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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1963
Yesterday was, as many of you will be aware, the forty-eighth anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. This means that next year, 2012, is the fiftieth year of Who’s existence. Over the next...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1964
It might seem odd to viewers nowadays, but one of the rules Sydney Newman, the executive in charge of Doctor Who at its beginning, put into place was ‘no bug-eyed monsters’. This rule was, of course,...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1965
Doctor Who has always been primarily a TV show, but from very early on it became what we would now call multimedia. Very early on it stopped existing only on TV, and spread out into comics, books,...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1967
I’m back after an extended Christmas and not-being-arsed break! Only one photo this time though as my hard drive is knackered and I’m busy recovering all my files (have you any idea how difficult it is...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: The Mind Robber
Sometimes the best creative work comes from having to work within restrictions imposed from outside. The Mind Robber is a perfect example of this. The story before, The Dominators, was originally meant...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1969
It was the end…but the moment had been prepared for. From 1963 through 1969 Doctor Who was a black-and-white serial that ran for nine- or ten-month stretches, that featured as a lead an unknowable...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1970
Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor was the most stable the series ever had. For his entire run, the show had the same script editor, Terrance Dicks, and producer, Barry Letts (Letts officially took over...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1972
You can’t change history, not one line… The words “Special Edition” on a Doctor Who DVD give far more information than two words should be able to. Whenever a Doctor Who story has a Special Edition...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1974
All is not well at the Wenley Moor underground atomic research station: there are unaccountable losses of power-output; nervous breakdowns amongst the staff; and then—a death! UNIT is called in and...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1975
1975 was the last year that everything changed for Doctor Who. We’ve seen that there are three main forces behind the feel of Doctor Who , the producer, the script editor, and the star. Season 12,...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1976
Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of peace and ordered calm, protected against all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly,...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1977
How good can a story be before its bad aspects are excusable? The Talons Of Weng-Chiang is notable for many things — it’s the last story for Philip Hinchcliffe as producer (and he let the show go so...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – 1981
It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for… 12th Doctor, The Character played by Tom Baker in Doctor Who. It was established in the story The Brain of Morbius that the Doctor was in his twelfth...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1982
Earthshock is almost universally considered one of the very best Doctor Who stories of Peter Davison’s tenure in the role, with only The Caves Of Androzani offering it much competition. In Doctor Who...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1983
The twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who was obviously a special event, and who better to write it than the man most associated with Doctor Who, Terrance Dicks? Terrance Dicks is a figure we haven’t...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years — 1984
The Caves Of Androzani is, notably, the only actually good Doctor Who story from 1984. This is not just my opinion — consensus opinion (the Doctor Who Magazine reader’s poll) places it as the best...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1985
Eric Saward hasn’t received a lot of love in these essays so far, but in the last full series he script-edited, Colin Baker’s first, he finally found a coherent aesthetic vision for Doctor Who. Whereas...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1986
The levels of taste and good judgement in the Doctor Who production office in the mid-1980s can be summed up in three words: Doctor In Distress. Band Aid had had a huge hit with the song Do They Know...
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1987
A quick note before I begin here — I had no home internet access for a month, and so wasn’t able to watch or write about the rest of the recent series. Sorry to those who were hoping for more reviews....
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Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years: 1988
The Happiness Patrol is one of the greatest triumphs of Andrew Cartmel’s aesthetic as applied to Doctor Who. It’s a Brechtian political satire about consumerism and Thatcherism, a cutting polemic and...
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