One of the down sides to a long-running Doctor Who website, in a period where events have once again ventured into an era of uncertainty, is that the impelling force of the new, however distant they sometimes were, often ebbs away.  As of this writing, the Tour is sitting on a decent number of classic series to do re-cap in all of their HD goodness, but is lacking the time, and as important, the inspiration to get the Tour to an evermore ‘complete’ state.

And then two episodes of The Daleks Master Plan were recovered, and even better given the release of so much of the classic canon worldwide, immediately available for Tour inclusion.  Huzzah!  Motivation, of a fashion, restored.

Except that it also presents an odd problem, one that perhaps only (literally only) matters to the Tour Honchos.  Episodes 2, 5, and 10, which have been around for a while and have been released in glorious standard definition whereas foundling episodes 1 and 3 have been distributed in HD.  As the Tour strives for presenting Doctor Who in the best possible quality, what then to do?

The previous screencaps for The Daleks Master Plan, given that they represented only 25% of a epic story, and that they were done in 2010, were (past tense intended) a real mixed bag,  Now it’s time for a more modern gloss…

In ever-glorious SD, just as it was made over 12 weeks in 1965 and 1966.

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Looking at Master Plan (both the ‘old’ episodes and the ‘new’ly recovered taken in context) there are a few points of note:

• It’s so, so easy to forget given the pure distance of time what steel Hartnell projects as the Doctor.
• Nick Courtney as the point of view character in the first, newly recovered, episode ‘The Nightmare Begins’,  after the usual skepticism, very quickly gets thrown into the TARDIS crew.  With that kind of rapport it’s easy to see why he would later become a fixture within the program.
• Katarina was just too passive a character to last long in the program.
• At 12 parts and with crushing deadlines–even with Nation and Spooner trading off scripts–the inclusion of the Meddling Monk, as delightful as he was in The Time Meddler, smacked a little of desperation to keep the plot moving (creaking) along.
• It’s such a pity more missing episodes haven’tseen the light of day.  Can you imagine how fascinating it would be to finally see, in full, The Power of the Daleks or The Evil of the Daleks.

New-ish caps for The Daleks Master Plan are now online.

Who would’ve thought that the first ‘new’ Who (in the most generous sense of the word) in 2026 would be a William Hartnell story, or at least a (small) part of one.

For the first time since episodes of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear were recovered in 2013, two episodes (episodes 1 & 2) of The Daleks Master Plan have been returned to the archives.  The Daleks Master Plan was the apotheosis of Dalek-mania–all wrapped up in a 12-part epic tale which bridged 1965 to 1966 alternately written by Dennis Spooner and Terry Nation.  The recovery now means 5 out 12 episodes exist.  A great average in baseball, but rather abysmal in any other context.

Two Down.  Ninety-five (the number of episodes still extant) to go.

That Patrick Troughton sure does get around.  It might seem as though we here at the Tour are purposefully, perhaps even obsessively, hunting him down (and out), but it really is pure serendipity on our part.  Still with a CV as long as his, ‘collisions’ such as these were inevitable.

Actually what drew the Tour to the 1958 ITC production of ‘The Invisible Man,’ along with an ongoing fascination with that fare, was Deborah Watling, all of 10 years old, as the niece of the titular character.  Given how much work as Troughton was doing during these years there was, that word inevitability again, even in a limited 2×13 series, a chance for a rare pre-Who crossover between Doctor and companion.

Sadly this only happened in the credits for episode 13 of Series 1, ‘Strange Partner’. Watling had her scene at the beginning of the story while Troughton, playing a sickly, suspicious, half-owner of diamond mine, appeared in the latter half.

A near-miss, but still a miss for Miss Watling.

… as it turns out.

There is a working theory that the Tour glommed onto years ago, admittedly a complete fiction but it goes something like this:

There are only about 35 actors total working in English television at any point in time.  They all have their own shows and then spend the rest of their working life appearing on shows for the other 34.  In other words, British TV all-too-often, from the cozy murder-mysteries to the prestige dramas, feels comfy and reassuringly small.  Kinda like Doctor Who in the classic era as it happens.

So when not one but three faces familiar to Doctor Who, and from the same story no less, pop up in one of those cozy murder-mysteries it was bound to catch the attention of the Tour.  In an episode 4 of ‘Midsomer Murders’ titled ‘The Flying Club’ from 2014, amongst the cast were June Whitfield, Jacqueline King (Donna’s mom), and Bernard Cribbins, (Wilfred Mott–Donna’s grandad) all of whom appeared in The End of Time Pt I (and Pt II).  In the story the characters played by WInfield and Cribbins, both of whom have CVs longer than many arms, were in direct opposition to each other while King’s character as the mother to one of the regular, although peripheral, cast members, was somewhat off to the side.  Doubtless a more thorough search will provide more shared credits, especially between Whitfield and Cribbins.  Still it’s quite a constellation.

We look forward to finding more before The End of Our Future.

It has been far too long, nearly seven months we reckon, since the Tour’s last foray into the ramshackle realm of finding Doctor Who people in the most unexpected of places.

‘The Persuaders!’ was a British action comedy television series starring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, produced by ITC Entertainment, and initially broadcast on ITV and ABC in 1971.  It was high profile and expensive given the names involved, and is perhaps most notable as being Moore’s last of five TV series before Bond-dom beckoned.

So finding Roger Delgado in the next-to-last episode ‘To the Death, Baby’ was not all that much of a surprise.  The series was so well-funded that many recognizable British character actors of note at the time were around, even it was for only a scene or two.

Delgado was no different in that regard. in an episode whose plot involved cons within cons, Delgado was but another of the cons, running a crooked high stakes card game with counterfeit cash. It was just a single scene with Moore, and Delgado never peers out from behind dark glasses, but it’s still a Master-ly performance, and more importantly, from a Doctor Who point of view, is perhaps the last thing Delgado made before Series 8 of Doctor Who came beckoning for him …

.., in every single story.

In a holiday season without Doctor Who, it’s worth remembering that there is a hidden Christmas Special, it happened 54 years ago today.

On December 28, 1971 there was a holiday omnibus repeat of The Dæmons.   That sure sounds like a Christmas Special to us here at THT Worldwide.  In terms of pure feel, The Dæmons is much more of a Halloween story (even though the story itself takes place in April) but the joy of it all is watching the pure esprit de corps of the cast moving through the story. The stakes here are every bit as high as during any of the ‘modern’ Christmas specials, but this is a team effort, and not just the Doctor up against a series of explosions.

Of course there were other, more practical considerations at work as well.  Pertwee’s third season, Season 9 started just four days later with Day of the Daleks, so the repeat had the useful effect of reminding the public that a new Doctor Who was just around the corner.

In fact, all of Pertwee’s seasons began around the start of the year and in 1972 it just happened to start on the 1st day of the new year–a bit of a contrast to the trend set for Jodie Whittaker to have her holiday specials air on that date, including Eve of the Daleks.

Chap with wings, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS …

The TARDIS whirled on it’s way again. The Doctor listened to Sara and Steven as they recovered from their recent exertions. Sara asked, “Whatever was that place?”

“I’ve no idea,” Steven replied, “Let’s hope we never land there again.” He heard a tinkling sound and looked up to see the Doctor carrying a silver tray with three crystal wine glasses, brimful. “we so rarely get a chance to celebrate,” remarked the Doctor at their unspoken questions.

“Celebrate?” the mystified Steven asked.

“Don’t you remember? In the Police Station – it was Christmas.”

“So it was,” smiled Steven, taking the proffered glass.

“Here’s a toast. A Happy Christmas to all of us,” said the Doctor, bending a benign smile on his young companions. Then he raised his glass high, saluting a host of Absent Friends and turned away.

“And incidentally – a happy Christmas, to all of you at home.”

Some things just fall through the cracks, it must be admitted with a slight sense of shame.  Has it really been almost a year since our last foray into the (very, very) occasional series of posts examining the haphazard world of Doctor Who Production Coding?  Apparently so.

Y	The Celestial Toymaker
YY	The Space Pirates
YYY	The Monster of Peladon
4Y	Underworld
5Y	Kinda
6Y	Timelash
7Y	The Enemy Within
8Y	Love & Monsters
9Y	The Unicorn and the Wasp
10Y	The Big Bang
11Y	Cold War
12Y	The Girl Who Died
13Y	The Ghost Monument
14Y	Flux – Chapter 5: Survivors of the Flux
15Y	The Reality War

To re-cap the classic series used letter codes for each story which started with A (for An Unearthly Child) and ran to Ghost Light.  ‘I’ was never used, ‘O’ and ‘U’ sparingly, but as for the rest…

The Tour followed and even extended this into nu-Who all the way forward to Gatwa.  It’s also an incredibly handy way to sort stories.  Previous stops in this ramshackle series included stops at ‘B,’ ‘R,’ X,’ ‘L.’ ‘U” and ‘Q‘.

Y, being the penultimate letter of the regular alphabet, is all too easy to overlook, especially given its status as an emergency vowel, but that doesn’t mean the list of stories with Y in their Production Coding should likewise be overlooked,,,

Unless, of course, if you actually look at the list.  To our thinking there’s only one great story on the list, Kinda, but then there is also an oddball genre-stretcher in The Celestial Toymaker along with a ‘just-for-fun’ story in The Unicorn and the Wasp and a very-decent story in The Ghost Monument.

The rest however are, to be charitable, a really mixed bag.  There is no understating the overall importance that The Enemy Within holds in the overall history of Doctor Who as bridge between classic and nu-Who, but it was also an odd ad-mixture whose failure when, for the first and definitely not the last time, shows the peril of Doctor Who when it goes really big, as The Reality War also on this list, amply demonstrated earlier this year.

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Will the Tour continue to dawdle in our meandering Production Coding quest?  Why not?

2025 marks the 60th Anniversary of one very particular episode of Doctor Who.  Our own marking now numbers 30.  A unique Christmas tradition.

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It’s a Tragical History Tour tradition (and the Matrix Mutterings before that) that stretches all the way back to 1995. Our annual holiday bit of Christmas merriment heralds Doctor Who’s most prominent (at least until 2005) and obvious holiday crossover.

And therein lies a tale (some of it possibly apocryphal!)

Christmas Day in 1965 fell on a Saturday. DOCTOR WHO was well into a successful third season in its by-now-traditional Saturday tea-time slot on the BBC schedules with William Hartnell in the lead and was going all out to appease the rampant Dalekmania that had taken England and the series by storm by unleashing the massive 12-part story The Daleks Master Plan over a three month period. Rather than take a break for more traditional holiday-fare the powers that were in the BBC decided not to break up the Dalek epic halfway through (at episode 7) and continue to run the series. The Producer at the time John Wiles felt the unusual slotting on Christmas day provided an ideal chance to break from the larger story temporarily and try something totally different.

In England the theater tradition of Christmas pantomimes was a well understood and accepted form of entertainment. Thus, virtually all links to the story up to that point were forgotten for a week to indulge in the ‘Christmas spirit’ as it were.

In other words, nothing less than a full-blown pantomime and send-up as the Doctor and his companions–Steven and Sara–ricocheted from one ridiculous situation to another. As it was, viewers at the time didn’t mind the diversion–although the episode was never sold into syndication overseas.

Even so the most infamous feature in this episode was William Hartnell’s closing speech–directly to the audience! Although this closing exists in the scripts that exist today, both script editor Donald Tosh and director Douglas Camfield insisted it was not in the shooting script! Camfield was reportedly so incensed that, according to Heather Hartnell, he gave Hartnell the original print shortly after it was broadcast and in subsequent years the Hartnell family would then gather together after Christmas dinner to watch The Feast of Steven all over again. Ho! Ho! WHO!

Read more about Doctor Who’s original Christmas Celebration, The Feast of Steven here.

In a completely unfair characterization, the people who have been slowly parcelling out classic Doctor Who Season releases on blu-ray, seem to have been particularly cruel to the Tour Brain Trust–and in the most ingenious way possible.

The Tour holds classic seasons 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, and 21 in particularly high regard, and it sure seems, that these are just the seasons which have been at the back of the queue in the overall release schedule.  In fact 14 and 18 have been out for a while, but seasons 7 and 13 (which the Tour has a lot of work to do on–later) are only releases and 16, The Key to Time Season, has yet to be announced.  But what got the attention of the Tour was the very clever way of announcing (for the UK) Season 21, by wrapping the promo around the first part of a minisode featuring Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, and Mark Strickson!

It would be unfair in a year where there was actual new Doctor Who including quite good stories such as The Well and The Story & The Engine and imginative (if terribly misguided) stories like Lux, to call this minisode the best episode of the year, especially when it is so clearly designed to melt this old fans cockles, but it is the most surprising simply because it was completely unanticipated.

We’ll restate our opinion that the Season 21 story run of Frontios, Resurrection of the Daleks, Planet of Fire, and The Caves of Androzani was just about as good the classic series ever had. and the Tour can’t wait to finally get our grubby little protuberances on them … eventually.