowned horse explains Nick.
trainer Gai Waterhouse, “I think the most Host/Writer: Rove McManus
who had acted under successful element of the Whovians Panel: Tegan Higginbotham [1-2,4-5,7-8,10-12], Adam
the name Gai Smith show was simply how it Richard [1-12], Steven O’Donnell [1-2,4-6,9,11-12], Geraldine Quinn
and worked on The connected with fans, like [1,3], Jordan Raskopoulos [2,8,12], Cal Wilson [3,10], Stephen
Invasion of Time in nothing I’d ever Conroy [3], Alice Fraser [4], Petra Elliott [5], George Christensen
1977 (“One of the most experienced,” [5], Yassmin Abdel-Magied [6], Rhianna Patrick [6], Daniel
fun things I’ve ever done in says Nick, Nettheim [6], Tasma Walton [7], Paul Verhoeven [7],
my life”). looking back Bridie Connell [8,11], Celia Pacquola [9], Dave Callan
Rove also hit the streets of Sydney, at the first run. “We [9], Stav Davidson [10]
offering free pies from were also lucky to have Head Writer: Justin Hamilton
under his hat a la Thin Ice (“I was a spectacular team to Additional Writing and Research: Patrick Magee
horrified by how many people happily make it happen each Original Concept: Rove McManus
accepted”). During his shark attack week. Fingers crossed we’ll Director: Simon Francis [1-2], Todd Decker [3-12]
warning he encountered holidaying be back for the Christmas Series Producer: Nick Price
actor Ian Cullen, who had appeared in Special and the next series.” Executive Producer: Nick Hayden
the 1964 story The Aztecs. “If I could add anything in
Generally, the ABC team received future, it would be nice to have access Show 1 (16 April): Reaction to The Pilot, Doctor Who’s links with
each new episode a fortnight before to more of the classic series from the Australia (including a chat with Gai Smith), a shark attack, and
transmission. Panellists viewed the BBC archives,” says Rove. “What Jennifer Byrne of First Tuesday Book Club auditions as the new
shows a week in advance on would also be great is for the show Doctor with Jason Steger and Marieke Hardy.
Sunday or Monday. A Tuesday to be seen outside Australia, so
script meeting gathered that the wider Whoniverse Show 2 (23 April): The studio audience attempt to Smile through
ideas for the next show could join in the fun as anything, Who-related tattoos and auditions from Charlie Pickering,
which Rove, Justin and well. Doctor Who is a Kitty Flanagan and Tom Gleeson of The Weekly.
Patrick Magee would global franchise and it’d
refine for circulation be nice to be able to Show 3 (30 April): Thin Ice prompts discussion of the butterfly
on Thursday night. have the opportunity to effect, Sarah Dollard on crying at job interviews, Rove offers free
Thursday and Friday embrace that a bit more. pies, and Doctor Who’s Assistant.
also saw the assembly Whovians is a show for
of pre-recorded inserts, fans by fans, so the more Show 4 (7 May): Knock Knock invites shots of house
with Friday devoted to the merrier I say.” DWM renovations, Rove chats to David Suchet, eight-year-old
location recording and an Sabrina asks for a female Doctor, plus auditions from
afternoon cast readthrough. Hoot the Owl and Jimmy Giggle of Giggle and Hoot.
Recording took place
at the ABC Studios on Show 5 (14 May): Following Oxygen, Dexter Gibson-
Harris Street Ultimo at Cummings has a theory about the vault, Federal MP George
noon on Sunday, with Christensen wants an episode made in Australia and Costa
the audience of around Georgiadis of Gardening Australia auditions.
150 having been shown
the latest episode Show 6 (21 May): Extremis director Daniel Nettheim joins the
immediately beforehand. panel, cosplay at the Doctor Who Festival and the new audition is
“We wrapped studio in ABC News’ Jeremy Fernandez.
the afternoon. Then the
series producer and Show 7 (28 May): Debating The Pyramid at the End of the World,
I would cut the show Adam discovers how viewers hide their fandom, Steven Moffat
until delivery at about chats by video link and Virginia Trioli of ABC Breakfast auditions
with Michael Rowland.
Top left inset:
Regular panellist Show 8 (4 June): Pearl Mackie chats by video, after The
Steven O’Donnell. Lie of the Land the prize is awarded for The Vault Report,
Top right inset: and Play School’s Teo Gebert and Alex Papps audition.
A scene from the
series’ trailer. Show 9 (11 June): Empress of Mars writer Mark Gatiss
Above inset: chats to Rove by video link and Kumi Taguchi
Regular panellist
of Compass auditions as the next Doctor.
Adam Richard.
Right: Rove adopts
a familiar pose.
Show 10 (18 June): Following The Eaters of Light, Rove curries
favour with popcorn, Hayley Nebauer appears on video link, and
Far right inset 1:
David Suchet appeared Zoë Norton Lodge and Kirsten Drysdale audition from The Checkout.
in the fourth show.
Far right inset 2: Show 11 (25 June): Debate on the events of World Enough and
Pearl Mackie was Time, and further Doctor auditions from Barrie Cassidy of
interviewed in show Insiders with Niki Savva, Phil Coorey and Mark Riley.
number eight.
Far right inset 3:
Show 12 (2 July): In a 45-minute series finale for The
Stephen Conroy
was a panellist in the Doctor Falls, Alexandra Tynan and Steven Moffat call,
third show. and Matt Lucas enthuses about Whovians (“which
I haven’t seen but Rove tells me is marvellous”).

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 47

 Episode 7

The Pyramid at the

End of the World FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

The Monks have landed on Earth, promising

to save it from some imminent disaster… at
a price. Meanwhile, an unfortunate series
of events leads to a biochemical experiment
going very wrong indeed…

L
ong story short: the end of the world
begins not with an ill-advised face-off
between nuclear powers in a faraway
land, but in Yorkshire, after a misplaced
decimal point in an ‘Agrofuel’ lab
creates bacteria that “turns any living thing it
touches into gunk”. The former may seem more
plausible, but would you sleep any better at
night for knowing that the latter might
actually have happened, a little over
20 years ago?
In 1999, an article in the
eco-journal Synthesis/Regeneration
reported on an experiment
conducted a few years earlier at
Oregon State University, in which a genetically
modified Klebsiella planticola bacterium, a soil
organism re-engineered to thrive on plant
residue, appeared to have ‘devastating effects’
on wheat plants: ‘The wheat plants grew
quite well in the Mason jars in the laboratory
incubator, until about a week after we started
the experiment,’ wrote microbiologist Dr Elaine
Ingham. ‘We came into the laboratory one
morning, opened up the incubator and went,
“Oh my God, some of the plants are dead.
What’s gone wrong? What did we do wrong?”’
The logical extrapolation, concluded Ingham,
was to suggest ‘that it is possible to make a
genetically engineered micro-organism that

BBC One, 27 May 2017

Writers: Peter Harness & Steven Moffat
Director: Daniel Nettheim
Guest cast: Togo Igawa (Secretary General),
Nigel Hastings (The Commander), Eben Young
(Colonel Don Brabbit), Rachel Denning (Erica),
Tony Gardner (Douglas), Andrew Byron (Ilya),
Daphne Cheung (Xiaolian), Jamie Hill (Monk),
Tim Bentinck (Voice of the Monk)
Rating: 5.79m
Appreciation Index: 82

48 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
Inside the newly arrived pyramid, the Monks show their
‘simulation machine’ to the Doctor and a human delegation,
including the American Colonel Brabbit.
Monk: “We are modelling the future. Each thread
is a chain of days leading to your end. We can detect
when a catastrophe is about to occur.”
Doctor: “And?”
Monk: “Stop it from occurring.”
Brabbit: “You don’t look much like guardian angels.”
Monk: “We have chosen this form to look like you.”
Brabbit: “You look like corpses.”
Monk: “You are corpses to us. Your world is ending. You can do nothing, but we can save you.”
Doctor: “Save us, then.”
Monk: “To save you we must be asked.”
would kill all terrestrial plants. Since Klebsiella
planticola is in the root system of all terrestrial
plants, presumably all terrestrial plants would
be at risk.’
That conclusion is controversial, but there
can be no doubt that the Oregon experiment is
acknowledged in The Pyramid at the End of the
World: researcher Douglas’ monitor shows that
one of the three elements he’s mixing for Agrofuel
Research Operations is ‘R. PLANTICOLA’
(ie, Raoultella planticola, synonymous with
Klebsiella planticola); later, he and his colleague
Erica open their incubator to find that
their plants have died suddenly; and
later still, Erica describes to the
Doctor how their bacteria is “making
ethanol. The greenhouse and the lab
are full of it!” – when that modified
Klebsiella had been designed to break
down plant residue more efficiently by
producing greater quantities of… you
guessed it, ethanol.
Doctor Who has channelled fears of
a World War Three many times before
– as the Data File opposite shows.
The Agrofuel plot, though,
harkens back to Planet of
Giants (1964) and The Green
Death (1973), which warned
that contemporary science
could easily bring about ecological disaster.
True, GM bacteria in the soil is highly unlikely
to cause humans who come into contact with
it to dissolve into puddles of splat – as with the
bleary and hungover Douglas, green at both the
beginning and premature end of his last ever
day at work. Then again, industrial pollution
was never all that likely to create giant maggots
wallowing in pools of lethal green slime, either.
Actual, credible concerns are addressed in all
of these stories, nonetheless – as they were in
Doomwatch, the early 1970s ‘science fact’ drama
series devised by Cybermen co-creators Kit
Pedler and Gerry Davis. There can be
no doubt that, if it were still going,
Professor Quist’s ‘Department for
the Observation and Measurement
of Scientific Work’ would have
Agrofuel on a watchlist of its own.
It’s not hard to imagine two of
Doomwatch’s operatives – Toby Wren’s
bright-eyed great-niece, perhaps, or John
Ridge’s man-eating granddaughter –
turning up at the Agrofuel lab
and, like the Doctor and
Nardole, risking their lives
to save the world, too…
As The Pyramid at the
End of the World tells us,
somebody has to. DWM
DATA FILE
l According to the Doctor, Turmezistan sits “on the
strategic intersection of the three most powerful
armies on Earth” – the US, Russia and the People’s
Republic of China – raising the prospect that World
War Three might somehow be triggered. We know
that there will be a World War Three, ever since the
Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) described how
he’d already seen “World War Five” in The Unquiet
Dead (2005) – but various Doctors have helped avert
that conflagration, thus far. In the
near-contemporaneous The Mind
of Evil (1971), the Third Doctor (Jon
Pertwee) prevented the Master
(Roger Delgado) from using a stolen
missile to wipe out a World Peace
Conference, bringing about said
conflict… which would next have
kicked off in Day of the Daleks (1972), had the same
Doctor not prevented the assassination of diplomat
Sir Reginald Styles (Wilfrid Carter). The Fourth Doctor
(Tom Baker) helped stop the fascist SRS organisation
from instigating a nuclear apocalypse in Robot
(1974-75); and his successor (Peter Davison) stopped
the Silurians and Sea Devils from doing likewise
a century or so later, in Warriors of the Deep (1984).
According to Dalek (2005), failed companion Adam
Mitchell (Bruno Langley) nearly caused WWIII
when he hacked the US defence system at the age
of eight. Finally, in Aliens of London/World War Three
(2005), the alien Slitheen family also tried to bring
the eponymous conflict about.
l The Doctor describes how the
Doomsday Clock – a symbolic clock
face representing a countdown to
possible global catastrophe – was
first set ticking in 1947. At the time
of the Monks’ arrival, the clock was
set at three minutes to midnight. You
can see its latest reading on the home page of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: thebulletin.org
REVIEWS
‘TPATEOTW is an engaging middle chapter,
▼
confidently told, that glides over its sillier aspects
in the pursuit of portents of doom.’ Radio Times
‘The Doctor’s main ally this week was in fact the
▼
lovely Erica, a companion who never-was-or-will-be
in the grand tradition of Sally Sparrow.’ The Guardian
‘The issue of the Doctor’s blindness finally gets
▼
a pay off in terms of storytelling, culminating
in something we haven’t seen him face in a while:
hubris.’ Daily Mirror
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 49
 SCIENTIFIC ADVISOR
In The Pyramid at the End of the World Rachel Denning helped to save
the human race from annihilation… and got a selfie into the bargain.
INTERVIEW BY PAUL KIRKLEY

R
achel Denning’s first memory
of Doctor Who is playing
the theme tune on the
recorder at a primary
school concert. She was
ten years old, and the
show had been off the air
for a long time. “Even though
I was born in 1986, I feel like Doctor Who
was always around,” she says. “It’s sort of
like a backdrop to life, isn’t it?”
What that girl in Essex couldn’t have
known was that 20 years later she would
not only meet Doctor Who – she’d help
him save the world.
It started with a phone call just before
Christmas 2016. “My agent said, ‘I’ve
got you an amazing meeting,’” Rachel
recalls. “And she was right, it was
amazing. It was for Doctor Who!”
The meeting led to her being cast
as research scientist Erica – a leading
guest role in The Pyramid at the End
of the World. “I really liked the character
as soon as I read her,” says Rachel.
“I thought she was very intelligent.
I liked the fact she was the one who
survived! She’s very clever – quite dry,
quite measured. A bit like me, really.
Well, apart from the intelligence bit…
“And also, as an actress of short
stature, I liked the fact they got me in to
play a character where the height wasn’t
really a thing – it wasn’t mentioned.
Which is how it should be, I think.”
Rachel was born with achondroplasia,
a bone disorder that results in restricted
growth (she is 4’ 1”). But Erica’s height
doesn’t factor at all in Peter Harness
and Steven Moffat’s script. “What’s
interesting is, once you put it in front of
an audience – and Doctor Who is a great
platform for that – they just accept it,”

Above: Lab worker

Erica (Rachel Denning)
in The Pyramid at the
End of the World (2017).
Right: “I liked the fact
they got me in to play
a character where the
height wasn’t really
a thing,” says Rachel.

50 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

“Peter Capaldi is brilliant,
but it’s one thing meeting
Peter, and another
meeting Doctor Who.”
she says. “In the feedback I got, there was
hardly any comment on my height – it
was all about Erica, the character. We
should give audiences a bit more credit,
I think.”
Most of Rachel’s scenes were filmed
in a laboratory at Swansea University,
where she continued a long tradition of
Doctor Who actors being “absolutely
freezing”. Luckily, she got to
wear “loads of thermals”
under her hazmat suit.
For much of the
episode, Rachel was
paired with actor Tony
Gardner ­who, as
Erica’s colleague
Douglas, brought
mankind to the brink
of extinction by
accidentally creating
a virulent new strain of
bacteria. When poor old Douglas
got his comeuppance by dissolving
into a pile of mulch, Rachel acquired
a new co-star in the form of a certain
Time Lord.
“Peter Capaldi is so brilliant,” she says.
“A very, very lovely man. I first met him
in the make-up truck, but it’s one thing
meeting Peter, and quite another meeting
Doctor Who. That’s when I thought,
‘Okay, this is getting weird now. I’m
making a bomb with Doctor Who!’’’
What’s the ‘selfie etiquette’ when you’re
a guest actor working with a big star? Do
you pop the question – or is that deemed
unprofessional? “I never asked, I didn’t
think I could,” says Rachel. “But what’s
great about Peter is he kind of knows
everyone’s going to want a photo in
front of the TARDIS. So he took that
pressure off my hands: on my last day,
he said, ‘Come on, we need to get
a photo, where’s your phone?’ He’s
a fan himself, of course, so he
knows what you want.”
While the young Erica
wanted to be a bus
driver (because she
liked the way they
waved at other bus
drivers) Rachel knew
from an early age that
she wanted to act.
“But I didn’t think it
was possible,” she says.
“I thought, ‘You have film
and soap stars, and then people
who aren’t working.’ I didn’t realise there
was something in between – that you
could be a jobbing actor.”
That said, she had a tough time after
graduating from the Mountview Academy
of Theatre Arts in London. “You think
there’s going to be plenty of work and
plenty of phone calls, but it doesn’t
really happen like that. You have to
start grafting your way – going for any
sort of job.”
Did her disability (a word that Rachel
doesn’t believe in running away from)
make it even more challenging? “It’s
definitely a different layer of resistance,”
Above left: Douglas
(Tony Gardner) and
she says. “In the early stages I found it Erica realise that
was helpful because it was a talking point. something has gone
Someone said to me at drama school, very wrong.
‘You will work when you leave, but it’s
whether or not you want that sort of
Above right: Erica
and the Doctor (Peter
Capaldi) set about
work.’ There were definitely a few things saving the world.
that I wanted to avoid, that I thought Inset: Erica leaves
probably weren’t a good choice for me. home for what will turn
So I wouldn’t say it’s made it harder, out to be a very bad day
but I wouldn’t say it’s made it easier at the office.
either. I don’t really know any different, Below: Erica discovers
that Douglas is dead.
to be honest.”
In January 2017 Rachel made
a memorable appearance in Call the
Midwife, in an episode which tackled the
prejudice faced by pregnant women with
dwarfism. “I thought it was an important
story to share,” she says. “And it was
lovely to film – especially the scenes where
I got to lay in bed!”
What with that and saving the entire
planet – plus a busy theatre schedule –
2017 proved to be something of a vintage
year. “It’s been a real memorable one,”
she says. “Especially being part of Doctor
Who. With Doctor Who, you’re not just
part of an episode, you didn’t just have
a job – you’re now part of its history.
Which is really cool.” DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 51
 Episode 8

The Lie of
the Land FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

Since civilisation began, humanity

has been enriched by the guidance
and benevolent rule of the Monks.
With the Doctor as their chief
propagandist, it seems the
creatures’ power over
mankind is unassailable…

A
mong their many other
achievements – the light bulb,
the telephone, the internet
– the Monks inspired Monty
Python’s Flying Circus. Why?
Because if the Monks’ psychic link is passed
on from the ‘lynchpin’ they use to gain control
of a planet, Missy tells the Doctor and Bill,
then the Monks stay in charge – “through,
they think, their ruthlessness and efficiency.”
“Ruthless efficiency” was, of course, the
third of the three – sorry, four – chief weapons
of the Pythons’ Spanish Inquisition, along
with fear, surprise, an almost fanatical
devotion to the Pope… whom the Monks
involved themselves with in Extremis… and
nice red cowls. (Five chief weapons!)
Fake news, obviously. The Monks did not
in fact inspire that famous Python sketch
(from the second episode of the second
series, first broadcast 22 September 1970).
But the analogy isn’t entirely daft. The Lie
of the Land, after all, begins with a mother
– one Jane Bishop – being dragged from
her family’s comfy chair by the Monks’
human acolytes, and charged with “the
manufacture and possession of propaganda
intended to undermine the True History…

BBC One, 3 June 2017

Writer: Toby Whithouse
Director: Wayne Yip
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy), Emma
Handy (Mother), Beatrice Curnew (Group
Commander), Stewart Wright (Alan), Solomon
Israel (Richard), Jamie Hill (Monk), Rosie Jane
(Bill’s Mum)
Rating: 4.82m
Appreciation Index: 82

52 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
In his cell aboard a prison hulk, the Doctor explains to Bill
human society isn’t just stagnating… it’s regressing.
Bill: “What about free will? You believe in free will.
Your whole thing is – (She remembers) you made me
write a 3,000-word essay on free will.”
Doctor: “Yes, well, I mean – you had free will, and look
at what you did with it. Worse than that, you had history.
History was saying to you, ‘Look, I’ve got some examples
of fascism here for you to look at. No? Fundamentalism?
No? Oh, okay – you carry on.’ I had to stop you, or at least
not stand in the way of someone else who wanted to, because the guns
were getting bigger, the stakes were getting higher, and any minute now it was going to be,
‘Goodnight, Vienna.’ By the way, you never delivered that essay.”
in contravention of the Memory Crimes Act of
1975”. One might say, therefore, that poor Jane
is accused of heresy on diverse counts: heresy
by thought, heresy by word, heresy by deed
and heresy by action…
Each of the three parts of the so-called ‘Monks
trilogy’ turns its narrative around a distinctly
different 21st-century paranoia: in Extremis,
the existential fear that real life is going on
elsewhere; in The Pyramid at the End of the World,
the fear of a modern apocalypse, be it driven by
nuclear war or bacteriological pestilence; in The
Lie of the Land, fear of mass delusion by media
manipulation. But there’s something else going
on in The Lie of the Land, too. It’s an ‘occupation’
story – not unlike The Dalek Invasion of Earth
(1964) or Last of the Time Lords (2007) – in which
the Doctor’s companion(s) travel great distances
across an already-invaded Earth in order to
liberate the Doctor from the clutches of some
occupying force, before they can banish that
alien force from the heart of their power, and
free the planet.
These are ‘resistance
is useful’ stories,
painted over the widest
of space-and-time
canvases – so broad that
one can easily imagine them
expanded to fill a full season’s
worth of adventures. For all we
know, for example, Bill has been
watching Jane Bishop, and her efforts to
fight back against the Monks, for all of the
previous six months (how was she found out?
Was she betrayed?). There are whole unseen
episodes’ worth of story, too, in the Doctor’s
progressive attempts to convert his captors
throughout that half-year span; and in Nardole’s
recovery from Raoultella planticola infection,
and how he then tracks down the Doctor (just
where is the TARDIS throughout?). Then there’s
the saga of the fishing boat captain who agrees
to transport Bill and Nardole to the prison ship,
with the son who got ten years for possession of
a box of comics…
Plus, there’s the story of the Doctor, Bill
and Nardole’s subsequent journey back to the
university with Alan, Dave et al, across the
length of both Scotland and England, dodging
the Monks and their Memory Police – and
perhaps ensuring, en route, that the group
commander who arrested poor Jane Bishop right
at the start receives either her redemption, or her
come-uppance, or both. Oh – and
there has to be a prologue showing
Missy’s prior misadventure with
the Monks, and that poor wee girl
in the volcano, too…
Picture that story now –
all ten or 12 epic episodes’
worth. It’s real in your
mind’s eye, isn’t it?
Even though you never
actually saw it. But
maybe some lies are
worth believing in,
after all. DWM
DATA FILE
l Bogus images disseminated
by the Monks suggest that
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
drew one of them into his
L’Uomo Vitruviano, or ‘Vitruvian
Man’, and painted another
into his La Gioconda, the
Mona Lisa. From City of Death
(1979), we know that Leonardo
was actually in the employ
of Scaroth, the last of the
Jagaroth, who claimed to have
“caused the pyramids to be
built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first
wheel, shown the true use of fire…” So reality is
actually stranger than the Monks’ fiction. Scaroth, in
truth, was one of many alien beings to have directly
influenced mankind’s development – including,
for example, the Dæmons (from The Dæmons,
1971); and arguably, the Doctor himself – when, for
example, he dropped an apple on Isaac Newton’s
head and later explained gravity to him over dinner
(as related in The Pirate Planet, 1978).
l The Monks also purport to
have welcomed “the first men
on the Moon” – meaning Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, in
July 1969. But their doctored
photo doesn’t show the Tenth
Doctor and Martha Jones, who were actually present
on that occasion. “Oh, the Moon landing’s brilliant,”
Martha (Freema Agyeman) claimed in Blink (2007).
“We went four times…” (In the very next episode,
Empress of Mars, the Doctor and Bill will meet the
real first men on the Moon.)
REVIEWS
‘Scripts this series have increasingly engaged with
▼
the real world and this one was no different, with
the Monks’ rule able to be read as both a religious
and political allegory.’ The Daily Telegraph
‘Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is the scariest thing in it…
▼
You can almost believe he’s working for the dark
side, so great is his disenchantment with the human
race.’ Radio Times
’[Missy’s] game of hot and cold with her sparring
▼
partner, mentions of pushing a small girl into a
volcano and piano interludes create a Silence of the
Lambs vibe that I could watch an entire episode of.’
Daily Mirror
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 53
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

Although partly obscured beneath

make-up and an elaborate, reptilian
costume, Adele Lynch gave an
unforgettable performance as the ruler
of the Ice Warriors in Empress of Mars.
INTERVIEW BY MARTIN RUDDOCK

54 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 E
ver since their
introduction back
in 1967, the hulking
Ice Warriors have
ranked highly in the
officer class of Doctor
Who monsters. They
initially seemed to be something of
a boys’ club, but that all changed in
2017 with the introduction of the first
female Ice Warrior, their mighty ruler
Iraxxa, in Mark Gatiss’ Empress of Mars.
For actress Adele Lynch, who played
Iraxxa, it started with a straightforward
casting call. “My agent phoned me and
I went for an audition with Nikki
[Wilson, producer], Wayne [Yip,
director] and the casting director,” says
Adele. “There wasn’t much information
because they have to be so secretive,
but there was a little bit of the script,
and Wayne gave me some suggestions.
We looked at a few photos of how the
costume might be and talked about the
voice a little. I left thinking, ‘That went
well, I hope they phone me!’ Sometimes
they do, sometimes they don’t…”
Happily for Adele, the call from BBC
Wales came and she was soon reporting
to Millennium FX for a full body cast
in preparation for her costume. “It
really was going in the deep end,” she
says. “Any director will ask, ‘Can you
ride a unicycle?’ and you say, ‘Oh yeah’,
then learn to do it after you get the job!
Once I’d visited Millennium a couple of
times I realised the extent of it. I was so
wowed by Gary Pollard’s design, and the
Ice Warriors are such an iconic character
with so much history behind them.”
Once Adele’s costume was complete,
she wasted no time getting into
character. “I remember putting the
whole costume on for the first time
upstairs at Millennium and I was
just like a kid, doing the arms,
going ‘Pew-pew!’ to the
windows,” she says gleefully.
Target practice over, Adele
got to grips with the part
of Iraxxa by examining her
motivation. “Here is someone
with huge power that’s been
asleep for a long time, and is
slightly disorientated when she wakes
up. The Doctor and Bill are there, the
soldiers are there, [fellow Ice Warrior]
Friday is there… you, the actress, have
to try to emit all these things that are
going on. Otherwise she’s just standing
there. Whether it’s Elizabeth I or Iraxxa
you want to get into those characters,
even though you’re wearing a heavy
costume. You have to be big of course,
but there has to be truth behind that or
you’re just being a panto villain.”
Was it hard for Adele to perform and
project in such a heavy costume under
the studio lights? “It was a little bit hard
to see and hear,” she admits. “I did
have to really concentrate. But when
“I remember putting the whole costume
on for the first time at Millennium and
I was just like a kid, doing the arms,
going ‘Pew-pew!’ to the windows.”
I watched it I was pleased at how much
was coming through. When I saw it
on the monitor I thought, ‘Wow – this
really does look amazing.’ That’s not
to do with me, that’s Gary’s work, but
I have to bring it to life.”
A
dele shared some major screen
time with Peter Capaldi and Pearl
Mackie in Empress of Mars, and is
full of praise for both actors. “I had
a lot of scenes with Peter Capaldi. He’s
so delicate and nuanced and I’m a
big big fan; he instantly makes
you feel very comfortable.
Pearl has a really light
touch where she can be
comic or heartbreaking.
They’re great together.”
Although Empress of Mars
was a complex, effects-heavy
production involving
pyrotechnics and long hours in
costume, Adele relished her experience
so much that she barely left the set.
“I don’t think me and Richard Ashton
[who played Friday] ever went into
our trailer because there was such a
great feeling of camaraderie on set. We
actually forgot we could go somewhere
else for lunch! Film sets are very warm,
especially under a prosthetic, and
there’s explosions going off… there’s
a lot of material to get through and
we’re working long days, but it was a
really fun production. No actor’s going
to moan about being in Doctor Who.”
Since the transmission of Empress
of Mars, Jodie Whittaker has been
announced as the Thirteenth Doctor.
Could Adele be tempted back for
a rematch against the new, female Doctor?
“I would love to!” she says without
hesitation. “At the end of the story
Iraxxa’s left to colonise her new home, so
hopefully the Doctor can find her later on
down the line. I think Iraxxa would love
a strong female Doctor. I think Jodie’s
going to be great – I’m such a fan – and
I don’t even have an idea of how she’s
going to play it, which is really exciting
isn’t it? There’s a lot of goodwill towards
her, which is brilliant. Every new Doctor
brings new fans with them. It can only
be good for the show.” DWM
Opposite page: Iraxxa
(Adele Lynch), queen
of the Ice Warriors in
Empress of Mars (2017).
Opposite page inset:
“It really was going
in at the deep end,”
says Adele.
Top: The Ice Warrior
named Friday (Richard
Ashton) attends Iraxxa,
while nervous Victorian
soldiers look on.
Inset: The Doctor (Peter
Capaldi) and Bill (Pearl
Mackie) are caught
between a clash of
cultures in Empress
of Mars.
Left: Adele pictured
during one of the fittings
for her Iraxxa costume.
Photo © Millennium FX.
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 55
 Episode 9

Empress
of Mars FEATURE BY ALAN BARNES

NASA’s Valkyrie probe reveals an astonishing

message from the surface of Mars. A message,
spelled out in Martian rocks, reading ‘GOD SAVE
THE QUEEN’. A message dating from the failed
British invasion of Mars, in 1881…

O
f course, the eponymous
Empress, she “of ” the Red
Planet, isn’t necessarily the Ice
Warrior queen Iraxxa, rudely
awoken from her sleep of five
millennia. The presumed Empress of Mars
could also be a certain royal personage who,
five years before, had formally adopted the
title ‘Empress of India’ – to wit, Alexandrina
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837
until her death in 1901. That’s why
Colonel Godsacre, Captain Catchpole
and their regiment of Redcoats
have come (by means of a restored
Martian vessel) to the fourth planet
of the solar system in the year of
their Lord 1881: “To claim Mars
in the name of Queen Victoria,”
realises the Doctor.“To loot it
of its riches, stake a claim. The
red planet turned pink.” Traditionally,
countries claimed by the British Crown were
coloured pink on maps, in atlases and on
globes; and the wholly rotten Catchlove will
later tell the Doctor, explicitly, that “Mars is
part of the Empire now”.
Victoria’s portrait stands in the soldiers’
encampment – looking just as she did when
the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) met her in

BBC One, 10 June 2017

Writer: Mark Gatiss
Director: Wayne Yip
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy),
Anthony Calf (Godsacre), Ferdinand Kingsley
(Catchlove), Richard Ashton (Friday), Adele
Lynch (Iraxxa), Glenn Speers (Sergeant
Major Peach), Ian Beattie (Jackdaw), Bayo
Gbadamosi (Vincey), Ian Hughes (Knibbs),
Lesley Ewen (Coolidge), Ysanne Churchman
(Voice of Alpha Centauri)
Rating: 5.02m
Appreciation Index: 83

56 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
The Doctor hushes Bill as penitent coward Colonel Godsacre
offers his life to the Ice Warrior queen Iraxxa… hoping that she
will then grant his request to spare his soldiers, and his world.
Iraxxa: “You will die with honour, with bravery,
and in the service of those you swore to protect…”
Godsacre: “Thank you. You don’t know what that means.
Thank you.”
Iraxxa: “… but not today. In battle, soldier. To die in battle
is the way of the warrior. Pledge your allegiance to me and
my world, and I will ensure you have the opportunity.”
Godsacre: “My life and my service are yours.
He kneels.
Godsacre: “To the end.”
Iraxxa: “To the death, my friend. To the death.”
The assembled Ice Warriors salute.
Tooth and Claw (2006), a story set just two years
before this one, in 1879. Godsacre’s men are
seeking gemstones here on Mars, and there’s no
more Victorian an ambition than that. After
all, Tooth and Claw had revolved around the
Koh-i-Noor, the “greatest diamond in the world”.
A diamond from an Indian mine, of course –
“Given to me as the spoils of war,” asserted
Her Majesty (Pauline Collins). Going to
war in foreign lands in pursuit of native
riches was far from alien to the Victorian
ideology, and in 1879 Her Majesty’s
forces set out to invade the Kingdom
of Zululand as part of a wider scheme
to federate and control the gold- and
diamond-rich regions of southern Africa.
On 22 January, some 1,800 British
troops armed with breech-loading rifles
met around 20,000 Zulus armed with
spears at the Battle of Isandlwana…
and were largely wiped out.
Godsacre, we learn, was there,
but “flunked it” and deserted
– just as his blackmailer
Catchpole will run out
on his own men when
they’re overrun by Iraxxa’s
Warriors: “sod this for
a game of soldiers…”
History repeats. The Doctor tells Bill
that the Ice Warriors “could build a city
under the sand, yet drench the snows of Mars
with innocent blood. They could slaughter
whole civilisations, yet weep at the crushing
of a flower.” He could have said much the
same of the Victorians. But like the
ambiguity over the title ‘Empress of
Mars’, perhaps that’s the point. The
Victorians could be monsters, too. And
in some parallel universe, who knows?
Perhaps the history of the solar system
was very different. Perhaps the rulers
of Imperial Earth went into hibernation
when their planet’s atmosphere failed,
round about the year 1900; only
for the Imperial Martians to
arrive on the dead third planet
round about the year 2400,
accidentally bringing their
legendary Queen out of
her hibernation…
The only question is:
would Victoria have
shown the Martian
invaders as much mercy
as Iraxxa ultimately
shows Godsacre and
his men? DWM
DATA FILE
l On first meeting ‘Friday’, the Doctor says he
knows the Ice Warriors of old: “I was once an
honorary guardian of the Tythonian Hive [sic: as
scripted].” Could this be a reference to an outpost
on the home planet of Tythonian ambassador Erato,
from The Creature from the Pit (1979); or could it
be somehow connected to the so-called “Typhonian
Beast”, aka contemporaneous Mars tomb-dweller
Sutekh, from Pyramids of Mars (1975)? Surely it
refers to Tithonius Lacus (‘Lake Tithon’) – the Greek
mythological name given by the Italian astronomer
Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) to a geographical
feature at Mars latitude -4.94° N and longitude
275.0° E…
l The chorus that the
rascally Jackdaw sings to
himself while trying to prise
gemstones from the side of
Iraxxa’s bier – “It’s the same
the whole world over/It’s the
poor what gets the blame/
It’s the rich what gets the
pleasure/Ain’t it all a bleedin’
shame?” – is from She Was
Poor but She Was Honest, a late 19th-century street
ballad turned music-hall ditty recorded (albeit with
“bloomin’” in place of “bleedin’”) by Billy Bennett
(1887-1942) in the early 1930s.
l At the last, an hermaphroditic alien from Alpha
Centauri welcomes Iraxxa’s restored Warriors to the
universe – it’s the same galactic ambassador whom
the earlier Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) will twice
meet later, in The Curse of Peladon (1972) and The
Monster of Peladon (1974).
REVIEWS
‘Strangely, across all those years we’ve seen [the
▼
Ice Warriors] on Earth, the Moon and Peladon, yet
until now never on their home planet Mars… The
masks, costumes and make-up are all extraordinarily
good...’ Radio Times
‘… what could be more quintessentially British
▼
than that hilarious scene of army officers drinking tea
and eating cake beneath Mars, while being waited
upon by an enslaved native?’ The Daily Telegraph
‘The manner by which the army are picked off, a
▼
human scrunching ray, is pretty gruesome for kids’
TV but seems a fate reserved for those that kind of
deserve it.’ Daily Mirror
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 57
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW
The
Hermaphrodite
Civil Servant
In a surprise cameo at the end
of Empress of Mars, Ysanne
Churchman returned to voice
Alpha Centauri – a character
that first appeared in 1972’s
The Curse of Peladon.
INTERVIEW BY SIMON GUERRIER

Y
sanne Churchman
was 91 years old
when she returned
to Doctor Who in 2017
to reprise the voice of
the alien hermaphrodite
Alpha Centauri. “I was
amazed,” she says. “I mean, I retired
about 20 years ago. But my past is really
catching up with me.”
It’s true. In 2015, Radio 4’s Dead Girls
Tell No Tales dramatised the real-life events
surrounding the death of a character
Ysanne played in the radio soap opera
The Archers. Grace Archer was shockingly
killed in a fire, in an episode broadcast
on 22 September 1955 – deliberately
scheduled to spoil the launch of ITV the
same night. The 2015 drama revealed,
for the first time, that Grace had been
selected because Ysanne annoyed Archers
creator Godfrey Baseley by asking to be
paid the same as her male colleagues.
In 2015 Ysanne told The Daily Telegraph
that this might actually have done her
a favour: “On the very night Grace died,
ITV started and immediately needed
people with exactly my experience to
voice commercials, so I was able to make
a good living from voiceovers for years.”
Ysanne has been seen – and heard – in
such cult favourites as Nigel Kneale’s Beasts
(1976) and the Play for Today productions
The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980) and
Another Flip for Dominick (1982). In the
mid-1960s Ysanne joined the cast of
puppet series Space Patrol, playing Marla
and Cassie. She even returned to The
Archers, playing several different
characters over time. “I had to do
completely different voices [from
Grace],” she says today. “But I’ve spent
my career doing all sorts – children, old
women, all this, that and the other.”

58 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 This was this range and flexibility
that led to Ysanne being cast in the 1972
Doctor Who story The Curse of Peladon.
“I’d worked quite a bit with [director]
Lennie Mayne before, so he knew
I specialised in voices,” she says. But
“l worked very closely with Stuart Fell,
Alpha Centauri was particularly unusual
– a six-armed, one-eyed hermaphrodite the stuntman. We had to discuss how he
would move, which would match my voice.”
with a high-pitched voice.
“He was a bit effeminate and also
anxious to do the right thing, but
frightened,” says Ysanne. Did she
base the voice on anyone of the Spiders, the story that ADR editor Matthew Cox. Did they play
in particular? “Oh, no,” she killed off the Third Doctor Ysanne a clip of the old Peladon stories
says. “I’m just thinking [Jon Pertwee]. “It was to remind her what she needed to do?
of the character.” me, Kismet Delgado and “Oh, that wasn’t necessary!” she laughs.
In rehearsals with Maureen Morris as the “I hadn’t forgotten him.”
the cast before studio spider voices, but I can’t And what of the response to her
recording, Ysanne remember if we did the return? “I hadn’t had fans of Doctor Who
“worked very closely with rehearsals for that one.” writing me letters until I was in it again,”
Stuart Fell, the stuntman But what about her she says. “I’ve been amazed because Opposite page:
Federation delegate
[wearing the costume]. We return to Doctor Who 43 normally, with fan mail [for her other
Alpha Centauri, as
had to discuss how he would years later? For one thing, work], I get letters saying would I send seen in The Curse
move, which would match my she didn’t work with the rest an autographed photograph. This time, of Peladon (1972).
voice.” That meant understanding how of the cast but recorded her cameo fans send me photographs from Doctor Ysanne Churchman
provided the voice,
Alpha Centauri was thinking and feeling separately. “The producers said they’d Who and ask me to sign them. And it’s
while Stuart Fell was
in each scene. come up to Birmingham [where Ysanne really very strange because of course the inside the costume.
During rehearsals, the director and lives] so we did it in a studio here.” pictures are not of me but of Stuart Fell Opposite page inset:
production team first saw the costume Recording took place on 20 April 2017 in the costume.” She laughs again – and Ysanne voiced Marla
for the one-eyed hexapod, and hastily at The Audio Suite in Moseley, supervised then concludes, modestly, “I only did (and other characters)
dressed it in a yellow cape to make it look by Doctor Who producer Nikki Wilson and the voice.” DWM in the 1960s puppet
series Space Patrol.
less phallic. “I’m afraid I don’t remember
Top left: One of
that!” says Ysanne, laughing. Ysanne’s most famous
She does remember the fun of the roles was the ill-fated
rehearsal room, and that one of the other Grace Archer in BBC
cast members (we think it might have radio soap The Archers.
been George Giles) made up limericks Top right: Sarah
about each of the characters. “My Jane Smith (Elisabeth
Sladen), the Doctor
limerick was: ‘Said Arcturus to Alpha (Jon Pertwee) and Alpha
Centauri, You hexapod sexapod hoary, Centauri in The Monster
Your one eye shines so bright, Your six of Peladon (1974).
arms hold me tight, You remind me Inset: The council
of Adrienne Corri.’ It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” chamber in Planet
of the Spiders (1974).
Ysanne, Kismet Delgado

Y
sanne returned to the part of Alpha and Maureen Morris
Centauri two years later for The provided the voices
Monster of Peladon. “It was exactly the of the ‘Eight Legs’.
same,” she says, “except they wanted him Left: Alpha Centauri’s
surprise cameo in
to sound older. After that I did an evil
Empress of Mars (2017).
spider in the next serial.” This was Planet

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 59

 Episode 10

The Eaters
of Light FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole visit second-

century Scotland in search of the lost Ninth
Legion. They find a monster from another
dimension – a ravening beast that feeds
on light and grows stronger by the hour…

R
eaders of a certain age may
remember a six-part BBC serial
called The Eagle of the Ninth
that aired from September to
October 1977. Set in Roman
Britain after the construction of Hadrian’s
Wall, the series related the story of young
Roman officer Marcus Aquila (played by
Anthony Higgins) and former slave Esca
(Christian Rodska) who undertook a dangerous
journey beyond the wall to determine the fate
of a missing legion and recover its lost eagle
standard. The serial was a dramatisation of a
best-selling 1954 children’s novel by Rosemary
Sutcliff, who based her story on a genuine
historical mystery – the disappearance of Legio
IX Hispana, the Ninth Legion.
Founded by Pompey in 65 BC, the legion
is known to have been stationed in Britain
after the Roman occupation of 43 AD and was
involved in Agricola’s invasion of Caledonia
(Scotland) in 82 to 83 AD, but after rebuilding
the fortress at Eboracum (York) in 108 AD,
the Ninth disappears from textual records.
The popular theory is that the legion was
wiped out early in the reign of the emperor
Hadrian after marching into Caledonia
to put down an uprising of the northern
tribes. Fragments of archaeological evidence

BBC One, 17 June 2017

Writer: Rona Munro
Director: Charles Palmer
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy),
Rebecca Benson (Kar), Daniel Kerr (Ban),
Brian Vernel (Lucius), Rohan Nedd (Simon),
Ben Hunter (Thracius), Sam Adewumni (Vitus),
Billy Matthews (Cornelius), Aaron Phagura
(Marcus), Jocelyn Brassington (Judy), Lewis
McGowan (Brother)
Rating: 4.73m
Appreciation Index: 81

60 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
Trapped in a cave with the survivors of the Ninth Legion,
Bill realises that Lucius is attracted to her.
Bill: “Ah... Lucius, right, listen. There’s something
I should explain.”
Lucius: “What?”
Bill: “This is probably just a really difficult idea.
I don’t like men that way.”
Lucius: “What, not ever?”
Bill: “Nah. Not ever. Only women.”
Lucius: “Oh. All right, yeah, I got it. You’re like Vitus then.”
Bill: “What?”
Lucius: “He only likes men.”
also suggest that the legion may have been
transferred to Nijmegan (the Netherlands) circa
120 AD and then decimated in later conflicts
in Judea or Armenia. But no one really knows
what became of the Ninth and the legion’s fate
remains one of the enduring legends of the
Roman occupation of Britain.
Sutcliff’s book was dramatised again more
recently as The Eagle, Kevin Macdonald’s 2011
feature film, while an alternative account
depicting the legion’s slaughter at the hands
of a northern alliance of Pictish tribes was
central to Neil Marshall’s Centurion (2010).
In her lyrical and beautifully paced
script for The Eaters of Light, Scottish
playright Rona Munro offered a
more imaginative explanation for the
Ninth’s disappearance.
Here, the 5,000-strong legion is
discovered to have been wiped out
in an attack by a Lovecraftian beast
that has crossed the threshold of
an interdimensional temporal rift
and now threatens the existence
of the universe. A handful of
frightened teenage soldiers
who survived the initial
attack must join forces with
the children of a local Pict
tribe to lure the beast and
drive it back through the rift,
with the help of the Doctor and
his companions.
In 54 years, Doctor Who has never filmed on
location in Scotland, even for stories set there,
and The Eaters of Light didn’t break with that
tradition. The exterior scenes of Aberdeen circa
117 AD were shot in Brecon Beacons National
Park with Porth yr Ogof near Ystradfellte in
the park’s Fforest Fawr area providing the
setting for the cave where Bill finds the legion
survivors: Pearl Mackie entered the cave through
its main entrance, which is the largest entrance
to any cave in Wales – over 56 feet wide and
nearly 20 feet tall.
What was new though was that Rona Munro
became the first scriptwriter to have penned
both 20th- and 21st-century episodes of Doctor
Who, having previously written the three-part
story Survival for the 1989 series. Given
the favourable reputation of that earlier
contribution and her delightful return
to the series in 2017, it would be
a shame if we had to wait another
28 years for her to provide the
Doctor with the kind of dialogue
he was given here. “I go on for
ages. I don’t even really die
– I regenerate,” he tells Bill
at one point. “I’ve been
standing by the gates
of your world keeping
you safe since you
all crawled out of
the slime. I’m not
stopping now.” DWM
DATA FILE
l The Doctor has lived, governed, farmed and
juggled in Roman Britain where he also became
a Vestal Virgin second class.
l Enzomodons communicate by digesting each
other and naturally assume that any species they
encounter communicates in the same way. Nardole
relates the story of an Enzomodon ambassador
who ate the entire crew of the Mary Celeste and
then choked on a lifeboat, although this is probably
apocryphal given the Daleks’ involvement in events
aboard the ship (The Chase, 1965).
l The beast lay waste to
the Ninth Legion in just one
hour. It is one of a race of
light-eating locusts that
look for cracks and rents
between worlds to let
themselves into dimensions
of light. They feed on light
but home in on sound and
can be repelled by light
focused through rose quartz
crystals, which have optical
cancellation properties.
l Return journeys in the TARDIS are easy: just leave
the instruments on the current setting and hit them
with a spanner.
l Nardole knows about ten
per cent of the Doctor’s dark
secrets and is the only one
in the TARDIS who knows
where the teacakes are. He
isn’t even remotely Italian
but he does a mean spag bol.
REVIEWS
‘Deftly balancing its many ingredients, The Eaters
▼
of Light offers up a winning combination of mood,
historical intrigue, emotion and wit. It’s a stirring
story that sets Series 10 back on the right path.’
Digital Spy
‘With a youthful, largely unknown but skilled
▼
guest cast, slick direction from Charles Palmer and
evocative soundtrack from Murray Gold, Rona
Munro completely draws me into her world for 45
minutes or so. As the crows fly, Bill, Nardole and the
12th join the Picts and the Ninth against the hounds
of hell. That’s the stuff of legend.’ Radio Times
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 61
 Tributes to the Doctor Who
luminaries who passed away
between December 2016
and November 2017.
FEATURE BY JONATHAN RIGBY

62 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

 21 November 2016
Ron Thornton
Born in London in
1957, Ron Thornton
went to see Alien
22 years later and
was inspired to
enter the world
of visual effects.
Having contacted
the BBC’s Mat Irvine, he was soon put to work
as a freelance on the Doctor Who serial Warriors’
Gate (1981). Joining the BBC Visual Effects
Workshop, he contributed to Castrovalva (1982)
and other stories, as well as doing plenty of
model work on Blake’s 7; then in 1985, by which
time he was a freelance again, came The Two
Doctors. Moving to the USA, he became a pioneer
in computer-generated effects on such series
as Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Voyager, winning an
Emmy award for the former and setting up
Foundation Imaging with Paul Beigle-Bryant.
Among his other credits were Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, the millennial reboot of Captain Scarlet,
and the 2009 feature film The Crazies.
3 December 2016
Johnny Dennis
In the 1987 story Delta and the Bannermen,
Johnny Dennis gave a memorable performance
as Murray, an effervescent but ill-fated
Nostalgia Tours bus driver. Born in London
in August 1940, on stage he was a music-hall
regular at the Players’ Theatre in Charing
Cross, while on TV he cropped up in The
Enigma Files, Dempsey and Makepeace, The Endless
Game and Surgical Spirit. In addition he was the
Voice of Lord’s, well known to fellow cricket
enthusiasts for over 30 years, 18 of them as the
MCC’s senior match-day announcer.
8 December 2016
Peter
Messaline
Born in London
in April 1944,
Peter Messaline
dubbed himself
‘Joe Ordinary’.
Though spending
much of his life and
career in Canada,
he gained his first screen credit in his native
England – providing, along with Oliver Gilbert,
idiosyncratic Dalek voices for the 1972 serial
Day of the Daleks. Subsequent TV credits
included Warship, Avonlea, RoboCop, Forever
Knight and Goosebumps. He also published
several books about the nuts and bolts of the
acting profession, notably The Actor’s Survival
Kit, written with his wife, Miriam Newhouse.
3 January 2017
Rodney Bennett
Born in March 1935, Rodney Bennett got
his start in BBC Radio before venturing into
television in 1969, directing various instalments
of Z Cars and Thirty-Minute Theatre. In later
years his deft directorial touch attracted plenty
of big names, among them Francesca Annis
as Madame Bovary, Ian Carmichael’s definitive
Lord Peter Wimsey in Murder Must Advertise,
Ian Holm as JM Barrie in The Lost Boys, Derek
Jacobi’s Hamlet for the BBC Shakespeare
project, Denholm Elliott in Gentle Folk – and in
the 1980s he twice directed Alec Guinness, in
the standalone TV films Edwin and Monsignor
Quixote. The last of these brought Bennett his
second BAFTA nomination; the first was for the
1979 eight-parter The Legend of King Arthur. His
roster of classic novels transferred to the small
screen was similarly impressive, among them
North and South, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
Sense and Sensibility, Stalky & Co and Dombey and
Son. In the middle of all this he was responsible

News of the following five deaths reached us too late
for inclusion in the last Yearbook:
17 August 2016
Ian Fraser
As production manager, Ian Fraser
oversaw the departure of the Sixth
Doctor, working on the final half-dozen
episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord in
1986, prior to several engagements with
the Seventh in the remaining years of
that decade – Paradise Towers (1987),
Remembrance of the Daleks (1988),
The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
(1988-89) and The Curse of Fenric
(1989). On screen, he and his wife,
multiple Who director Fiona Cumming,
passed through the opening episode
of Silver Nemesis (1988) as tourists
inspecting Windsor Castle. Beyond
Doctor Who, Fraser’s BBC career
encompassed such shows as Kessler,
Juliet Bravo and Bergerac, together with
adaptations of classic dramas such as
Uncle Vanya and A Doll’s House. Like his
wife, he was a Scot; also like her, he was
part of Teynham Productions alongside
former Who producer John Nathan-Turner
and his partner Gary Downie.
25 August 2016
Michael Bangerter
Brighton-born in 1936, Michael
Bangerter was of Swiss-German ancestry
and, having trained at RADA, began
a long run on television in 1960 with
two high-profile BBC assignments – a
Twentieth-Century Theatre presentation
of Young Woodley and as Bosie (a role
to which his blond good looks were
ideally suited) in On Trial: Oscar Wilde.
Thereafter he interleaved provincial
theatre with stints on ITV Play of the
Week and Armchair Theatre; in the 1970s
he added such credits as The Onedin
Line, Warship, When the Boat Comes In
and The Naked Civil Servant, together
with the feature films O Lucky Man!
and A Bridge Too Far. By 1983 he was
living on Lanzarote and was therefore
handy casting as Curt, assistant to
Professor Foster in the Lanzarote-shot
Fifth Doctor story Planet of Fire; his wife
(former actress Katya Wyeth) and their
son and daughter also passed through
as background artists. In later years he
became a lecturer and composer, as well
as publishing several volumes of poetry.
16 September 2016
Andrew Staines
Bald and
frequently
bearded,
Andrew Staines
made a limited
number of TV
appearances,
almost all in
Doctor Who – and of those all four were
under the direction of Barry Letts. He
was the sergeant to Milton Johns’ Benik
in The Enemy of the World (1967-68),
Beacon Hill research technician Goodge
(who ends up dead, miniaturised and
stashed inside his lunch box) in Terror
of the Autons (1971), captain of the
SS Bernice in Carnival of Monsters
(1973) and Keaver, one of the five men
responsible for summoning the ‘Eight
Legs’, in Planet of the Spiders (1974).
27 September 2016
Jon Croft
In 1971 Jon Croft played Tom Girton,
the Devil’s End coven member who
tries to kill the Third Doctor by means
of a helicopter, but only succeeds in
killing himself, in The Dæmons. Croft
was born in Warwick in July 1941 and
among his numerous screen credits
over a 45-year period were Softly Softly,
Out of the Unknown, Poldark, Warship,
The Onedin Line, The Nightmare Man,
Jack the Ripper, Forever Green, Hamish
Macbeth, Wycliffe, Kavanagh QC
and (his last credit, in 2008) Florence
Nightingale. He also cropped up in
occasional feature films, including
When Eight Bells Toll, Gandhi, The
Woodlanders and The Gathering.
26 October 2016
Jackie Skarvellis
Actress-playwright Jackie Skarvellis,
born in Cardiff in December 1942, was
a fixture of fringe theatre in London
for close to 50 years. In 1970, early in
her career, she achieved the distinction
of starring in two films shot in London
by the offbeat Staten Island maverick
Andy Milligan – The Body Beneath and
The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves
Are Here! Much later she featured
in two BBV audio
dramas released
in 2002, playing
‘woman’ in The
Quality of Mercy and
Liz in In 2 Minds.

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 63


for three of the Fourth Doctor’s most powerful
early adventures. In 1975 The Ark in Space, grisly
and studio-bound, and The Sontaran Experiment,
recorded entirely on location in Bennett’s native
Devon, were second and third in line for the
new Doctor. The Masque of Mandragora, filmed
on location in Portmeirion, followed eight
stories later in 1976. Among his latterday TV
credits were Rumpole of the Bailey, The House of
Eliott and The Darling Buds of May (for which he
helped to ‘discover’ Catherine Zeta-Jones), and
in retirement he wrote several children’s books.
5 January 2017
Peter Thomas
The craggy, hangdog
features of Peter
Thomas were ideal
casting for the
remorseless Captain
Edal in the First
Doctor story The
Savages (1966). He
had first encountered
William Hartnell
several years before
in an episode of The
Army Game; his other TV credits ranged from
multiple appearances in No Hiding Place, Dixon
of Dock Green and The Avengers to recurring
roles in Walk a Crooked Mile, No Cloak No Dagger
and Big Breadwinner Hog. To fans of British
horror he was also well known for fleeting
roles in the films Witchfinder General (as a
loquacious horse dealer) and Tales from the Crypt
(as a sepulchral undertaker-from-beyond). In
the mid-1970s, however, he decided to quit
acting in order to care for his terminally ill
wife, only returning, in short films and various
commercials, some three decades later. He died
less than three weeks before what would have
been his 81st birthday.
17 January 2017 1962). His defining role early on – the title
Philip Bond part in Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against
the Eunuchs (Garrick Theatre, February 1966)
– immediately preceded the shooting of his
first major film role: Richard Rich in A Man
for All Seasons. Thereafter the list of intriguing,
often offbeat films is formidable, among them
Sinful Davey, 10 Rillington Place, Little Malcolm
(a belated film version), The Shout, Midnight
Express, Alien, The Elephant Man, 1984, Scandal,
Love and Death on Long Island, Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin – right up to Hellboy and Melancholia.
It was television, however, that first made him
a household name, thanks to his astonishing
mid-1970s performances as Quentin Crisp
In late 1963, Dinsdale Landen’s loss – he was in The Naked Civil Servant and Caligula in
unable to accept a role in the second Doctor I, Claudius. And it was on television that,
Who serial, The Mutants (aka The Daleks) – was in 2013, he created a hitherto unsuspected
Philip Bond’s gain. Playing Ganatus (the plucky incarnation of the Doctor. The so-called War
Thal who becomes romantically interested in Doctor appeared in The Name of the Doctor, the
Barbara Wright while breaching the Dalek city mini-episode The Night of the Doctor and the
via its water-supply system) was one of many 50th Anniversary Special The Day of the Doctor,
TV engagements in the early part of Bond’s subsequently becoming the focal point of 12
career, from The Voodoo Factor and Sergeant Big Finish audio adventures. Knighted in 2015,
Cork to The Saint, Redcap and The Avengers. Hurt died just
Born in Burton-on-Trent in November 1934, three days after
his appearance in the West End musical turning 77.
Zuleika (Saville Theatre 1957) furnished his
TV debut when the BBC televised the show;
other early West End appearances included
Music at Midnight (Westminster Theatre 1962)
and The Dwarfs (New Arts 1963, opposite John
Hurt [qv]). Thereafter his screen assignments
included the BBC’s 1968 version of The Hound
of the Baskervilles (opposite Peter Cushing’s
Sherlock Holmes), recurring roles in the 1970s
favourites The Main Chance and The Onedin Line,
and, in 1981, Loevborg opposite Diana Rigg’s
Hedda Gabler (produced for YTV by Bond’s
wife, Pat Sandys). His final credit was a 2007
instalment of Midsomer Murders.
25 January 2017
John Hurt
Four times a BAFTA winner and twice
Oscar-nominated, John Hurt was
among the most fascinating actors
of his generation, with a career so
vast that a 250-word summary
can’t possibly do it justice. Born in
January 1940 in Chesterfield, he
made a few television appearances
while still at RADA prior to his stage
debut in Infanticide in the House of
Fred Ginger (Arts Theatre, August

A
mong other Doctor Pirates (1969) and
Who contributors numbered among his other
who died in credits The Silver Sword,
2016, at undisclosed ages Vanity Fair and the 1992
and on undisclosed dates, film Utz. On the technical
was actor Anthony side, Robin Barnes
Donovan, was senior cameraman on
who played the four-part 1983 story
the ill-fated Mawdryn Undead, while
Space Corps Peter ‘Squire’ Hills’
guard on experience on the camera
Alpha Four crew wound right back to
in The Space the 1964 story The Aztecs.

64 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE


10 February 2017
Carl Conway
For students of
British exploitation
films, Carl
Conway achieved
immortality as the
American-accented
male lead in two
early nudie-cuties – the breakthrough 1958
film Nudist Paradise and, four years later, the
similarly inclined My Bare Lady, assignments
that took him to naturist camps in St Albans
and Orpington respectively. His other screen
credits included the TV shows White Hunter,
Espionage, The Saint and Z Cars; a mid-1960s
flirtation with the nascent pirate station Radio
Caroline then led to a second career as a DJ
and voice artist. Among his final acting credits
were two appearances in Doctor Who – as US
correspondent in The War Machines (1966) and
control room assistant in The Ambassadors of
Death (1970). Born in Ramsgate in February
1922, he died four days after his 95th birthday.
25 February 2017
Neil Fingleton
At over 7’7” Neil
Fingleton was the
tallest man in Britain.
Born in Durham
in February 1980,
he turned to acting
only when invalided
out of a burgeoning
basketball career in the USA and Spain. His
credits included the feature films X-Men: First
Class, 47 Ronin and Jupiter Ascending, together
with Mag the Mighty in the HBO hit Game of
Thrones and the Fisher King, chief antagonist in
the 2015 Doctor Who episode Before the Flood. He
died of heart failure at the early age of 36.
27 March 2017
Richard Beale
Born in London in May 1920, Richard Beale
chronicled his wartime service in the well-
received 2015 memoir One Man’s War: An
Actor’s Life at Sea 1940-1945. Post-war, he made
his screen debut – appropriately, given his naval
service – in the 1956 film The Battle of the River
Plate. His screen credits thereafter ranged from
Compact, Special Branch and A Horseman Riding
By to The Life and Times of David Lloyd George
(as Lord Kitchener), EastEnders and (finally,
in 2005) Afterlife. Stage appearances ranged
from the title role in Julius Caesar (Young Vic
1972) to the burglar in Heartbreak House (Royal
Exchange, Manchester 1981); he also played
Captain Smollett in the Mermaid Theatre’s
Treasure Island three Christmases running
(1964-66), subsequently repeating the role in
two TV mini-series, Treasure Island (1977) and
Return to Treasure Island (1986). For Doctor Who
he provided disembodied voices in both The
Ark (1966) and The Macra Terror (1967), as well
as playing Arizona sheriff Bat Masterson in The
Gunfighters (1966) and the Minister of Ecology
in The Green Death (1973).
April 2017
Gordon Sterne
Gunned down in
the third instalment
of The Ambassadors
of Death (1970),
Professor Heldorf
was Gordon Sterne’s
single-episode
contribution to
Doctor Who. Born in Essen, Germany in January
1923, Sterne’s wide-ranging TV career also
encompassed such titles as White Hunter, No
Hiding Place, The Saint, UFO, The New Avengers,
Reilly: Ace of Spies, Kavanagh QC and The Tudors,
together with feature films ranging from Battle
of the V-1, From Russia With Love and Sex Play
to An American Werewolf in London and The
Razor’s Edge. Equally wide-ranging, his stage
appearances included, in the USA, Josef K
in Kafka’s The Trial (Provincetown Playhouse
1955) and M’Comas in You Never Can Tell
(Circle in the Square 1986-87), and, in London,
the ‘Space Age Musical’ The Man in the Moon
(Palladium 1963-64), Christopher Hampton’s
Savages (Royal Court/Comedy Theatre 1973),
a 1987-88 West End revival of South Pacific, and
the elderly Peer in Peer Gynt (Battersea Arts
Centre 2001).
7 April 2017
Tim Pigott-Smith
Long before winning a BAFTA award for
Granada’s epic 1984 mini-series The Jewel in the
Crown, Tim Pigott-Smith was cast as Captain
Harker and arrested Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
in The Claws of Axos (1971). Later, as Marco, he
was embroiled in Renaissance intrigue in The
Masque of Mandragora (1976, directed by Rodney
Bennett [qv]); he also read the 2009 audio
version of Philip Hinchcliffe’s novelisation. Born
in May 1946 in Rugby, Pigott-Smith enjoyed
a meteoric rise in the 1970s – playing Laertes
to Ian McKellen’s Hamlet and (on Broadway as
well as in the West End) Watson to John Wood’s
Sherlock Holmes, making his film debut in Aces
High, and playing Angelo in Measure for Measure
and Hotspur in Henry IV Part I for the BBC
Shakespeare series. Subsequent Shakespearean
leads on stage included Leontes, Brutus, Lear
and Prospero; he also excelled in such classics as
The Alchemist, Mary Stuart, Pygmalion, The Iceman
Cometh (entailing another Broadway transfer)
and Mourning Becomes Electra, together with
important modern plays such as Benefactors,
Coming in to Land and Enron. Other TV roles
ranged from Fame Is the Spur to The Chief, The
Vice and The Hour, alongside occasional films
In Memoriam
like Clash of the Titans, The
Remains of the Day and
V for Vendetta. His final
triumph was in the title
role of Mike Bartlett’s
2014 phantasmagoria King
Charles III, which moved
from London to Broadway
and sired a TV version that
in the event was broadcast
posthumously. He was
awarded the OBE in 2017.
13 April 2017
Eric Pringle
Born in June 1935, Eric Pringle hailed from
Morpeth and for many years juggled radio and
TV writing with a career in insurance. Among
his 1970s credits were HTV’s The Pretenders,
YTV’s Phyllis Calvert vehicle Kate and, for
the BBC in 1974, The Carnforth Practice. The
following year a commissioned Doctor Who
script called The Angarath failed to go into
production; his agent, Peter Bryant (who had
been producer of the programme during the
Patrick Troughton era), encouraged Pringle
to keep trying and in 1982 came another
commission, War Game. The result, retitled
The Awakening, was broadcast in two parts in
January 1984. As well as writing a novelisation
of The Awakening in 1985, Pringle also wrote the
Big George children’s books for Bloomsbury. His
radio writing included Paupers and Pig Killers,
the award-winning Hymnus Paradisi, Something
Strange and several dramatisations, among
them Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
(1994), AS Byatt’s The July Ghost (2000) and
JB Priestley’s The Good Companions (2002). His
1993 radio play Meeting Bea became a stage play,
The Secret of Beatrix Potter, later the same year.
17 April 2017
Michael Ladkin
Born in March 1945, Michael Ladkin had just
turned 22 when playing ‘RAF pilot’ in the
fourth episode of The Faceless Ones (1967). He
subsequently became an agent, establishing
Michael Ladkin (Personal Management) Ltd in
June 1979, and eventually retired to South Africa.
2 May 2017
Moray Watson
This upright Old Etonian,
born in Sunningdale in June
1928, was a welcome face on
stage and screen for six decades.
He made his West End debut
in The Bride of Denmark
Hill at the Comedy
Theatre in August
1952; 30 years later
he was reunited
with the play’s star,
Barbara Murray,
when cast as Sir
Robert Muir in the
1982 Fifth Doctor
story Black Orchid.
By July 1953 he was
making his television
debut, playing
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 65
 The following Doctor Who contributors also died in 2017, Cabaret, Seaside Special) and a large
at undisclosed ages and on undisclosed dates: number of pop showcases, from Tony
Bennett and Andy Williams to Diana
Elizabeth Moss Lives, The Lair of the White Worm, Ross, ABBA and John Denver.
Make-up artist Elizabeth Moss, who Paper Mask and Mrs Dalloway.
worked on the 1974 Third Doctor story Royston Farrell
The Monster of Peladon, was also Chris Holcombe London-born in 1937, Royston Farrell
credited on such BBC staples as Paul In June 1983 Chris Holcombe provided was an uncredited regular in both
Temple and When the Boat Comes Outside Broadcast sound for Warriors The Avengers and Doctor Who. In
In together with several adaptations of the Deep, a troubled four-part story the latter, he stretched from 1966 to guards. Slipped in just prior to his final
of classic drama – The Lady from the that would be broadcast in January 1972, appearing in episodes of The story was The Claws of Axos (1971),
Sea, The Wood Demon, The Cherry the following year. Holcombe’s career Ark (1966), The Savages (1966), The in which he was finally granted billing
Orchard, The Changeling, Henry IV in the BBC Sound Department also Underwater Menace (1966-67), The – as ‘technician’. He also cropped up
Parts I and II, The Two Gentlemen of embraced panto (a 1974 version of Seeds of Death (1969), The War Games on TV in Softly Softly, The Persuaders!,
Verona and The House of Bernarda Robin Hood), costume drama (The (1969), The Ambassadors of Death The Gentle Touch and Never the Twain,
Alba. Later in her career she moved Pallisers), modern drama (Chips with (1970), Inferno (1970) and The Curse together with such films as The Yellow
into feature films, among them A Everything), sketch comedy (Dave of Peladon (1972), essaying various Rolls-Royce, Crooks and Coronets, Trog
Private Function, Distant Voices Still Allen at Large), variety (International elders, soldiers, priests, policemen and and Yellow Dog.

Reginald Tate’s assistant in the groundbreaking
BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment, with
further TV engagements ranging from
a long-running soap stint in Compact, numerous
Brian Rix showcases and Lord Collingford in
the second series of Catweazle (starring Geoffrey
Bayldon [qv]) to The Pallisers, Quiller, Rumpole of
the Bailey, Mr Bennet in the 1980 version of Pride
and Prejudice, Union Castle, Rude Health and the
Brigadier in The Darling Buds of May. In the West
End alone, his numerous stage appearances
included Plaintiff in a Pretty Hat (1956-57),
The Grass is Greener (1958-59), The Doctor’s
Dilemma (1963), You Never Can Tell (1966), Don’t
Just Lie There, Say Something (1972), Hay Fever
(1983-84), Pygmalion (1997) and The Chiltern
Hundreds (1999). He was also noted for one-man
shows, particularly as Max Beerbohm in The
Incomparable Max, together with occasional
film roles in Find the Lady, The Grass is Greener
(playing the bespectacled butler he originated
on stage), The Valiant, Operation Crossbow, Every
Home Should Have One and The Sea Wolves.
10 May 2017
Geoffrey Bayldon
Hailing from Leeds, Geoffrey Bayldon was
born in January 1924 and made his debut in
the Adelphi musical Tough at the Top in July
1949. The following year he was at Stratford,
playing Froth in
Measure for
Measure among others, with further West End
showcases (The Happy Time, The Trial of Mr
Pickwick) following in 1952. After a three-play
John Gielgud season at the Lyric Hammersmith,
he was back at Stratford in 1954-55, playing
opposite Laurence Olivier’s legendary Macbeth
and Titus Andronicus, then Bayldon’s own
much-praised Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra
(Old Vic 1956) was exported to Paris. Periodic
screen roles from 1952 bore fruit 11 years later,
when he was reportedly offered the title role in
the new BBC series Doctor Who. He remembered
declining, and said he declined again when
offered the Second Doctor. But by the summer
of 1969 he was filming the LWT series that
would bring him a different kind of immortality
– Catweazle. His indelible performance as an
out-of-time medieval magician was echoed
later by his role as the Crowman opposite
Jon Pertwee’s Worzel Gummidge (1979-81). In
the meantime, he had played the astrologer
Organon in the 1979 Doctor Who story The
Creature from the Pit, finally playing the Doctor
himself in two Big Finish audio adventures, Auld
Mortality (2003) and A Storm of Angels (2005). His
final stage role, in the RSC’s Unfinished Business at
the Barbican, coincided with his 70th birthday;
his truly extensive screen career only wound up
16 years later, with an episode of My Family.
2 June 2017
Peter Sallis
Twickenham-born in February 1921, Peter
Sallis started out as a bank clerk before
training at RADA and making his debut in
The Scheming Lieutenant at the Arts Theatre in
September 1946. There followed 20-odd years
of distinguished West End engagements, notably
Summer and Smoke (Duchess Theatre 1952), The
Matchmaker (Haymarket 1954-55), Moby Dick
rehearsed (Duke of York’s 1955), Look After Lulu
(New Theatre 1959), Rhinoceros (Strand Theatre
1960), his two favourite roles – Sipos in the
musical She Loves Me (Lyric Theatre 1964) and
Roat in Wait Until Dark (Strand Theatre
1966-68) – and the original London production
of Cabaret (Palace Theatre 1968). There were
also a couple of stints on Broadway, as Dr
Watson in Baker Street (another musical, 1965)
and Inadmissible Evidence (1965-66). Early TV
credits included the title role in The Diary of
Samuel Pepys (1958) and William Hogarth in
Amelia (1961), followed by Elric Penley, destroyer
of the titular villains’ ship, in the Second Doctor
story The Ice Warriors (1967). Latterday stage
work, occasional feature films (notably Taste
the Blood of Dracula and Full Circle) and a slew of
further TV credits, among them The Pallisers and
The Ghosts of Motley Hall, were soon subordinated
to an incredible 37-year run in the gentle sitcom
Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010). He finally
earned cult status as the voice of hapless inventor
Wallace in Nick Park’s globally successful
‘Wallace & Gromit’ short films, together with
Park’s 2005 feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
He was awarded the OBE in 2007.
12 June 2017
Sam Beazley
Sam Beazley, one
of whose last
screen credits was
Alan in the 2006
Torchwood episode
Out of Time, started
out as a youthful
member of John
Gielgud’s company but dropped acting when
badly reviewed in Gielgud’s 1935 West End
production of Romeo and Juliet. After several
decades as a London antiques dealer, he
returned to acting in his seventies, racking up
several distinguished theatre roles (notably
another spell in the West End, playing the
grandfather in the 2004 hit Festen) and such
disparate screen credits as Pride and Prejudice,
Midsomer Murders, Foyle’s War and as Professor
Everard in Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix. Born in Kensington in March 1916,
he died at the grand old age of 101.

66 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE


19 June 2017
Brian Cant
Born in Ipswich in July 1933, Brian Cant began
his acting career in a 1958 rep season in Buxton
and gained his final TV credit in 2011. His early
rep experience was recalled in the latter part
of his career by touring productions of Doctor
in the House, Dames at Sea, The Canterbury Tales
and An Ideal Husband, together with plenty of
pantomimes, while early TV roles in Bootsie
and Snudge, Crane and Dixon of Dock Green were
echoed later by stints in Ever Decreasing Circles,
Casualty and Doctors. Among those early TV
credits were a couple of roles opposite the
First and Second Doctors – Kert Gantry in The
Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66) and Tensa in The
Dominators (1968). But it was as the undisputed
king of children’s television – a reassuringly
avuncular presence to several generations of
young viewers – that he acquired legendary
status. He was presenter of Play School for
21 years (1964-85), Play Away for 13 (1971-84)
and provided the instantly recognisable
narration for the stop-motion series Camberwick
Green (1966), Trumpton (1967) and Chigley
(1969). Also in his portfolio were Bric-a-Brac
(1980-82) and Dappledown Farm (1990-99),
plus theatre versions of Play School (Old Vic
1969-70) and Play Away (Old Vic 1976-77) and
the 1980s touring show Brian Cant’s Fun Book.
In November 2010 he received the Special
Award at that year’s Children’s BAFTAs.
9 July 2017
Clare Douglas
For editor Clare
Douglas, who was
born in Ipswich in
February 1944, the
1975 Fourth Doctor
story The Masque of
Mandragora (directed
by Rodney Bennett
[qv]) was an early assignment in what would
become a highly distinguished career. Among
her more notable credits were the classic
John Le Carré adaptations Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy, Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy, together
with recurring assignments for Dennis Potter
(Christabel, Blackeyes, Secret Friends, Lipstick on
Your Collar, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus), Stephen
Poliakoff (The Lost Prince, Friends & Crocodiles,
Gideon’s Daughter, Joe’s Palace, Capturing Mary)
and Paul Greengrass (The Murder of Stephen
Lawrence, Bloody Sunday, United 93). Other credits
included the BBC’s classic 1985 adaptation of
Bleak House together with the feature films
The Misadventures of Margaret and A Way of Life.
In 2007 her work on United 93 brought her
a BAFTA award and an Oscar nomination.
In Memoriam
16 July 2017
Trevor Baxter
One of the most delightful features of the
classic 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang
was the matchless chemistry between Professor
Litefoot (Trevor Baxter) and Henry Gordon
Jago (Christopher Benjamin). A mere 32
years later, a Big Finish audio drama called
The Mahogany Murderers initiated a series of
52 further Jago & Litefoot adventures starring
Baxter and Benjamin, only concluding in
2017. Born in London in November 1932,
Baxter trained at RADA and made London
appearances in such plays as Betzi, The
Admirable Crichton, Hans Kohlhaas, Bells of Hell
and See How They Run, as well as playing the Newcomers, Rising Damp and Lillie, culminating
Knight in a musical version of Canterbury Tales in a regular role as Norma in Danger UXB
(Phoenix Theatre 1968). After a 1981-82 spell (1979). She also appeared in two feature
at the RSC he played Malvolio and Prospero films, made just eight months apart in
in the USA, together with Robert in the David 1972-73 – That’ll Be the Day and Take Me High –
Mamet play A Life in the Theatre, while in the and, in an extensive stage career, her West End
1990s he was Polonius to Alan Cumming’s appearances included The Wizard of Oz (Victoria
Hamlet and Gloucester to Warren Mitchell’s Palace 1971), Laburnum Grove (Duke of York’s
King Lear. TV assignments ranged from Mystery 1977) and Alfie (Queen’s Theatre 1993). Her last
and Imagination, Adam Adamant Lives! and stage role, in 2004, was Mrs Alving in Ghosts
Dickens of London to The Barchester Chronicles, at Frinton Summer Theatre, an Essex rep
Maelstrom, Jack the Ripper, Selling Hitler and The formerly run by her father, Jack Watling.
Politician’s Wife. As a playwright he added to a
couple of Oscar Wilde adaptations such out-of- 29 July 2017
town originals as Family Viewing, Dark Corners, Hywel Bennett
Appetite, Through a Glass Darkly, The Greenhouse When cast in The Chase (1965) – as Rynian,
Effect, Office Games and Ripping Them Off, with the young Aridian who warns the First
West End showcases going to Lies (Albery Doctor against the indigenous Mire Beasts
Theatre 1975-76, with Dame Wendy Hiller) – Hywel Bennett was just 21 and making his
and The Undertaking (Fortune Theatre 1979-80, television debut. Within a year he was starring
with Kenneth Williams). A TV play, The Last opposite Hayley Mills in the Boulting Brothers
Evensong, was produced by the BBC in 1984.
21 July 2017
Deborah Watling
When Deborah Watling was cast as Victoria
Waterfield on 13 April 1967, a mere seven days
elapsed before she started shooting The Evil
of the Daleks. There followed a classic sequence
of Second Doctor adventures – The Tomb
of the Cybermen, The Abominable Snowmen, The
Ice Warriors, The Enemy of the World, The Web
of Fear and Fury from the Deep – prior to her
last shooting day, on 29 March 1968. It was
a year’s run in which Victoria proved one of
the most affecting of all companions, as well
as the proud possessor of a world-class scream.
In the 1990s Watling would return to the role
in the BBC’s Dimensions in Time special and the
independent video Downtime, later reprising it
in five Big Finish audio dramas between 2008
and 2016. Born in London in January 1948, she
made early TV appearances in The Invisible Man,
A Life of Bliss and as Dennis Potter’s Alice, with
a post-Victoria career that included The
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 67
 feature The Family Way, soon after which
the Boultings matched the two again in the
1968 shocker Twisted Nerve; a few years later
the non-Boultings film Endless Night paired
them a third time. His early cinema celebrity
was sustained by The Virgin Soldiers, Loot, The
Buttercup Chain and Percy, but a more mature
celebrity only surfaced via television, with the
lead in the BBC’s Malice Aforethought (1979)
swiftly followed by his defining role: the jaded
yet philosophical title character in the Thames
sitcom Shelley (1979-84, 1988-92). Born in
Garnant, Carmarthenshire in April 1944 but
raised in London, Bennett started out with
the National Youth Theatre and in later years
excelled on stage as Mark Anthony in Julius
Caesar (Young Vic 1972, opposite Richard
Beale [qv]), the title character in The Case of the
Oily Levantine (Her Majesty’s Theatre 1979),
Marlow in She Stoops to Conquer (National
Theatre 1984-85, opposite Tom Baker) and
Andrey in Three Sisters (Albery Theatre 1987).
Further TV credits included Romeo in the
BBC’s 1967 version of Romeo and Juliet, plus
The Sweeney, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Artemis
81, Absent Friends, Frankie and Johnnie, Frontiers,
Neverwhere, EastEnders, High Hopes and three
Dennis Potter dramas – Pennies from Heaven,
Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.
10 August 2017
Patrick O’Connell
When cast as black
marketeer Ashton,
who meets a nasty end
courtesy of the Slyther
in the fourth episode
of The Dalek Invasion
of Earth (1964), Patrick
O’Connell was fresh
from playing opposite
Donald Pleasence in
the West End run of
Jean Anouilh’s Poor
Bitos. It was a fertile
period for the rather
military-looking young actor, who had been
born in Dublin in January 1934. In 1959 he had
appeared in the original Royal Court production
of Arnold Wesker’s Roots, followed by The Kitchen
(same author, same theatre) two years later, with
a bit of light relief provided by the role of Blind
Pew in the Mermaid Theatre’s Christmas 1961
version of Treasure Island. By 1966 he was back
at the cutting edge, appearing in Events While
Guarding the Bofors Gun (Hampstead Theatre)
in April and Peter Brook’s production of US
(Aldwych) in October; the following year, also
for the RSC, he was playing Macduff to Paul
Scofield’s Macbeth. Later theatre credits included
a West End revival of Loot (1984) and the title
roles in Henry IV (English Shakespeare
Company 1986) and Julius Caesar (Open
Air Theatre Regents Park 1990). TV
credits, meanwhile, included recurring
roles in The Big Spender, North and South,
Frontier, Fraud Squad, The Brothers and We’ll
Meet Again, and there were parts, too, in such
feature films as Cromwell, The McKenzie Break,
The Ragman’s Daughter, The Human Factor,
The Shooting Party and Nanou.
68 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
18 August 2017
Robin Griffith
Robin Griffith, who played Barry in the 2008
Torchwood episode Something Borrowed, was born
on Anglesey in February 1939. In the 1970s he
voiced Miss Blodwyn Tatws (Potato Blossom),
a glove puppet on the cult HTV Wales children’s
show Miri Mawr, also voicing the Red Baron in
the BBC Cymru series Siop Siafins. Thereafter he
gained roles in, among others, Coronation Street,
Angels, The Angry Earth, the pilot film of A Mind
to Kill, The Famous Five, Dirty Tricks, Mine All
Mine, High Hopes and the feature films Un nosola’
leuad and The Dark.
5 October 2017
Trevor Martin
When cast as the Second Time Lord who, in the
concluding episode of The War Games (1969),
condemns the War Lord to dematerialisation,
Trevor Martin was five years away from playing
an alternative version of the Fourth Doctor
in Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to
Doomsday, a Christmas attraction at London’s
Adelphi Theatre that ran for 44 performances
from December 1974 to January 1975. Born
in Enfield in November 1929, he started his
career in August 1953 with the BBC’s radio rep,
a commitment that would stretch to ten years
and (by his own estimate) over 4,000 broadcasts.
Indeed, as an actor he was very much a company
man, spending the early 1960s with the nascent
RSC, moving straight on to a mid-decade spell
with the similarly nascent National Theatre
(acting, for example, opposite Peter O’Toole’s
Hamlet), spending much of the 1970s with
Prospect Theatre Company and the Bristol Old
Vic, then in 1984 embarking on a marathon
18-year commitment to, again, the RSC, winding
up in 2002 as the soothsayer in Antony and
Cleopatra. His TV appearances, starting in 1958,
included Three Golden Nobles, Orlando, Jackanory,
Z Cars, Armchair Thriller, Coronation Street and,
latterly, Call the Midwife, while continued radio
commitments included Kaido and others in the
1993 Doctor Who serial The
Paradise of Death. He also
recorded two Big Finish
audio dramas, playing
Professor Capra in
Flip-Flop (2003) and
reprising his Doctor
in the company’s 2008
adaptation of Seven
Keys to Doomsday.
2 November 2017
Paddy Russell
Patricia ‘Paddy’ Russell directed three Doctors
in all – William Hartnell in the missing historical
story The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve (1966),
Jon Pertwee in the effects-compromised Invasion
of the Dinosaurs (1974), and Tom Baker in two
of the Fourth Doctor’s strongest adventures,
the heavily Gothic Pyramids of Mars (1975)
and the creepily claustrophobic Horror of Fang
Rock (1977). Born in Highgate in July 1928,
she trained as an actress at the Guildhall
School but quickly changed course; cutting her
teeth at the BBC as a production assistant to
Rudolph Cartier, she worked on, among others,
all three of his groundbreaking Quatermass
serials together with the controversial 1954
dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. She
subsequently became the corporation’s first
female director, starting in December 1961 with
the ‘historical personages being interviewed’
anthology Return and Answer, quickly proving
herself adept at horror and and fantasy (Out
of the Unknown, Late Night Horror, The Omega
Factor), children’s adventure (Quick Before They
Catch Us), police drama (50-odd episodes of
Z Cars), and an impressive crop of classic novel
adaptations (Treasure Island, Angel Pavement,
Père Goriot, Little Women, Fathers and Sons,
The Moonstone). As well as moonlighting
in the mid-1970s at Thames (Harriet’s Back
in Town) and LWT (Within These Walls),
she moved to Yorkshire TV for the sitcom
My Old Man, later becoming a major force
there, directing multiple episodes of the
quiz show 3-2-1 and the bucolic soap
Emmerdale Farm
in addition to
training young
directors. She
eventually retired
to Oxenhope,
near
Keighley.

4 November 2017
Dudley Simpson
“I always treat it as serious drama,” said Dudley
Simpson of Doctor Who in 1973, “and try to
give the music a sense of doom.” The climate
of eeriness so brilliantly conjured by Simpson
did much to define the programme in its
first 16 years, as well as maximising its scare
factor for young audiences. He was born in
Melbourne in October 1922 and studied at that
city’s Conservatorium; he subsequently became
musical director of the Borovansky Ballet prior
to moving to Britain. Having been principal
conductor at the Royal Opera House for three
years, he moved into TV, with his music for
the 1963 BBC series Moonstrike attracting the
attention of the Doctor Who production team.
His earliest Who music, for Planet of Giants,
was first heard, appropriately, at Halloween
1964. Thereafter he scored over 200 episodes,
a phenomenal run that only ended with The
Horns of Nimon in January 1980 – at which
point he was unceremoniously dropped by
an incoming, new-broom production team.
Towards the end of his time on the programme
he even appeared on screen, playing a Victorian
conductor in 1977’s The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
His work rate beyond Doctor Who was just as
phenomenal, encompassing The Tomorrow
People and Blake’s 7 together with Out of the
Unknown, The Last of the Mohicans, numerous
other classic novel adaptations, The Brothers,
Moonbase 3, The Diary of Anne Frank, seven plays
in the BBC Shakespeare series, and winding
up in the late 1980s with Supergran and Tales
of the Unexpected.
6 November 2017
Scott Fredericks
Born in Sligo in 1943, Scott Fredericks cut
a distinguished figure in Irish drama. As well
as working at Dublin’s Gate Theatre alongside
its founders, Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac
Liammóir, he also devised a successful one-man
show called Yeats Remembers and in 1992
became a drama director for Raidió Teilifís
Éireann. His career began, however, in England,
with the young RADA graduate moving from
Chesterfield rep to playing a speedway biker
in ATV’s Crossroads. Among varied credits such
as The Regiment, Sutherland’s Law, Z Cars and
Triangle, he played freedom fighter Boaz in
Day of the Daleks (1972) and, five years later,
power-hungry scientist Maximillian Stael in
Image of the Fendahl. His slightly cold-eyed
good looks were also put to good use by
Fendahl writer Chris Boucher and director
George Spenton-Foster when he was cast as
the manipulative Carnell in the 1979 Blake’s 7
episode Weapon; from 2001-04 he reprised the
role in half-a-dozen Kaldor City audio dramas.
15 November 2017
Keith Barron
Keith Barron inherited the role of Striker,
a supposedly Edwardian sea captain in the
1983 story Enlightenment, when Peter Sallis
(qv) proved unavailable; he later voiced Isaac
Barclay in the 2009 Big Finish audio drama
Plague of the Daleks. Born in Mexborough in
August 1934, Barron made his stage debut at
Sheffield Playhouse, consolidating this with
an extended stint at Bristol Old Vic in the early
1960s. Thereafter he became a familiar TV
face in Granada’s The Odd Man and its sequel
It’s Dark Outside, graduating in 1965 to the
titular lead in Dennis Potter’s landmark BBC
In Memoriam
plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote
for Nigel Barton. Subsequently there were such
drama showcases as Byron (in the title role),
Upstairs Downstairs, Telford’s Change, Prince
Regent, Stay With Me Till Morning and Take Me
Home, together with plenty of comedy – among
others, The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim, No
Strings, Duty Free, Leaving, Room at the Bottom,
Haggard and The Good Guys. Occasional feature
films ranged from Baby Love and The Man
Who Had Power Over Women to She’ll Follow You
Anywhere, Nothing But the Night and The Land
that Time Forgot.
21 November 2017
Rodney Bewes
As well as lending both hangdog humour and
complete credibility to Bob Ferris in the
classic BBC sitcoms The Likely Lads (1964-66)
and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
(1973-74) – not forgetting a 1976 feature film
spin-off – Rodney Bewes moved to ITV to
co-write, produce and star in Dear Mother… Love
Albert (1969-72). Born in Bingley in November
1937, he began as a teenage actor (appearing
in, among others, an early BBC Pickwick Papers),
then in the 1960s he had eye-catching roles
in such feature films as Billy Liar, Decline and
Fall and Spring and Port Wine; he also played
opposite John Hurt (qv) in Little Malcolm at
the Garrick Theatre. Among latterday TV
credits like Churchill’s People, Just Liz and East
Lynne, he made a Doctor Who appearance
as the self-sacrificing Stien in the 1984
story Resurrection of the Daleks. With screen
engagements petering out, he focused later
on stage farces and self-devised one-man
shows, including an award-winning version
of Three Men in a Boat. He died less than a week
before he would have turned 80. DWM
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 69
 Episode 11

WORLD ENOUGH
AND TIME FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

On a giant colony ship reversing away from

a black hole, Bill finds herself trapped at
the opposite end from the Doctor, in a zone
where time runs considerably faster. Ten
years pass before the Doctor arrives to rescue
her, only to discover she has undergone
a horrifying transformation…

N
ow d’you see this mad woman
“ sitting in this chair? Her name
isn’t Doctor Who. My name
is Doctor Who.”
For more than 30 years, we’ve
been repeatedly told that ‘Doctor Who’ is
just the name of the programme, not its lead
character. But as so many of us have known
all along, that was just revisionist nonsense.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Doctor
was always called Doctor Who – by the
producers, scriptwriters, cast and crew, BBC
executives and viewers alike. The character
was consistently listed on screen as either
‘Dr. Who’ or ‘Doctor Who’ (from 1963 to
1981, plus 2005) on the end titles, and referred
to by that name in production paperwork,
scripts, feature films, books, comic strips and
other officially licensed merchandise.
In The War Machines (1966), the super-
computer WOTAN clearly named its target
“Doctor Who”, not once but four times, and
WOTAN’s creator Professor Brett offered the
same moniker twice in reference to the First
Doctor. Then consider those occasions when
the Doctor uses ‘Doktor von Wer’ as an alias
(The Highlanders, 1966-67), signs papers as
‘Dr. W’ (The Underwater Menace, 1967) or with
a question mark (Remembrance of the Daleks,

BBC One, 24 June 2017

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Rachel Talalay
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy),
John Simm (The Master), Oliver Lansley
(Jorj), Paul Brightwell (Surgeon), Alison
Lintott (Nurse), Nicholas Briggs (Voice
of the Cybermen)
Rating: 5.00m
Appreciation Index: 85

70 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
The Doctor and Bill eat chips together on the roof of
a St Luke’s University building as they discuss Missy.
Doctor: “She was my first friend, always so brilliant,
from the first day at the Academy. So fast, so funny.
She was my man crush.”
Bill: “I’m sorry?”
Doctor: “Yeah. I think she was a man back then.
I’m fairly sure that I was too. It was a long time ago though.”
Bill: “So, look, Time Lords – bit flexible on the whole man/
woman thing then, yeah?”
Doctor: “We’re the most civilised civilisation in the universe. We’re
billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.”
Bill: “But you still call yourselves Time Lords.”
Doctor: “Yeah. Shut up.”
(1988), personalises Bessie with ‘WHO 1’ or
‘WHO 7’ licence plates, and responds, “Yes,
quite right,” when asked “Doctor who?” (The
Gunfighters, 1966): none of them make any sense
in a fictional context if Doctor Who is not a
name by which he calls himself.
But there was always an element of doubt
unless the Doctor explicitly stated it on screen.
Nine minutes into World Enough and Time,
he introduced himself to Jorj the
janitor as “Doctor Who”, explaining to
Nardole that it was a name he liked.
This was just the first of a whole raft
of jaw-dropping moments in this
episode. Another one came along just
seconds later as Jorj shot a large hole
through Bill’s chest. Surely one of the
most shocking things seen in the
series in 54 years, the camera
lingered on that image, cut away
to a flashback, came back and
then cut away again before
Bill’s lifeless body finally fell
to the floor in slow motion
four minutes later.
After that came the
creepy Gothic hospital with
its mysterious operating
theatre, patients left in
constant pain by a scary
nurse, and Bill surgically
equipped with a clunky chest
unit that she daren’t look at – all likely to prompt
nosocomephobia, tomophobia and iatrophobia
in viewers of a nervous disposition (we’ll wait
here while you look ’em up). Finally, there was
the double whammy revelation that Bill’s friend
Mr Razor is really the psychopathic Harold
Saxon incarnation of the Master, and he’s
engineered Bill’s conversion into a Mondasian
Cyberman, cyborg monsters last seen in The
Tenth Planet (1966).
To cap it all, the whole thing was framed
with a mind-boggling real-science concept –
gravitational time dilation in the vicinity of
a black hole resulting in time passing at very
different speeds at opposite ends of a 400-mile
spaceship. According to the relative time
display on the hospital wall, 1,000
years had passed on Floor 1056
while just under two-and-a-half days
elapsed on Floor 0000, equating
to the passage of 103 days and
12 hours at the bottom of the ship
for every minute at the top.
We could all have welcomed
a bit of time dilation as
the end credits rolled. Left
with the unforgettable and
heartbreaking image of a tear
forming in the cold, black eye
of Bill’s new Cyberman face,
next Saturday couldn’t come
around soon enough. DWM
DATA FILE
l The Mondasian colony ship is 400 miles long
and 100 miles wide. This is considered big, even
for a colony ship.
l Manned by a skeleton crew of just 50, the
brand-new ship was on its way to Mondas to
collect the colonists when it became trapped
in the gravitational pull of a black hole. A team
of 20 went down to Floor 1056 and were never
heard from again.
l Because of the black hole,
time is moving faster at one
end of the ship than the
other. Gravity slows down
time, so the closer you are to
the source of the gravity, the
slower time will move.
l The city on Floor
1056 was a good
place once, but after
1,000 years the ship
is old and dying,
polluting the air
with engine fumes.
Many years ago
there was an expedition to Floor 507, the largest
of the solar farms, but it never returned.
l Missy reveals that the Doctor chose the
name ‘Doctor Who’ himself, just trying to sound
mysterious, but later dropped the ‘Who’ part
when he realised it was too perfect. While he
claims that Missy is teasing, the Doctor doesn’t
deny any of it.
REVIEWS
‘After a series I’ve managed to find little
▼
fault in, World Enough and Time is the finest
penultimate episode we’ve seen in quite some
time (and yes, that includes Heaven Sent).’
The Guardian
‘World Enough and Time is riveting
▼
(mostly), macabre (deliciously) and it quite
coldly metes out death – or a fate worse than
death for someone we’ve grown to love.’
Radio Times
‘Not just the standout story of this 10th
▼
‘nu-Who’ series but one of the best episodes
since the 2005 reboot. Bravo.’ The Daily Telegraph
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 71
 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

The Finale
Countdown The return of the Mondasian
Cybermen was accompanied
by a nostalgic visit from their
original costume designer and
a special concert to mark the
end of an era.
FEATURE BY EDWARD RUSSELL

D
uring Doctor Who’s World Tour,
which launched the Twelfth
Doctor’s era in August
2014, Peter Capaldi cited
the original ‘Mondasian’
Cybermen as his favourite
monster and said he hoped
they’d return. Three years later,
showrunner Steven Moffat delivered a
two-part script for the 2017 series finale
that fulfilled Peter’s wish. But it wasn’t
Left: Alexandra Tynan just The Tenth Planet Cybermen from
on the TARDIS set at 1966 who made a comeback; this was
Roath Lock in June 2017. also an opportunity for the production
Below: Alexandra’s team to welcome back the designer who
design sketch for the had created their original look all those
original Cybermen
in the 1966 story years ago.
The Tenth Planet. Sandra Reid had joined the BBC in
1964. She was initially reluctant to take
the Doctor Who assignment, but the
Belfast-born designer was never shy
of a challenge. Sandra went on to create
some of the most famous Doctor Who
costumes of the era, but her work on the
Cybermen for The Tenth Planet is perhaps
the most enduring.
Kit Pedler’s script for The Tenth Planet
had included quite a lot of detail
on how the Cybermen should look.
Speaking in 2017 Sandra, now known
as Alexandra Tynan, recalls the
difficulties she had fulfilling Kit’s
expectations: “With the mini-budget
that I had, there was no way they were
going to exactly resemble what he
would have liked. For the body of the
suit I had a wool jersey material, then
on top of that I put a layer of, would
you believe, fine plastic. That’s a great
way to lose a lot of weight. They were
very, very uncomfortable to wear.”
Alexandra redesigned the Cybermen
costumes for their return in 1967’s
The Moonbase and has watched their
development closely ever since. The

72 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

numerous redesigns haven’t always met
with her full approval, but she’s pleased
that, “They’ve still got the handles on
their heads and there are one or two other
little things that hang in there.”
When a publicity picture was tweeted
from Doctor Who’s official Twitter account
to announce the Mondasian Cybermen’s
return in March 2017, the news quickly
reached Alexandra at her home in
Australia. “My son sent me a text with
that photo. Then the emails arrived from
the UK. Yes, it was true… [my Cybermen]
were on their way back to Earth!”
I was put in touch with Alexandra by
a mutual friend, and in my capacity as
Doctor Who’s brand assistant I extended
an offer for her to visit the studios next
Doctor’s TARDIS. “The Cardiff crew were
so welcoming and friendly; sitting with
them there in the studio watching a take
felt very familiar.”
Alexandra was keen to meet both
Doctors. “What a thrill to meet them
together on that set. It was Peter’s
enthusiasm for the Mark I Cybermen that
had helped to resurrect them. Not every
costume designer has their work rebooted
after 51 years.”
Above: The Cyberman
that delivers the fatal
blow in The Doctor Falls
(2017).
Below: David Bradley
(as the First Doctor) and

“Not every costume

Peter Capaldi (as the
Twelfth Doctor) with
Alexandra on the set of

designer has their

the First Doctor’s TARDIS.

work rebooted
after 51 years.”
time she was in the UK. She said she
may be over in the summer, and a plan
formulated in my mind…
The 2017 series finale – World Enough
and Time and The Doctor Falls – would
follow events leading up to The Tenth
Planet. However, Steven Moffat’s script
for the 2017 Christmas Special Twice
Upon a Time would take the prequel a step
further by recreating parts of that original
First Doctor story, including the return of
1960s companions Ben and Polly. With
the Christmas Special’s recording dates
not entirely locked down, it was suggested
that Alexandra head over to Cardiff in
late June with the hope of tying in her
visit with the publicity for the broadcast
of the series finale.

O
n Friday 23 June, Alexandra
stepped back on to the set of
Doctor Who for the first time in
50 years. Entering Studio 2 at Roath
Lock, she seemed a little taken aback that
people not only knew about her arrival,
but stopped to say thank you for her
creations from the past.
Director Rachel Talalay rushed over
to explain how she had watched all the
available episodes of The Tenth Planet
countless times in order the get the
look of the Mondasian Cybermen as
authentic and accurate as possible.
Members of Doctor Who’s current
costume department showed her
continuity snaps of the recreations
of Ben and Polly’s outfits and Alexandra
was soon settled in front of monitors
to watch the recording take place.
“It was akin to time travelling,” she
says of watching Peter Capaldi and David
Bradley act out a sequence inside the First

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 73

 THE

DWMINTERVIEW

HOSPITAL DRAMA
T
here’s a very fine line between releasing
exciting teasers about upcoming
episodes and not giving too much away.
Some fans would prefer that we said nothing,
but it’s important to remember that the majority
of the audience are casual viewers who need
reminders and hooks to bring them to the show.
We knew that the Mondasian Cybermen
would be seen in public during the night shoot in
Cardiff Bay. They looked so great that we decided
to do our own photo in advance of any blurry
shots that fans might post online.
We don’t normally have the luxury of time Peter Capaldi until he was available – you can
when we do stills, but on this occasion we had see from my hand that we’d planned for the
access to the monsters and the just-finished Doctor to hold his sonic screwdriver. Of course,
hospital set for a few hours. This allowed when Peter took over he knew exactly what the
photographer Simon Ridgway to set up his shot Doctor should do. I think that final photo was
and light it in a dramatic way. I stood in for one of our strongest publicity stills ever.

After this, the slightly overwhelmed
designer was rushed into another studio
for a set of interviews with Christel Dee
of Doctor Who: The Fan Show and then met
Doctor Who’s current costume designer,
Hayley Nebauer. Although the new
Cybermen costumes had been created
by Millennium FX, Hayley had worked
closely with the company. Alexandra
recalls chatting with Hayley “about her
experience with the new costumes –
having the advantage of 21st-century
materials and, happily, a bigger budget.”
The following day, Saturday 24 June,
Alexandra joined over 300 Doctor Who
enthusiasts at a special concert held in
Cardiff. ‘The Finale Countdown’ was
intended to be a memorable evening for
both the fans and the cast and crew of
the 2017 series, who were back together
in Wales for one last time to record the
Christmas Special.
With the main cast and many
behind-the-scenes people moving
on from the show, we wanted to do
something that commemorated
the end of an era and echoed
our past achievements – this was
celebrated with a concert of Murray
Gold’s fantastic orchestral score
performed by the BBC National
Top right: The Orchestra of Wales.
promotional image that
that we replicated it several times at the
Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC’s
Prom seasons. The popular show became
known as the ‘Symphonic Spectacular’
and toured both the UK and Australia as
well as being broadcast on BBC One and
featuring on Doctor Who DVD and Blu-ray
box sets.
Murray Gold himself had contributed
heavily to the shows, under the supervision
of executive producer Paul Bullock, and
both jumped on board for the opportunity
to play for the public in the city where it
all started.
For a while, we planned an outdoor
event at the historic Cardiff Castle, but
a series of sporting occasions on the land
meant there was a high chance that the
grass would be too muddy for our poor
audience. With other venues booked
up, we relocated to Hoddinott Hall, the
home of the BBC National Orchestra
of Wales and an annex of the Wales
Millennium Centre; our event
would now be held in the same
hall where Murray’s music

O
revealed the original
Cybermen would return ur first concert took
in the 2017 series. place towards the end
Top left: Edward of 2006 and was
Russell stands in for a charity event for BBC
Peter Capaldi as the Children in Need. Held
shot is set up.
at the Wales Millennium
Above: Alexandra at Centre in Cardiff Bay,
Roath Lock with Hayley
Nebauer, the costume the format was simple:
designer on the 2017 a symphonic orchestra
series of Doctor Who. played along to exciting
Right: With Christel Doctor Who episode clips
Dee, presenter of Doctor while monsters walked
Who: The Fan Show.
among the audience. The
event was so successful

74 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

has been recorded for almost ten years. Top left: Pearl Mackie
Although we were disappointed that its and Steven Moffat are
interviewed during
capacity meant a much smaller audience,
The Finale Countdown
we were pleased that the building had on 24 June 2017.
access to the networking infrastructure Top right: Clips from
that helped us record and share the event the Twelfth Doctor’s era
around the globe. are accompanied by
A satellite truck was parked outside, live music from the BBC
National Orchestra
and on Saturday 24 June we broadcast to of Wales.
BBC One’s Facebook channel as audiences
Left: Presenter Jason
listened to a live orchestra play along to Mohammed asks the
World Enough and Time. This performance audience to show
was followed by a 40-minute show hosted its appreciation for
conductor Alastair King
by Jason Mohammed, a BBC presenter
and the orchestra.
who has appeared in Doctor Who a handful
Inset: Audience members
of times, beginning with The Christmas at the Wales Millennium
Invasion (2005). Centre in Cardiff.
Commitments to the film Paddington 2 Below: The cover of
meant that Peter Capaldi couldn’t be at the souvenir programme
the event, but his co-star Pearl Mackie was designed by
Richard Atkinson.
and showrunner Steven Moffat attended
as guests for a live interview. Questions
from the audience were interspersed “What a night to
with more musical moments conducted
by Alastair King. remember! This was
the highlight of all
A
s an extra-special treat, audience

members were handed a 40-page
souvenir booklet to commemorate
the event. The booklet included new
interviews with Steven, Pearl and Peter
plus some never-before-seen pictures and
contributions from the likes of director
Rachel Talalay and executive
producer Brian Minchin. Its
cover, designed by Doctor
Who Magazine’s Richard
Atkinson, was a nod to
Peter Blake’s famous
artwork for Sgt Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band,
with characters from
Doctor Who’s 2017 series
joining the TARDIS
team in a pastiche of the
classic album which had just
celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Of course, the guest of honour was
Alexandra Tynan, who received a standing
ovation when Jason announced her
presence to the audience. The evening
was her first chance to see the recreated
my years connected
with the Doctor.”
Cybermen up close. “What a
night to remember!” she
told me when I chatted
with her afterwards.
“This was the highlight
of all my years
connected with the
Doctor. It was such
a privilege to be there,
feeling part of such
a wonderful programme
– one which has set such
high standards in design,
direction, and production.”
You can watch the original version
of The Finale Countdown on the BBC
YouTube channel. A 37-minute re-edit
of the show is also available on The
Complete Series 10 box set. DWM

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 75

 Episode 12

THE DOCTOR
FALLS FEATURE BY CHRIS BENTLEY

Fleeing from the Cybermen, the Doctor,

Nardole and Bill take refuge at a solar
farm on Floor 507, together with Missy
and the Master. There, Bill learns the
terrible truth of her conversion and the
Doctor makes his last stand…

T
he Doctor Falls continued the
ambitious set-up from World
Enough and Time in supremely
confident style. Expertly
balancing an exciting and
explosive action plot against beautifully
written and performed character moments,
the hour-long episode not only brought
a satisfactory resolution to the threat posed
by Operation Exodus, but also offered closure
for the Master, Missy and Nardole, rescued
Bill from a fate worse than death and reunited
her with Heather (from The Pilot) for a new
kind of life among the stars.
One of the most successful aspects of
the whole finale was the restoration of the
Cybermen to their rightful place in the
pantheon of proper scary monsters. Their
21st-century appearance has always been
impressive, but in their transformation to
armies of stompy robot men – the ‘weapons
grade’ models seen here – they lost much of
what made them creepy and frightening in the
first place. The Cybermen were always at their
scariest when they were skulking about in the
dark, moving with slow, careful precision, and
wearing Cybersuits that revealed the existence
of an organic body beneath the surface – all
acting as a continual reminder of the body
horror they willingly submitted to and now
want to inflict on humanity everywhere.

BBC One, 1 July 2017

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Rachel Talalay
Guest cast: Michelle Gomez (Missy), John
Simm (The Master), Samantha Spiro (Hazran),
Briana Shann (Alit), Rosie Boore (Gazron),
Simon Coombs (Rexhill), Stephanie Hyam
(Heather), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the
Cybermen), David Bradley (The Doctor),
Liam Carey (Cyber Bill)
Rating: 5.29m
Appreciation Index: 83

76 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE DATA FILE
The Doctor makes an appeal to the Master
and Missy as they walk away.
Doctor: “If I run away today, good people will die. If
I stand and fight, some of them might live. Maybe not
many, maybe not for long. Hey, you know, maybe there’s
no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do. So
I’m going to do it and I will stand here doing it ’til it kills
me. You’re going to die too. Some day. How will that be?
Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who
I am is where I stand. Where I stand… is where I fall. Stand
with me. These people are terrified. Maybe we can help. A little.
Why not? Just at the end. Just be kind?” l Cybermen have developed on multiple worlds –
Master: “See this face? Take a good, long look at it. Mondas, Telos, Earth, Planet 14 and Marinus – as a
This is the face that didn’t listen to a word you just said.” result of parallel evolution. There is no evil plan or
evil genius behind their creation: they just happen
wherever there are people.

l After the Master’s resurrection was corrupted,

he became physically unstable, intermittently
transforming into a creature of pure energy. This
condition was cured by the Time Lords on Gallifrey
but he left his home world by mutual consent after
acquiring a new TARDIS.

l Missy always carries

a spare dematerialisation
circuit, even though she
no longer has a TARDIS.

l When two iterations of the same Time Lord meet,

the timelines slip out of synch. This prevents the
younger one from retaining his memories.

l The whole of Floor

To modern eyes, the design of the Mondasian
Cybermen created for The Tenth Planet (1966)
may seem unsophisticated, but once
combined with movement and sound,
their bizarre realisation on screen
turned them into unforgettable
creatures of nightmare.
Their 2017 reappearance effectively
recreated everything that was most
disturbing about them: the cloth faces
with their large dead eyeholes, the unwieldy
chest unit and surgical gloves, the faltering
sing-song speech streaming from an open
mouth. World Enough and Time brilliantly
illustrated how those elements
acknowledged another more significant
landmark: the completion of ten series since
the programme’s return in 2005. We’ve come
to expect that each Doctor will revisit his
own companions – either in person or
in memory – just before he regenerates,
but here Capaldi’s Doctor also recalled
the companions of the Ninth, Tenth
and Eleventh Doctors, as visions
of Rose, Martha, Donna, Jack,
Vastra, Jenny, Sarah Jane, Amy
and River appeared alongside
Bill, Nardole and – most
intriguingly – Clara.
Even more unexpected was
507 of the Mondasian
colony ship has fuel lines
and fusion turbos under
the soil. If you happen
to be a computer genius
with insane computer skills, you can remote spark
a critical failure, resulting in a fiery explosion.
l Nardole doesn’t know where he comes from
as he was found (sort of). If there are more than
three people in the room, he starts a black market.
He intends to name a town after the Doctor, and
probably a pig.

REVIEWS
developed through twisted surgical the Doctor’s attitude to his
experimentation, making sense inevitable regeneration. Close
of that design and turning it to death after receiving three
into something even more full blasts of a Cyber-ray, he
horrific – especially when furiously resisted the process, ‘An immensely satisfying, packed, heartstring-
▼

the first recipient of ‘full declaring, “I don’t want to tugging conclusion that comes together brilliantly...’
conversion’ was Bill Potts. Her change again – never again. Daily Mirror
slow realisation of what she has I can’t keep on being somebody
become in The Doctor Falls was one else.” Then, just as it seemed he ‘Those hoping for an episode that sustains the
▼

of the most heartbreaking sequences was about to regenerate some creeping horror and sense of doom of World Enough
we’ve ever seen in the series, eliciting six months earlier than we and Time will probably come away disappointed. But
stunning performances from both were expecting, The Doctor Falls it’s an absolute emotional maelstrom of a finale, and
Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi. had one last surprise for us. any piece of television with the ability to make you
John Simm’s return as the Master A crotchety old man wearing feel this much, this frequently, has to be considered
happily coincided with the tenth a cloak and astrakhan hat something pretty special.’ Digital Spy
anniversary of his first appearance appeared out of the mist and
in the role at the end of Utopia the countdown to Christmas ‘A cracking closer, with truly shocking returns, the
▼

(2007). But in its closing minutes, 2017 had well and truly showdown to end all showdowns – and a doozy of
The Doctor Falls surprisingly begun... DWM a cliffhanger! Roll on Christmas.’ The Guardian

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 77

 THE

DWM
INTERVIEW

Captain
Lethbridge-Stewart
In 1973, if you’d told Mark Gatiss that one
day he’d play a Lethbridge-Stewart, it might
well have blown his seven-year-old mind.
Truth is, he says, “It still does.”
INTERVIEW BY BENJAMIN COOK

“I
’m the Brigadier’s grandfather,”
says a beaming Mark Gatiss.
“It’s everything I’ve ever
wanted, turning and saying
casually, ‘Lethbridge-Stewart’
– it’s marvellous!”
It’s Christmas 1914 on the
Western Front – or June 2017
in a muddy field near Pontyclun, South
Wales – and Mark is readying himself to
utter those immortal words: “Lethbridge-
Stewart. Captain Archibald Hamish
Right: Mark Gatiss
Lethbridge-Stewart.” So how’s he going
as Captain Lethbridge- to do it? The lines carry so much weight…
Stewart in Twice Upon He thinks for a moment. “You have
a Time (2017). to… I mean, what I’m going to do is…
Insets: As the doomed well, try not to cry. But also he’s basically
professor in The Lazarus
saying, ‘Remember my name,’ therefore
Experiment (2007) and
Gantok in The Wedding he’d say it quite carefully. But he’s not
of River Song (2011). winking to the audience. It’s for the
Below: The Captain Doctor, for it to impact on. So
boards the First Doctor’s I think I’ll go, ‘Lethbridge-
TARDIS in Twice Upon Stewart,’ casually. And
a Time.
then, quite deliberately,
‘Captain Archibald Hamish
Lethbridge-Stewart.’ Yeah,
I think that’s much more
powerful. Or I might do a turn
to camera,” he says, chuckling.
Playing the grandad of such
a legendary character as
Brigadier Alistair Gordon
Lethbridge-Stewart – portrayed
by Nicholas Courtney in
Doctor Who from 1968 to
1989, on and off – means
everything to Mark, a lifelong
fan of the show. Is that how
departing showrunner
Steven Moffat pitched it to
him: “Hey, fancy playing the
Brigadier’s grandpa?”
“Oh no, no,” says Mark.
“No, I didn’t know until
I read it. Then I called
him and cried.” Mark
really had no idea until
he read that line?
“I didn’t have a clue.
I don’t think the Cromer
line [an earlier nod
to the Brigadier’s famous
reference in 1972-73’s The
Three Doctors] was in there at
that stage, so no. The only thing
I thought was, ‘I wonder if this
is going to be the Christmas
truce.’ I had a feeling
about that. But not about
Lethbridge-Stewart.
“It’s just a lovely part.
Very like the Brigadier,
Archie is sort of slightly
dim, but good-hearted. And
it means I’ve played a proper
Doctor Who baddie [Professor Lazarus
in 2007’s The Lazarus Experiment] who
becomes a monster, a prosthetic
cameo [Gantok in 2011’s The Wedding
of River Song], and now a goodie.
So I’ve done it all.”

78 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

“They were like a family. You felt self that. But I don’t think I’d have been
able to comprehend the situation…
Above left: Sharing
a joke with Peter
comforted and delighted by them, the “I mean, the thrilling thing is, it’s
still on TV. Imagine being able to say
Capaldi (as the Twelfth
Doctor) and David

triumvirate of the Doctor, Jo, and the Brig.” that in 1973. Then I’d tell myself, ‘And
in 2017 you’ll play the Brigadier’s
Bradley (as the First
Doctor) on the set
of Twice Upon a Time.
grandfather.’” Mark scrunches his nose. Above right: Brigadier
To prepare for the part, did Mark And what would young Mark have “And seven-year-old me would Lethbridge-Stewart
rewatch any of Courtney’s old episodes? made of Twice Upon a Time? Could he go, ‘Oh… that’s a long time (Nicholas Courtney)
“Yes, and I just…” A happy sigh. “You have wrapped his six- or seven-year-old to wait.’” DWM and Sarah Jane Smith
(Elisabeth Sladen)
know, watching Nick again… he’s so good. head around his 50-year-old self playing reunited for Enemy of
It’s such a good character, the Brigadier, the Brigadier’s grandpa? “Whatever the Bane, a 2008 story
and a lovely contrast to the Doctor. I imagined – hoped – might happen, from The Sarah Jane
He exasperates him, but he absolutely to project this set of circumstances would Adventures.
adores the Brigadier, and that comes have been beyond me,” he says laughing.
across so well. I thought, ‘I’m not doing It would have blown his mind? “It still
an impersonation, really. I mean, I’m not does. I mean, I am still the seven-year-old
playing the Brigadier. It’s his grandfather.’ me. I’m, literally, wandering
But even the way Archie’s lines are around this location looking
structured… there’s something about the for fossils [Mark is an
staccato, sort of military voice and style. amateur palaeontologist]
The ‘Five rounds rapid’ kind of thing and while two Doctor Whos
the slightly bewildered, ‘Yes, I see.’ So talk to me! I think
that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s just such I’d be very happy
a privilege to be part of that lineage, after to tell my
all these years.” seven-year-old

F
or the first half of the 1970s, back
when Mark was a kid, the Brigadier
and UNIT were mainstays of
Doctor Who. “It was a family thing,”
Mark remembers. “It’s a worn cliché,
isn’t it? But they were like family. You
felt comforted and delighted by them,
particularly, I suppose, the triumvirate
of the Doctor, Jo, and the Brig. It sort
of meant the world to us, really.
And I knew Nick Courtney
a bit later in his life, so it’s
really touched me, this whole
thing.” Courtney passed away
in February 2011. “He was
a wonderful man. The good thing
is, the great rebirth” – by which
Left: The Third Doctor
Mark means Doctor Who’s (Jon Pertwee), Jo Grant
21st-century revival – “happened (Katy Manning) and the
while Nick was still alive. So he was Brigadier in a publicity
shot from Terror of the
very much aware of it. I think that’s
Autons (1971).
a marvellous thing.”

THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 79

 Christmas Special 2017

Twice Upon
a Time
FEATURE BY MARK WRIGHT

In the South Pole, two Doctors face one

destiny and time is out of sequence.
Can the testimony of the past help them
to accept their ultimate fate?

A
t its very big heart, Twice
Upon a Time is about two
men who don’t want to go.
Or rather, they want to
go, but for nothing to follow.
The First Doctor, nervous about the change
his body is about to experience for the very
first time, stakes claim to “the courage and
the right to live and die as myself ”. And
the Twelfth, over two thousand years later
wonders, “Isn’t it somebody else’s go?”
Identity drives Twice Upon a Time forward,
looking at once to past and future. One
Doctor is young and frightened, one is old
and tired. Is this another reason why he
first left Gallifrey, to avoid the inevitable
process of rejuvenation and cling to a single,
distinctive identity? Bill actually asks the
First Doctor why he left, and he offers
a simple and elegant explanation: “There
is good, and there is evil. I left Gallifrey to
answer a question of my own. By any
analysis, evil should always win. Good is not
a practical survival strategy. It requires
loyalty, self-sacrifice and love. So why does
good prevail? What keeps the balance between
good and evil in this appalling universe?”
The answer to that is literally looking the
Doctor in the face, but even then, he doesn’t
grasp it, refusing to believe that one “bloke”
wandering the universe, fixing everything is

BBC One, 25 December 2017

Writer: Steven Moffat
Director: Rachel Talalay
Guest cast: David Bradley (The Doctor), Mark
Gatiss (The Captain), Jenna Coleman (Clara), Matt
Lucas (Nardole), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Helen Clay), Toby
Whithouse (German Soldier), Lily Travers (Polly), Jared
Garfield (Ben), Nicholas Briggs (Voice of the Daleks)
and introducing Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor
Rating: tbc
Appreciation Index: tbc

80 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

CLASSIC SCENE
The Twelfth Doctor defiantly tells Testimony
what he intends to do.
Twelfth Doctor: “I’m going to do way more
than escape. I’m going to find out who you are and
what you are doing. And if I don’t like it I will come
back and I will stop you. I will stop all of you!”
First Doctor: “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Twelfth Doctor: “The Doctor.”
First Doctor: “I am the Doctor. Who you are, I cannot
begin to imagine.”
Testimony: “Then let us show you, Doctor… See who you will become!”
Images of the Doctor’s past (and future) selves fill the air…
what makes the difference. It would be a nice
fairy tale, but fairy tales just don’t exist in the
real world... do they?
As British and German troops cautiously
cross the No Man’s Land of the Ypres trenches
on 25 December 1914, it becomes
evident that almost anything
is possible. By the simple pull
of a lever, the Twelfth Doctor
saves the Captain, preserving
an essential part of his own
future and landing them in the
middle of a real-world fairy tale.
The Fifth Doctor (Peter
Davison) said in The Five
Doctors (1983) that a person is
the sum of their memories,
“a Time Lord even more so”.
An increasingly exasperated
Bill repeatedly testifies
to this self-same thing
throughout Twice Upon
a Time. If we take that at
face value – and there’s
no reason why we
shouldn’t – the Doctor
comes face to face in
a very real sense with
Nardole and, more
significantly, Clara Oswald. It feels right that the
Doctor’s memories of the impossible girl who
was willing to die to save him are returned. Has
she saved him once again? The Doctor steps
back into the TARDIS a more complete man
than when he left it, the sum of his memories
restored. Is it only now that the Twelfth Doctor
can let the Doctor go?
Twice Upon a Time may well be Steven
Moffat’s final Doctor Who script. While it
revisits a pioneering television moment,
it also looks back to where Moffat’s own
Doctor Who television journey began,
in 2005’s The Empty Child/The
Doctor Dances. In that story’s
climax, the Ninth Doctor
(Christopher Eccleston)
gleefully proclaimed:
“Just this once,
everybody lives!” Twice
Upon a Time provides
a pure distillation
of that message; yes,
everybody dies, but
through Testimony,
everybody really
does live on.
Especially the
Doctor. DWM
DATA FILE
l The Captain tells his German opponent that “War is
hell”, using a quote first attributed to General William
Tecumseh Sherman (1820-91), a celebrated Union
Army officer during the American Civil War of 1861-65.
l The Captain is afforded a restorative tot of brandy
from the TARDIS’ concealed drinks cabinet – the
same cabinet that River Song pilfered a cheeky glass
from in 2015’s The Husbands of River Song. The
cabinet has been there all along, also hiding behind
a roundel in the First Doctor’s TARDIS.
l The Twelfth Doctor throws some
affectionate nicknames at his earlier self.
“Mr Pastry” was a popular children’s
television character played by Richard
Hearne from the late 1940s to the mid-
1970s. Doctor Who producer Barry Letts
approached Hearne in 1974 to potentially
take over the role of the Doctor from Jon Pertwee.
Mary Berry’s television appearances date back to the
early 1970s and famously include a 2010-16 stint as a
judge on The Great British Bake-Off. “Corporal Jones”
was the octogenarian Home Guard soldier played by
Clive Dunn in BBC sitcom Dad’s Army (1968-77).
l As the Christmas truce begins, the German and
British troops sing Silent Night, composed in 1818
by Franz Zaver Gruber with lyrics by Joseph Mohr,
and later Auld Lang Syne, a poem written
by Robert Burns in 1788 and
popularly put to the tune
of a Scots folk melody.
l The Captain gives his full
name as Hamish Archibald
Lethbridge-Stewart, who
is the grandfather of Alistair Gordon
Lethbridge-Stewart. The family lives in Cromer.
REVIEWS
‘Twice Upon a Time is as fun, imaginative and
▼
sweetly sad as it is, capping off Capaldi’s time on
Doctor Who with less of a glorious final stand (Series
10 finale The Doctor Falls took care of that) than an
offbeat epilogue where the Doctor decides to rise
once again.’ Radio Times
‘This very special Special has all the hallmarks of
▼
a Doctor Who classic. Humour, surprises, nostalgia,
festive flair, and a hell of a lot of emotion.’ Metro
‘For [Capaldi’s] finale, his work is sublime.
▼
Generous, haunting, funny and utterly moving, his
farewell is brilliant.’ Den of Geek
THE DOCTOR WHO YEARBOOK 2018 81
 Letting Go
Above right: Peter
Capaldi receives
a farewell gift on the
set of Twice Upon
a Time (2017).
Below: Steven Moffat,
David Bradley, Pearl
Mackie, Mark Gatiss
and Jo Whiley at the
Science Museum’s IMAX
cinema on 13 December
2017. Photo © Marcus Hearn.
82 DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE
Peter Capaldi was unable to attend the
preview screening of his final Doctor
Who episode in December, but sent
a poignant farewell message.
O
n Wednesday 13 December
2017, a special preview
of Twice Upon a Time
took place at
London’s Science
Museum. The
episode was screened
for an invited audience
that included Tony Hall (the BBC’s
Director-General) and a number
of Doctor Who alumni, including Waris
Hussein (the series’ first director) and
former companions Nicola Bryant, Janet
Fielding and Katy Manning.
After the screening, Jo Whiley hosted
a Q&A with David Bradley (who played
the First Doctor), Mark Gatiss (the
Captain), Pearl Mackie (Bill Potts)
and outgoing showrunner Steven
Moffat, who also wrote the episode.
Lord Hall had already insisted that
questions should only be taken from
the youngsters in the audience, and
Steven kept the ensuing conversation
characteristically light.
In many respects, however, Twice
Upon a Time is a sombre, philosophical
episode, and there was no disguising the
sadness that surrounded both Steven
Moffat and Peter Capaldi’s departure
from the series.
Peter was in Scotland that evening so
was unable to attend, but he sent
a message that Jo read for the audience.
Peter has given us his permission to
share that farewell here:
I’m really sorry I can’t be with you
tonight. I’d like to thank all my friends
on Doctor Who for sharing their good
humour, talent and life with me over the
last four years, and particularly Steven
Moffat, who has brought so much to
Doctor Who, even more than might
be realised today, but will be seen clearly
in the future.
I’d like to thank everyone who loves
the show for sharing it with me, and
sharing the boundless generosity of spirit
that it embodies.
I wish Jodie and the new TARDIS
team all the best for the future, and the
past, and everything in between. I look
forward to watching them journey to new
and wonderful places.
For me, it’s been an amazing trip.
I went to the end of time. I met
fantastical creatures, and I blew them
up. But now it’s over. Time I was off.
Peter Capaldi
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DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE 83

 THE 2018 YEARBOOK
“What would you die for?”
At the end of 2017 a remarkable chapter in the history of Doctor Who drew to a close. Two incarnations of the Time Lord
overcame an existential threat... before the arrival of the Thirteenth Doctor heralded a bold new era for the programme.

The latest Special Edition of Doctor Who Magazine is a unique souvenir of the Twelfth Doctor’s final adventures,
from The Return of Doctor Mysterio through to Twice Upon a Time. Packed full of all-new features
and previously unseen images, this is the essential guide to the year in Doctor Who.

DWM Special Edition #48

Spring 2018