‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘Bringing science fiction into reality, Britain has launched two manned space rockets to the Moon.’ Doctor Who didn’t spring from nowhere. The aim of these entries is to look sideways from each Doctor Who serial at other media, seeking out influences and inspirations, and boldly viewing what no Matt has viewed before. Starting with the Pathfinders… serials from the early 1960s. There were four (the first, Target Luna, is lost) written by Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice, and produced by Sydney Newman. They focus on Professor Norman Wedgewood’s British rocket programme as it succeeds (albeit with a safety record as bad as Quatermass’s – invariably journalists, children and rodents find their way on board) first in sending humans into space, then to the Moon, Mars and finally Venus.

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