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TEN FAVORITE STORIES BIGGER ON THE INSIDE |
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Ten stories, in the order they were made, at least one for nearly every Doctor. A Doctor Who "story" is a serial of several episodes, so each of these is somewhere between an hour and a half and two and a half hours of television. I've kept it to a line or two apiece and given nothing away that isn't on the back of the videotape box. Three are Tom Baker. I showed restraint. |
| An Unearthly Child 1963 Hartnell |
Two schoolteachers follow an odd pupil home to a junkyard and find a police box humming in the corner; the first twenty-five minutes are as good as anything the show ever did, and the cavemen afterward take a little patience. |
| The Mind Robber 1968 Troughton |
The TARDIS falls clean out of reality into a Land of Fiction full of storybook characters, and it's the strangest, cleverest thing they ever pulled off on no money at all. |
| Spearhead from Space 1970 Pertwee |
Pertwee's first, the first in color, and shot entirely on film because of a strike at the studios; when the shop-window mannequins come to life, a generation of British children never looked at a department store the same way again. |
| The Dæmons 1971 Pertwee |
An English village, an archaeological dig into an old barrow, Morris dancers, a new vicar who is not what he seems, and UNIT at its very best. Comfortable as an old armchair. |
| Genesis of the Daleks 1975 Tom Baker |
The Time Lords send the Doctor back to the war where the Daleks were created, with orders to stop them before they start, and we meet their creator Davros; the best Dalek story ever made, and the moral question at the heart of it has stayed with me for seventeen years. |
| Pyramids of Mars 1975 Tom Baker |
An English country house in 1911, an Egyptian god in a tomb, robot mummies marching through the woods, and Tom Baker at his most alien. The first story I ever saw, and still the one I'd show you first. |
| The Robots of Death 1977 Tom Baker |
A murder mystery aboard a huge mining machine crawling across a desert planet, crewed by bored rich people and beautiful, polite robots; Agatha Christie in outer space, with Leela at her best. |
| City of Death 1979 Tom Baker |
I said three Tom Bakers. I lied. Paris, the Mona Lisa, a count with a secret, real location filming in the real Paris, a script Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker's Guide had a hand in, and John Cleese turning up for a moment in an art gallery. The funniest one, and the most fun. |
| The Caves of Androzani 1984 Davison |
Peter Davison's last: grim, desperate, beautifully written and played, with everybody in it out for himself except the Doctor. A lot of fans call it the best of them all, and I've never been able to argue. |
| Remembrance of the Daleks 1988 McCoy |
For the twenty-fifth anniversary the Doctor goes back to London in 1963, to the same junkyard and the same school as the very first episode, with two gangs of Daleks at war in the streets. McCoy's Doctor comes into his own here, and you feel it. |
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THE NIGHT AMERICA SAW IT FIRST
For the twentieth anniversary the BBC made a special called The Five Doctors, and here's something I love: public stations in this country showed it on the anniversary itself, Wednesday, November 23, 1983, two days before it was shown in Britain. Sue and I watched it that week with two other couples and a sheet cake decorated like a police box. For once, America was ahead. The one sour note: Tom Baker didn't take part, so my Doctor appears only in a few minutes of footage from a story they never finished making. I took it personally at the time. I've since been told by Sue that it wasn't about me. |
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Ones that just missed: The Ark in Space, Horror of Fang Rock, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Earthshock, and The Curse of Fenric. Write me and tell me which of mine you'd throw out, and which of these you'd put in. I'll listen. I won't change it, but I'll listen. |