Death to the Daleks Part One

The one where the TARDIS loses all its power...

There's quite a brief but brutal opening, in which a running man is shot in the belly by an arrow and tumbles into a lake to his death. It rather spoils the mysterious build-up that writer Terry Nation crafts throughout the rest of the episode, and I think it would have been much better to open with the second scene, with the Doctor spinning his parasol and crooning Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside. And from there, an inexorable descent into fear...

I have such nostalgic feelings about Death to the Daleks. It was one of the handful of stories I had in omnibus form on VHS in the 1980s, and I absolutely adored this story, perhaps more so than other tapes I had, like The Robots of Death and The Time Warrior. I mean, it had Daleks in it, and I was only 11 years old, so that kind of swung it for me! But I must try and put my warm thoughts aside to review the story episodically, critically, to see whether I still feel the same way.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Six

The one where the Brigadier meets a triceratops on the London Underground...

Doctor Who really shouldn't have attempted a dinosaur fight on the budget it had in 1974. It's easy enough for Malcolm Hulke to write "the T Rex and the brontosaurus fight", but it's not so easy for director Paddy Russell and producer Barry Letts to make that happen convincingly on screen, certainly not with the dinosaur models being used. It was Hulke (and script editor Terrance Dicks') responsibility to dial that back, but they didn't, so what we're left with is two inflexible giant lizards appearing to nuzzle each other gently.

While the Doctor tries to avoid the ferocious dino-wrestling outside, Sarah is locked up in a storage room, where she's reassured by Butler that she will be going with them on their crazy voyage back to the "golden age". But why do the bad guys insist on keeping Sarah around? She's clearly a disruptive influence, and it would be much easier to dispose of her to enable them to get on with their dastardly plot. Luckily for Sarah, she's been locked in a room with one of those handy ventilation shafts. You know the type, the ones you never see in real life but seem to be commonplace in the Doctor Who universe. Always big enough for a human to crawl through.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Five

The one where Sarah discovers she's not on a spaceship at all...

It's interesting, isn't it, that after all these years of the cosy "UNIT family" investigating and battling alien invasions alongside the Doctor, when it boils down to it, the only person he seems able to trust is good old Sergeant Benton. Captain Yates is exposed as a traitor at the start of the episode, and the Doctor doesn't really know if he can trust the Brigadier any more either ("What about the Brigadier?" says Benton. "What indeed?" wonders the Doctor). Maybe if Corporal Bell was still around she'd be the Doctor's ally.

But it is heartwarming that it's trusty Benton who stays loyal to the Doctor, sending the other men away so that he and the Doctor can talk properly, and then encouraging him to use his "Venusian oojah" to render him unconscious to stage an escape. Benton was the most loyal friend of all the Doctor's UNIT colleagues, so it's a shame he never got to be reunited with him after his final appearance in The Android Invasion. I rather think John Levene would've loved that.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Four

The one where the Doctor discovers, then loses, a secret underground bunker...

The Doctor seems to do a lot, but achieve very little, in this episode. Armed with his new mobile time displacement detector, he hops into his "new car", which has to be one of the most ridiculous things ever to appear in the programme. Never explicitly named on screen, but known off-screen as both the Alien and the Whomobile, this UFO-inspired vehicle comes out of absolutely nowhere, for no reason. It would be a fabulous merchandising opportunity for the show, but as a piece of hardware, it's just ridiculous. It smacks of Jon Pertwee wanting to be James Bond, and although 007's famous Lotus Esprit was a few years away yet, it's from the same ideas bank as all those other TV show toys that hit the market in the 1970s, like Scooby Doo's Mystery Machine and the Six Million Dollar Man's Bionic Mission Vehicle.

The Whomobile was only ever seen in a couple of episodes of Season 11, but also featured in the 2013 comic strip In with the Tide. I'm very glad it didn't hang about once Tom Baker came along, it's just really tacky and gimmicky.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Three

The one where Sarah discovers there's another traitor in their midst...

Captain Yates - the man directly responsible for rendering the Doctor's stun gun inoperable and endangering his life - leaps to the rescue, partially through natural military heroism, but probably much more through guilt. When he reports back to his new superiors at Operation Golden Age, he stresses just how upset he is that the Doctor was almost killed due to the sabotaging of the stun gun, but come on Mike... it's completely your fault! When Mike suggests to Butler and Whitaker that perhaps they should let the Doctor in on their plans as he might be sympathetic to them, that's when you realise Mike is somewhat out of his depth with these guys. Whatever Operation Golden Age's full intentions are, Mike seems naively unaware of just how far they're willing to go to achieve them...

And anyway, as if the Doctor would even contemplate the sanity of Operation Golden Age. It's transporting rampaging killer monsters millions of years through time to central London, for heaven's sake! That's just not sane, in anybody's book.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part Two

The one where we discover one of the Doctor's allies is betraying him...

Most people criticise the dinosaur models in this story for the way they look, and their lack of movement, but I think far sillier is the way they sound. The T Rex is actually saying the word "RAAAAARRRR", like it's really a terribly cultured and refined dinosaur merely pretending to be a carnivorous monster from the dawn of time. It's a bit like how children might play at dinosaurs in the playground!

Everything looks different in colour. Everything looks like low budget Doctor Who again, rather than the glorious grainy "found footage" monochrome film look of part 1 that made it feel like a lost home movie from the 1930s. I miss the eerieness of the black and white part 1!

Invasion (of the Dinosaurs) Part One

The one where the Doctor and Sarah arrive in a deserted London...

Before we start, I'm making it clear that I watched the black and white version of this episode, as I find the colour-recovered version rather sub-standard. Also, this absolutely marvellous episode looks and feels so much better in monochrome, and I'm sort of glad the colour master tape is lost as watching it in black and white makes it more powerful, in my opinion.

From the moment the episode begins, you can tell this is going to be something a bit different, a bit special. The shots of the empty streets of London - the wet Thames embankment, the deserted Trafalgar Square - are really eerie and atmospheric, helped enormously by Dudley Simpson's mournful music. We continue to see shots of abandoned cars, stray dogs and derelict houses, but the key absence is people. There's not a single human being to be seen. These scenes are fantastic - among the best ever shot for classic Doctor Who - and instantly give the story a post-apocalyptic feel reminiscent of (although presaging) programmes like Survivors and Threads.