I'm not sure if I saw Pyramids of Mars when it was first broadcast in 1975; I know I did catch the edited rebroadcast in November 1976, which got a larger TV audience than any previous episode of Doctor Who, and I also remember devouring the novelisation by Terrance Dicks at a young age. Once New Who had rekindled my fervour, it was one of the ( Read more... )

I have vivid memories of watching Image of the Fendahl when it first came out in 1977 - in retrospect, the last really satisfactory story of Season 15 of Doctor Who, though as a ten-year-old I was generally forgiving. When I rewatched it after thirty years in 2008, I wrote:I remember being a bit underwhelmed by Image of the Fendahl when it was ( Read more... )

There was a time when I faithfully tracked each of Big Finish's Doctor Who releases as they came out, and reported them here. I fell out of the habit some time around 2014, and indeed stopped listening to Big Finish all that much until the lockdown really started to hit a year ago. Now there is far too much material to hope that I will ever catch ( Read more... )

I have been slack about Big Finish recently - over the last few months, I picked up listening to the tremendous backlog of their output that I had not previously got to, but have blogged very little here. (In particular, I recommend Susans War with Carole Ann Ford, and the David Tennant/Tom Baker crossover Out Of Time 1.) Anyway, important to ( Read more... )

As previously mentioned, I have been following the Doctor Who multi-platform "event", Time Lord Victorious, of which the most substantial elements not written up so far are a novel, a comics story and a couple of audios.

DWM comic story: "Monstrous Beauty", by Scott Gray

Second frame of third installment:

( Read more... )

While I have vague memories of watching this in 1975 - my brithday was on a Saturday that year - I have much clearer memories of renting the video in about 1990; it was one of the first Doctor Who stories to be released on VHS. I persuaded sceptical housemates in the wonderful 49 Chesterton Road, Cambridge, to gather round and watch, and we all ( Read more... )

Again, an Old Who story that I got back to pretty early after New Who revived my enthusiasm, but this time I am pretty sure that I watched it both first time around in March/April 1975 and then the 85-minute cut shown during the Christmas holiday that year. In April 2006, I wrote:Watched episode 4 last night, and episodes 5 and 6 tonight. Will have ( Read more... )

I don't recall seeing any of The Sontaran Experiment first time around in 1975, but it was one of the earlier bits of Old Who that I got back to, in March 2006. I wrote then:It comes between two excellent stories of Tom Baker's first season, The Ark In Space and Genesis Of The Daleks. Alas, the two episodes in between are not much cop, with the ( Read more... )

I definitely remember watching The Ark in Space first time around - again, not sure that I caught every episode, but the setting of the space station far in humanity's future was immediately entrancing. When the show returned, this was one of the first DVDs I bought. I wrote then:Harry is a bit annoying, but it's every bit as good as I thought I ( Read more... )

It struck me as the year turned that this year’s Doctor Who series, being the twelfth of New Who, occupies in a sense the same space as the first series of Old Who featuring Tom Baker, which is also the first series of Doctor Who that I remember really making an effort to watch as it was broadcast (I was seven). So, time to go back, and also ( Read more... )