Terror of the Zygons

"Oil? An emergency? Ha! it's about time the people who run this planet of yours realized that be dependent on a mineral slime just doesn't make sense."

We've arrived at Season Thirteen. Tom's got his first season behind him. Hinchcliffe and Holmes, as Producer and Script Editor, are in total control. Season Twelve's scripts had been commissioned by Letts-Dicks and whilst Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor was obviously totally different from Jon Pertwee's the tone of Season Twelve was not hugely different to that of the Pertwee era. This was about to change.

Terror of the Zygons is magnificent. There's no other way to describe it. That makes it hard to blog about. It's much easier to be scathing about bad stories than to do justice to good ones but Terror of the Zygons is one of those Classic Doctor Who stories that burnishes bright more than 30 years after it was made. Yes, the Skarasen isn't the world's greatest special effect but it isn't the worst either and the Zygons are a wonderous piece of design work from James Acheson: half-human embryo, half-octopus.



The Zygons whisper, rather than shout. They're not without a sense of humor and they can transform themselves into human beings. Why they've never been bought back to the series I don't know.

The Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane have returned to Earth in response to a summons from the Brigadier who has been called to Scotland to investigate the destruction of several North Sea oil rigs. He is HQ'd in a pub in a village called Tullock.

It turns out the attacks on the rigs are being carried out by the Skarasen, a cyborg water creature controlled by the Zygons. The Zygons have been lurking at the bottom of Loch Ness in a spaceship for several hundred years as the result of damage and the Skarasen is their food provider - it's 'lactic fluids' apparently - and their weapon.

Using their ability to change shape they have taken the places of several locals, including the Duke of Forgill himself (John Woodnut), his large bearded servent Caber (Robert Russell) and Sister Lamont (Lillias Walker), a local nurse with a view to taking over the world, transforming it into a suitable environment for their fellow Zygons to settle as it turns out the Zygon's homeworld has been destroyed.

The Doctor eventually gets on board their ship, releases the human prisoners and blows it up. Broton, the chief Zygon, disguised as the Duke is planning to have the Skarasen attack an energy conference on the Thames, killing various big wigs and demonstrating their power to the world. Demands will follow.

The Doctor and UNIT track Broton to the conference where they shot him dead and the Doctor feeds the Skarasen its homing device, thus saving the world and sending the Skarasen back to Loch Ness, the only home it has ever known.

There are some great moments in this story. The cliffhanger to episode one where Sarah is on the phone to the Doctor from the hospital where Harry is injured. In mid-conversation Sarah is attacked by a Zygon and screams. It's one of the series all-time great cliffhangers.

Then there's the Zygon-Harry's attack on Sarah in the barn and its subsequent death, which is quite chilling and tonally very different to the Letts-Dicks era.

UNIT are quite effective in this story to. They look military for once, something Douglas Camfield the director always seems to be able to do effectively. When they're out in the woods hunting down the Zygon that killed Angus the Landlord the whole thing feels right. Lillias Walker is also spectacularly sinister as the Zygon-Sister Lamont. There's something chilling about her appearance in the neat, pressed nurses uniform and she's got a mean stare on her.

The model work for the Zygon spaceship is quite magnificent, especially its destruction.

We say farewell to Harry Sullivan at the end of this story as the production team, quite rightly, realized that with a younger actor as the Doctor Ian Marter was not being used effectively, which is a shame as I quite like Harry.

This is Doctor Who at it's best, edging away from the comfortable Letts-Dicks era and into something much darker.

A universe of terrors awaits.

Update, 30/07/2013 after re-watching on DVD.

I think I stick to most of the above. I'd add that John Levene puts in one of his best Benton performances in this story I think. There's a couple of quibbles: how come the Doctor is suddenly an expert in organic crystallography and Zygon technology; why doesn't Broton realize the Doctor's freed the Duke and most importantly why does Sarah almost get the Doctor killed lurking about in the doorway when the Doctor's told her to go and get the Brigadier?

It's also a shame to see Harry Sullivan depart. I thought Ian Marter added a nice chemistry to the Fourth Doctor's first season, which I'll miss going forward.

And we won't see the Brigadier for a while either, which is a shame too, but the Doctor begrudgingly helping makes more sense to me than the Third Doctor's name dropping establishment figure.

I still love Tom Baker. I still can't watch his era with anything approaching objectivity but you know I'm not going to apologize for that. Tom Baker's Doctor is the reason I'm a Doctor Who fan and when I'm depressed or tired it's Tom Baker's era that I reach for to cheer me up. So if you don't like the Tom Baker era or you don't think Tom is 'Doctor-ish' then we'll have to agree to disagree. Even though you're clearly wrong.

In terms of the Fourth Boxed set I quite like it. Yes, it's a unnecessary luxury but the box is lovely contains a letter from Tom Baker, a Tom Baker photo, a 5" action figure of the Fourth Doctor in immediate post-regeneration Pertwee clothes (although it's hard to do velvet in plastic so actually the Fourth Doctor looks more like he's wearing Eccleston's leather jacket), a Fourth Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver (which makes noises). It's a bit plastic if truth be told but it'll do for me. I've got a Fourth Doctor Sonic Screwdriver. Woo-hoo.

There's also some lovely picture cards of Tom's companions, although it's sad to realise how many of them have passed away.

The Terror of the Zygons DVD is the vanilla release but does the job. There's also a DVD with a new c.30 minute interview with Tom Baker, which is nice & is quite lovely about us fans and the audio of Genesis of the Daleks (with Tom's narration). I've still got a battered old cassette version of this somewhere, which I can't listen to, so it is nice to have a replacement.

So buy it if you've got the money to spare or you're an insane completist. Like me.

Revenge of the Cybermen

I'm beginning not to like the Cybermen much. In my head and on their reputation they're one of the series great villains, second only to the Daleks but having been watching the series through since An Unearthly Child I'm struggling to see why.

Of their stories so far only their debut The Tenth Planet and The Invasion are that great and in the latter the Cybermen are effectively just the muscle, it's Kevin Stoney's Tobias Vaughan who gets most of the action. Tomb of the Cybermen is OK but neither The Moonbase or The Wheel in Space really float my boat. Jon Pertwee never had a story with them in so Revenge of the Cybermen is their first proper story since The Invasion in 1968. Seven years later we get Revenge of the Cybermen and then they won't appear again until Earthshock in 1982.

On the basis of Revenge of the Cybermen, it isn't hard to see why there's such a long gap before the appear again because it is pretty poor and in the Doctor's own words to the Cyberleader: "You're just a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship."

They're a shoddy lot all around. The costumes have been redesigned. I'm not Ian Banks so I'm not going to dwell on that except to say that it was a dumb decision to stick their guns on the top of their heads. They wouldn't look so bad if they didn't spend huge amounts of time standing with their hands on their hips pontificating.



The production team's decision to let the Cyberactors play their lines without their previous vocal treatments also doesn't help as they end up sounding less like Cybermen and more like a Brian Blessed convention. Christopher Robbie's Cyberleader, in particular, is less cybernetic organism than a mid-Atlantic voiced actor trying to be heard in the Circle.

Because the Cybermen are so pathetic it undermines the rest of the story, which isn't the most exciting of tales anyway. The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah arrive on the Nerva Beacon - the scene of The Ark in Space remember - having completed their mission on Skaro for the Time Lords.

However, they've arrived early so whilst waiting for the TARDIS to show up they decide to explore. It's pretty obvious pretty quickly that something is wrong. The corridors of the space station are filled with corpses. (Mostly dummies to be fair but it seems churlish to dwell on that) It turns out that they've beamed into the middle of what appears to be a plague. Only four - soon to be three - of the crew survive: Commander Stevenson (Ronald Leigh-Hunt), Lester (William Marlowe) and Kellman (Jeremy Wilkin), although strictly Kellman's a civilian exographer.

Nerva is acting as a beacon around a mysterious 'moon' on the edge of Jupiter named 'Voga' by Kellman. Kellman's surveyed it and explained that there's no life there, except as because obvious that there is, the Vogans. It turns out that Voga is the remnants of the legendary planet of gold, which played a key role in helping humanity defeat the Cybermen during their war. It turns out that the Cybermen can be destroyed by gold.

This the Vogans themselves haven't been told or don't know, which is the big bleeding bit of stupidity at the centre of the story.

The main Vogans are played by an excellent cast: Michael Wisher is the consumptive scientist Magrik, David Collings is the speechifying politician, Vorus, and the aforementioned Kevin Stoney is the old councilor Tyrum but the masks they have to wear don't help them bring much life to the rather stilted dialogue.

Blah...you know I really can't be too bothered to explain this. It turns out that Vorus is working with Kellman to stitch up the last Cybermen so that the Vogan's can finally escape their subterranean hiding place. The Kellman-Vorus plan is to lure the Cybermen to Nerva then destroy them using their Skystriker rocket, built by Magrik. It's as cunning as one of Baldrick's plans and the Doctor's meddling almost puts a sonic screwdriver in the works.

The Cybermen have kept three of the crew alive to deliver three 'Cyberbombs' into the middle of Voga to blow it up thus GETTING THEIR REVENGE. (Sigh)

Vorus and Magrik get killed by Tyrum trying to launch their rocket, Kellman dies in a rockfall caused by Harry, who almost kills the Doctor too, Sarah trapped on Nerva gets rescued by the Doctor, then they're both recaptured as the Cybermen decide to crash Nerva into Voga...strutting off to their ship with a quip leaving the Doctor and Sarah to witness 'the biggest bang in history'. They escape, save Nerva from crashing and the Skystriker takes out the Cybership. THE END...thank heaven's.

The cast deserves so much better.

We deserve better.

Genesis of the Daleks

"Do I have the right..."

Genesis of the Daleks is an excellent story. Dramatic, dark and centered on two excellent performances: Tom Baker's Doctor and Michael Wisher's Davros.

I feel I might have been holding back my enthusiasm for some of these stories because of my Tom Baker nostalgia but I genuinely think this is the first story in his first season that feels like HIS. He's magnificent. But in truth Genesis of the Daleks is the Michael Wisher show.

Despite being encased in a rubber mask his Davros is intelligent, ruthless, obsessed, insane, charming and totally terrifying. You know that Davros would sacrifice everything and everyone so he could be 'set amongst the Gods' and he pretty much does.

The scene where he discusses whether he would release a virus he had created that would destroy everything else in creation is justly referenced as a 'classic' but there's so many other fantastic moments: the way he sneers when pronouncing the word 'democracy' in the final episode; his meeting with the Thals and the way, right at the end, when he knows that his creations have turned against him he can't quite bring himself to press the destruct button.

Only Roger Delgado and Kevin Stoney have created villains with the heft of Michael Wisher in Genesis. It's a performance to be savored.

The story itself is simple enough: the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry are 'grabbed' by the Time Lords who wish to avert the creation of the Daleks. The Doctor is the agent they have selected. They are on Skaro at the bottom end of a thousand-year war between the Thals and Kaleds. After being split up, captured, re-captured and escaping again the TARDIS team has seen Davros's steady climb to supreme power in the course of which he happily destroys his own people every time they oppose him.

Davros's experiments have shown that the ultimate form of the Kaled people is a terrible blob type mutation. The Daleks are his response and he loses all interest in the Kaled's present. They can be sacrificed to ensure the survival of his Daleks but his obsession with their survival means that he is creating a monster. A monster that will bring Davros's own destruction. The monsters will kill their creator.

He seems to have one main ally throughout the story. The magnificently nasty Nyder, played by Peter Miles. Almost everyone else betrays Davros.

Every action of the Doctor seems to force Davros to further acts of terror. The Doctor convinces the Kaled government to halt Davros's experiments and Davros wipes out the entire Kaled dome. It's as if by trying to change history the Doctor is just forcing it along faster, although in the end he suggests that he's delayed them by perhaps a thousand years.

There are a couple of quibbles. Firstly, whose idea was the killer giant clams? All credit to Ian Marter, Tom Baker and Liz Sladen for being able to act their terror at these...mutated shellfish convincingly. Ian Marter's particularly good when it looks like one of them is going to eat him alive.

Secondly, it's always been obvious that the Daleks are a SF version of the Nazis but sometimes in Genesis of the Daleks, the parallel is hammered home without subtlety.

Thirdly Sarah's 'bullying' of the Doctor when he's making his 'Do I have the right' speech. He's agonising over the possibility of committing genocide but Sarah's trying to make him do it. Like her bullying of poor post-traumatic Roth in The Sontaran Experiment, it just doesn't feel right.

Also if truth be told like all six-parters it has its moments of padding but don't let my quibbles put you off. This is one of those Classic Doctor Who stories that I'd recommend to anyone. If you want to see Doctor Who approaching it's best then Genesis of the Daleks will do the job.

The Sontaran Experiment

There's not much to say about The Sontaran Experiment really. It whips by in two quick episodes and is gone before you can blink.

The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry beam down from The Ark (or Nerva as everyone is now taking to calling it) to the abandoned Earth. There the Doctor sets about repairing the transmat, whilst he sends Sarah and Harry off to explore.

The abandoned Earth turns out not to be quite as abandoned as all that. Not only is there a gang of South African space colonists but there's a mysterious Robot to. Oh and Styre, a Sontaran. He's conducting an experiment on our South African friends to test the limits of human endurance and to find their weaknesses before the Sontarans launch an invasion.

The Doctor stops him.

The End.

Whilst making this story Tom Baker broke his collar bone so in a lot of shots his stunt double Terry Walsh is playing the Doctor. Unfortunately, it is pretty obvious a lot of the time, which is a tad distracting.

Styre's robot, which goes around collecting assorted South Africans to experiment on, looks pretty rubbish: a big silver box on rather precarious legs. It seems to have come from the same civilization that created the Smash Mash robots* and was apparently strapped to the top of a car so that it could be seen to move. (The details of Doctor Who stories I seem to have stuck in my head, it's quite bizarre)

Harry's excellent in this, perhaps because Tom's incapacitated he gets to do get a bit more involved in the action and his anger when he thinks both Sarah and the Doctor are dead and he sets off to get Styre is lovely.

I'm not sure I like Sarah in this story. She's borderline hysterical half the time and bullies - and there's no other word I can use really - Roth (Peter Rutherford) into guiding her around even though he's clearly terrified as a result of torture. Rutherford puts in a pretty good performance too. This is a man that can't take much more but Sarah still feels it's fine to get him to help her so that when they are eventually captured his terror leads him to flee and Styre murders him. It just doesn't seem right or particularly in character for Sarah.

Yes, I'm aware that some of Sarah's hysteria is generated by being terrified in a deliberate experiment by Styre but I still think it's not one of Sarah's best stories.

Basically, it isn't really a story in its own right but the last two parts of The Ark in Space, as well as providing a link into both the next story, Genesis of the Daleks and the final story of Tom's first season Revenge of the Cybermen.

It's another of those not bad, not good stories. Distinctly average.

* Here's a Smash Mash robot in action, just in case you're too young to remember:

The Ark In Space

In which Harry's unfortunate twisting of the TARDIS's Helmic Regulator leads to a landing inside a 30th-century space station and there's something horrible going on...

The Ark in Space is nicely paced with the tension building steadily towards the final moments.

The Wirrn - and their plan - is quite horrible, although rather surprisingly they're given a legitimate reason to hate mankind. Noah's gradual transformation from man to Wirrn is played dead straight and is all the more unpleasant for it. I like the guest cast's performances, although only Noah (Kenton Moore), Vira (Wendy Williams) and Rogin (Richardson Morgan) get more than a few lines and unpleasant death.

This new production team seems to be working towards something aimed at an older audience than the Letts-Dicks team. It's a gradual process and this could still - almost - be a Third Doctor story in the basic format. The balance between dark and light; scary and comedy seems to be shifting a little though. I suspect the Doctor's line about Dune's knowledge having been 'fully digested' would not have slipped past Letts-Dicks.

The sets look great with the pallets containing the cryogenic sleepers particularly effective and the scale of the Ark is hinted at through glimpses of further rooms around corners.

The Wirrn, are basically the space equivalent of the wasps that lay their eggs inside other insects thus giving their children something to feast on, have snuck aboard the Ark whilst its inhabitants are asleep, waiting out eternity, as the Doctor puts it. The humans have fled to the Ark to survive solar flares. The Wirrn have also been driven from their home world but by Earth colonists and the Ark is there chance to absorb the human race and their knowledge as a diet based form of revenge.

The Ark is supposed to contain the best of the human race but the first few Ark inhabitants are all white, so perhaps it's not the whole human race after all. Or are the non-whites waiting to be woken later?

Interestingly if this had been a 60s story I think there would have been at least one black actor, probably playing Lycett but oddly not in this 1974 story. I think the 'Race Against Time' documentary on 'The Mutants' explains why that might be better than I can and perhaps I'd not have noticed it quite so much if it hadn't been for watching that documentary recently. It certainly had never occurred to me on previous viewings.

The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry arrive on the Ark to find it non-functional. Poor old Sarah almost suffocates before the Doctor gets everything repaired. Then whilst the Doctor and Harry are distracted by a lampshade with an attitude, Sarah is transported, lectured to and cryogenically frozen. If it's not one thing, it's another for poor, old Sarah.

The Doctor and Harry find their way to the pallets where humanity is stored and discover Sarah is there and the revivification process has begun. The first out is Vira, Med Tech One. Then Noah. Vira's quite nice to the TARDIS gang but Noah goes into the threaten-gun-suspicious mode. He stuns the Doctor, whose only trying to help and then makes the mistake of going down into the Solar Stack wherein lurks a fat Wirrn grub. The Wirrn strikes Noah, which starts the process of turning him into a Wirrn.

It's all downhill for Noah then. His hand goes to green bubble wrap, his mind is at war with itself as Wirrn takes on Human and he's gradually changing. This is played with terrifying sincerity by Kenton More. This is proper body horror.

The rest of the story is the Doctor's battle to save the Ark's inhabitants from being Wirrn lunch and the battle between Human Noah and Wirrn Noah.

In the end, the Wirrn are distracted and defeated, partly by the Doctor and partly by the remaining humanity of Noah who seems to sacrifice himself in order to take out all the Wirrn. It's an upbeat ending, proving the Doctor's point about the indomitability of humanity.

There's a couple of quibbles: the direction is a bit odd, with strange jumps that don't make what's happened obvious; the adult Wirrn don't work as well as the grubs or the half-Noah, half-Wirrn. It's a combination of their lack of animation and dodgy limbs.

It flies by in terms of pacing and Tom's excellent in it: whether it's eulogizing about mankind at one point or mocking Harry's stupidity the next. Both Ian Marter and Liz Sladen are up to their usual standards but it is pretty obvious that Harry's not got enough to do already, so is often reduced to standing about being lightly patronizing, although I do like his attempts at getting Sarah to be stiff-upper-lipped about the Doctor's (apparent) death.

Overall a good story, although perhaps not quite the classic I remembered it to be.

Robot

Before I go into the details can I just admit to a horrific bias here? Tom Baker is MY Doctor. He was the Doctor when I first start watching the show - my first clear memory being Leela tearing Magnus Griel's mask off in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, something that I think must have terrified the six-year-old kid I was back in 1977. This means I tend to find even the worst Tom Baker stories come wrapped in nostalgia.

That being said, Robot is from the Third Doctor template: its Earth, it has mad scientists making mad plans for world conquest and it has UNIT doing things militarily. All of which makes sense from a production team point of view as it puts a cloak of comfort around the shock of a new Doctor.

So what of the Fourth Doctor. Well, he's a burst of energy full of "eccentric enthusiasms", just like Tom himself. Terrance Dicks deliberately wrote the Robot Doctor to be as wild and eccentric as he thought Tom himself was, with the view that they could always tone down the performance as time passed. That didn't happen, obviously.

It's hard now to separate Tom as he is now, with the success of the part behind him and the Fourth Doctor.

The Fourth Doctor's carelessness and chaos are a clear contrast to the dandified and tidy Third. It's reflected in both the costume, which is a brilliant piece of design by James Acheson and the performance.

The Fourth Doctor is effervescent, eccentric and exciting.

We also see the introduction of Doctor Harry Sullivan, played by Ian Marter. Who is of the 'nice but dim' school of the British military. The production team had bought him in on the assumption that the new Doctor would be an older actor and a younger man would need to do the action stuff. With the casting of Tom Baker, this raison d'etre disappeared and Harry suffers as a result, often being a figure of fun. But Ian Marter gives Harry the right amount of likeability so he's not a drag.

The basic story is King Kong meets Frankenstein, with a Robot in place of the big monkey.

There's a bunch of scientific fascists - mostly based at ThinkTank - who want to rule the world led by Miss Winters (Patricia Maynard) and her creep minion Jellicoe (Alec Linstead), they've got a Giant Robot, which is the creation of Professor Kettlewell(Edward Burnham) and his big hair to help them rob a series of top-secret labs in order to get hold of the launch codes for the superpower's nuclear weapons.

It's a big old blackmail plot.

UNIT gets on to the case. Sarah Jane meets the Robot in the flesh. I have to admit that I think the Robot's design is pretty impressive, again Acheson's work, although the hands and feet don't quite work.

Winter's and Jellicoe make an attempt to convince Sarah that their Robot can't kill people and the poor thing virtually suffers a breakdown. Sarah's concern for the Robot, mocked by Miss Winter's, will cause her a lot of hassle later on.

The Doctor's investigations of various crime scenes dovetail with Sarah Jane's and UNIT are onto the Winter's plan pretty sharpish but lacking proof the Brigadier is unable to do much initially. Sarah is captured when it turns out Kettlewell isn't as innocent as his bumbling about leads one to think. Sarah is a hostage and the baddies retreat to a nuclear bunker ready to carry out their plan. Adding Harry to the hostage list after his undercover work at ThinkTank is, er, uncovered.

The Giant Robot kills Kettlewell, goes mad and then grows to gigantic stature courtesy of a cock-up from the Brigadier. Sarah Jane gets to be Fay Ray for a brief moment, there's a special guest appearance from an Action Man tank (which I shall pass over in a dignified manner) and several UNIT privates get killed before the Doctor 'kills' the poor Giant Robot using Kettlewell's 'metal virus', which Kettlewell himself had kindly explained to Sarah Jane and Benton. Benton remembers just in time for the Doctor to bubble up a bucket of the virus in an active solution.

The End.

The Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan exit stage left in the TARDIS.

It's a pretty bog-standard Doctor Who story really made interesting because it is Tom Baker's first story, has some lovely costume design from James Acheson and some nice if unsubtle, guest performances.

It makes a nice comfortable introduction for a new Doctor though.

The Third Doctor

Well, with the last episode of Planet of the Spiders comes an end to the Third Doctor's era.

It's been entertaining revisiting the Third Doctor's era.

When I first crossed the line from someone who enjoyed watching Doctor Who on the television to proper geekdom it was the stories of the Third Doctor that I saw the most of initially. They were available as much duplicated pirate VHS tapes from Australian television. I remember enjoying seeing stories I'd never seen before. That feeling has stuck with me, with a couple of exceptions, throughout the re-watch.

Jon Pertwee's Doctor is comfortable. Yes, he can be a curmudgeon. Yes, he is an embarrassing name-dropper, a patronizing git and all a little too establishment for his own good. He complains about his exile on Earth, yet hobnobs with Sir 'Tubby' Rowlands down at the club and in some ways the Third Doctor's era is a bit too chummy for it's own good.

However he's also a fine, upstanding citizen of the Universe. Not afraid to take on the naysayers, nitpickers and little Hitler's of the British civil service - or their intergalactic equivalents. He's always looking for a peaceful solution or the right way out. It's a bit of a cliche to call him a James Bond Doctor but with his Venusian martial arts and love of fast cars (and other modes of transport), he is probably the most Bondian of the Doctors. He does a fine line to in righteous indignation.

It's a lovely performance from Pertwee, who was best known for being a comedian when he got the part but Pertwee refuses to play it anything but straight - at least until he goes all disguise crazy in The Green Death. Pertwee's Doctor is also probably the least alien Doctor until David Tennant's, which is reflected in the Doctorishness of Professor Cliff Jones. Could you pick which one was the Time Lord in The Green Death? That's not a criticism, it's just a fact. The Third Doctor is a straight down the line English chap as much as Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, despite the complaints.

Pertwee's three 'official' assistants: Liz Shaw, Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Caroline John does her best with Liz Shaw but the character doesn't get a chance because the super-scientist can't compete with the Doctor and she is quickly reduced to asking the kind of informational questions that any assistant could ask. Her sudden disappearance at the start of Season Eight seems right actually.

Katy Manning's Jo Grant is all emotions, energy and instinctive action. She's stupidly stupid on a few occasions but Jo Grant works so well with the Third Doctor, who it seems has fallen a little in love with her by the time she departs in The Green Death. She's at her best in The Curse of Peladon.

Sarah Jane Smith always feels like a Fourth Doctor companion to me. Liz Sladen brings so much to the part that you can see why she's still playing Sarah Jane nearly 40 years later. She's proper feisty, intelligent and proper brave. The kind of brave that understands that she's scared but needs to carry on regardless. She's a breath of fresh air in Season 11.

You can't talk about the Third Doctor without UNIT. They go together like cheese and marmite. UNIT's military abilities seem to vary from story to story: sometimes their ineptness stretches credulity a wee bit, whilst on other occasions, they really look like a proper international military outfit.

All of this is held together by the magnificent Nicholas Courtney, who makes the Brigadier real. He's not an idiot, although his thinking is sometimes constrained by his military training. He doesn't always toe the line but is trapped by his place in the system and is - in many ways - without the contacts the Doctor has. UNIT is an international force but he's pushed around because he and his men are from the UK military. You'd certainly want the Brigadier on your side when push comes to shove.

Both Richard Franklin, as Captain Yates and John Levene, as Sargeant Benton, give fine support as the two other UNIT regulars. The Season 10-11 Yates story is one of the most interesting storylines given to a companion, it almost feels like the sort of thing New Who would do, rather than Classic Who. I always wanted to know what happened to Captain Yates.

I suppose one should say that the final regular of the Pertwee years is Roger Delgado's Master. Used too often in Season 8 he still has a certain panache that other Masters lack. Delgado is wonderful in the part and keeps the character's tendency to hammery under strict control. It's a great creation, although I still like my theory that actually the Master and the Doctor are keeping each other entertained and there's no serious intention to kill each other. It's more a Time Lord game than anything else.

There are some dud stories in the Pertwee era: The Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, Frontier in Space, Planet of the Bloody Daleks, and Death to the Daleks and there are too many six-part stories, which have a tendency to padding and dragging.

However there's a strong arguement to be made that Season 7 is the best Season of Doctor Who in the series history. Four stories. A cracking, fast paced introduction in Spearhead from Space and then three cracking stories with villains who aren't doing evil for the sake of doing evil. All three stories have depth and ideas to get your teeth into. Season 7 is a peak of Doctor Who. If you haven't watched the stories, you should.

The other 'best of' Pertwee's are The Mind of Evil, The Daemons, The Curse of Peladon, The Three Doctors, The Green Death, The Time Warrior, The Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Planet of the Spiders. Of those, The Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the real surprise. I'll admit to having been put off by the dodgy dinosaurs in the past. Don't let that happen to you. It's a good story.

The Third Doctor/Jon Pertwee bought Doctor Who back into the public consciousness in a big way and built a solid platform for Tom Baker to build on. It's well worth revisiting.