‘It was plain the Martians appreciated the strategic significance of the British Isles. The people of Britain met the invaders magnificently, but it was unavailing.’ There’s something cinematic about Terry Nation’s Doctor Who scripts. Perhaps he just had a complete disregard for the limitations of Lime Grove, or, after The Daleks, an utter faith that the BBC could execute whatever he threw their way. But there’s a reason why Dr. Who and the Daleks and The Keys of Marinus were considered suitable for feature film treatments and, say, The Sensorites and Planet of Giants weren’t.

‘He knew there’s only one way to fight a war. Any war. With your gloves off.’ Looking for Peter is a fascinating extra on the DVD of The Sensorites, in which Toby Hadoke’s mild curiosity about the writer Peter R Newman becomes a touching voyage of discovery leading to Newman’s elderly sister, and the story of his tragic early death. Along the way, Hadoke chats to DWM’s Marcus Hearn about Newman’s other writing credits – beyond Doctor Who, the only notable one being Yesterday’s Enemy.

‘Blood. Blood. There shall be more blood.’ The Discontinuity Guide states The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play of the fatal encounter between Spanish conquistadors and the Inca, as a key influence on The Aztecs. About Time is less confident, suggesting the dates of the first performance don’t quite stack up with when we know John Lucarotti proposed an Aztec story. Other than the Mexican setting and possibly the theme of Atahualpa’s baptism, which has some slight parallels to Autloc’s own spiritual awakening, I don’t perceive significant influences, and am more inclined to the About Time view. Instead, I speculated in the Marco Polo / Farewell, Great Macedon entry, that perhaps Lucarotti was working from the same prompt as Moris Farhi – the notion of the TARDIS crew interfering in history, for philanthropic purposes but against the customs and consent of the locals – weaving this (David Whitaker?) idea into his Aztec setting.

‘The weird. The unknown. The terrifying. The mysterious…’ It’s said that Milton Subotsky considered The Keys of Marinus as the basis for a third Dr. Who movie in 1966. If this is accurate, it’s not difficult to see why: Subotsky’s greatest success to date had been the movie he made directly before Dr. Who and the Daleks: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. It’s a portmanteau film – made up of five distinct “episodes” wrapped in a sixth, over-arching story – inspired by Subotsky’s love of the 1945 horror Dead of Night. Perhaps, when he was mulling over a third Dr. Who film following the disappointing box office of Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., Subotsky saw an opportunity to combine the Dr. Who brand with his own particular obsession for anthologies, and naturally landed on Doctor Who’s first and (depending on your view of The Chase) last portmanteau horror.

‘What is destined always happens. You can no more change the past than you can the future.’ If The Edge of Destruction came closest to realising Sydney Newman’s conception of a science fiction series with “no BEMs”, Marco Polo comes closest to fulfilling his brief of educational adventures in history. Across seven weeks in early 1964, audiences were treated to the history of the assassins, the explosive science of bamboo, the causes of condensation, and the lavish costumes at the court of Kublai Khan. At around the time Marco Polo was airing, Moris Farhi was commissioned to write a historical focusing on another great man: Alexander the Great.

‘The Machine stops.’ I’m not a huge fan of The Edge of Destruction, which, during the Pilgrimage, I sniffily opined, “feels like hard work for little reward.” I largely stand by that, but a couple of things I picked up on in the review, which I’m revisiting here, are the ideas that, “it looks stagier than any other Doctor Who episode I can think of” and “the AI was better than the first Dalek episode, so it can’t have been that badly received.” It seems to me now that I brushed past the essence of the episodes, which represent the show tapping into a contemporary vein of single, science fiction plays that largely no longer exist.

‘That box has three dimensions: length, breadth and height… But what is the fourth dimension?’ Clearly H.G. Well’s 1895 novel is an obvious cornerstone for subsequent time-travel science fiction: Sydney Newman recalled, ‘I’d read H.G. Wells, of course, and I recalled his book The Time Machine. That inspired me to dream up the time-space machine for Doctor Who’ I’m focusing specifically on George Pal’s 1960 movie starring Rod Taylor as a young, athletic and idealistic time traveller (rather like C.E. Webber’s original notion of the male companion “Cliff”) voyaging into the distant future where he eventually encounters the descendants of 20^th Century humankind – the passive, childlike Eloi and the degenerate, monstrous Morlocks.