Back on News Page Reviews duty...

Edited to add..A couple of things I did notice, but forgot to include in the review:

( For those still waiting to see it who don't want to be spoiled, a cut )

This is as far as I got with a review of last week's episode...

If the Doctor Who of the mid-1980s gluttonously consumed set menus of its history without really understanding what it devoured, its fifty-year-old self has a more delicate palate. Hide selected from a carefully-prepared buffet of vintage images and words which had been matured in the oak barrels of professional reflection rather than the plastic tumblers of nostalgic adolescents. Hide owed much to the broad Doctor Who gothic of the mid-1970s and advertised this, but despite an initial heady bouquet resulting from the careful grafting of time-honoured vines, its roots were firmly planted in the bed of contemporary television.

Though usually associated most with the first three Tom Baker seasons and the influence of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, the trappings of gothic horror had been borrowed by earlier stories in the 1970s including The Daemons and more relevantly for Hide, Day of the Daleks. The country house setting and the ghost who is not a ghost, together with the military associations of Professor Palmer, suggest that this is more of a third Doctor gothic story than a fourth Doctor one. The use of the Metebelis crystal in a lash-up reminiscent of that which helped finish off poor Professor - Mister Clegg in Planet of the Spiders only confirms it.

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Other points would have been the rainstorms - Universal horror films via The Brain of Morbius; acknowledgements to Nigel Kneale and The Stone Tape (although Hide has a happier ending); remote kinship with Primeval and its anomalies and monsters, perhaps, in the shape of the Crooked Man; the continued sense that the Doctor is journeying through a projection of his own past and memories, with Clara as a kind of lodestone. Jessica Raine and Dougray Scott play their love story well, though Matt Smith in particular seems rather at odds with them, though this is also true of the Doctor. After being apparently neglected in Cold War the mystery of Clara returns - and Clara has a different perception of the Doctor's relationship to mortals to the one the series seems to have embraced up until now. It's not that everyone to the Doctor is alive at once, it's that they are dead... but is it not that all time travellers are ghosts?

Still no new icon...

...but my review of The Rings of Akhaten should be up at the reviews section of the Doctor Who News Page soon.

edited to add: It's now up, and here's the direct link.

I was led to this story about the discovery of a cache of scripts belonging to the late Anthony Coburn by the estimable miss_s_b at gallifrey_times. While I'm not doubting the find, the interpretation Jason Onion places on elements of the scripts must be treated with caution, particularly his assumption that Coburn's scripts include embryonic versions of the sonic screwdriver - though presumably he might be referring to the Doctor's pen torch, at its most powerful in the pilot episode, in season three and in David Whitaker's novelization Doctor Who [in an Exciting Adventure with/and] the Daleks - and regeneration.

Then again, C.E. Webber's notes for the series format suggested that the Doctor should have a wife who chased him through time, and she eventually turned up forty-five years later without any evidence of there being a causal link between Webber's concept and the character created by Steven Moffat; there is nothing to say that Coburn couldn't have suggested these ideas only for them to fall foul, like Webber's, of the attitude summed up in Sydney Newman's red-pencilled "Nuts!"

The official announcement of Caroline Skinner's departure as executive producer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/articles/Doctor-Who-Executive-Producer-Moves-On

An odd half-story suggesting disagreements between the two executive producers but not adding any details (ETA: Other sources suggesting it's rubbish):
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/03/13/doctor-whos-executive-producer-steps-down-with-immediate-effect/

( Between political thriller and family adventure )

( The Master, Chin Lee and Major Cosworth )

( Restoration of sound and vision )

( On the panel with Katy )

( Fan sensitivities )

Next month, The Robots of Death, in the presence of the great Tom Baker himself.

Today's Doctor Who DVD catch-up exercise was Death to the Daleks. I realise that I had never recognised John Abineri as Railton until now, perhaps because of his wig and also that he is unceremoniously dispatched by an Exxilon arrow early in part two. The casting of Duncan Lamont, the original Victor Caroon in The Quatermass Experiment, is appropriate as well as occasioning some frisson from the juxtaposition of a symbol of early British television science fiction with the Daleks. (ETA: my own historical perspective is of someone who has always viewed Quatermass as 'past' and the Daleks as 'current', but this was not the case for those who were making Death to the Daleks just a little over twenty years after The Quatermass Experiment.)

The production subtitles benefit from our knowing more about the development of Sarah Jane Smith and the subsitution of the (excellent and deservedly legendary) Elisabeth Sladen for the (taller, more 'womanly') April Walker. For all he says in interviews nowadays about the place of women in adventure stories, ropes and railway tracks, the Terrance Dicks of 1973 emerges as someone keen to enhance the role of women in Doctor Who, unsuccessfully urging Terry Nation to make Jill Tarrant second-in-command of the expedition, and emphasising Sarah's resourcefulness.

Lesser-known personalities are given coverage too - Arnold Yarrow, one of the acting profession's sprightly nonagenarians, is a cogent presence on the DVD's making-of documentary and the subtitles emphasise the breadth of his career. While Yarrow was glued into grey latex as the subterranean Exxilon Bellal, another studio in Television Centre was recording an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force quite possibly commissioned by Yarrow in his just-former capacity as that programme's script editor.

I'd come across a newspaper cutting from 1974 publicizing the London Saxophone Quartet's involvement with Death to the Daleks, and here they are on the soundtrack, performing the music of Carey Blyton. Blyton was in the process of leaving his long tenure as music editor at Faber, where he had been Benjamin Britten's editor, seeing his compositions through the press. Production subtitler Martin Wiggins draws attention to the quotations from music hall and nursery rhyme which pepper this score. His contributions to this period are understandably overshadowed by those of Dudley Simpson, but his determination to avoid electronic music (on the grounds that synthesizers were depriving musicians of income) was rewarded in a memorable score which arguably set a precedent for the rest of the 1970s as Dudley Simpson was steered away from close collaboration with the Radiophonic Workshop and back towards conventional music.

Visually Death to the Daleks supports my argument that it is in this, the last Pertwee/Letts/Dicks season, that the programme begins its Gothic phase, with Sarah finding her way through a temple set lit with flickering candles before being trussed up by priests ready to sacrifice her for bringing the latent past of the intelligent living city into the present of fear and ignorance. The execution of the scene is far more steeped in threat than the near-sacrifice of Jo at the end of The Daemons.

A public service announcement for followers of Doctor Who non-fiction and broadcasting history: the much-anticipated biography JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner by Richard Marson has changed publishers. It will no longer be published by Fantom, but by Miwk. Fantom are in the process of refunding all pre-orders made through them, and pre-ordering is underway from Miwk; the book will be published in May this year, rather than April. Miwk have also set up a Facebook page for the book.

If I were to write a longer post about Danger UXB, now watched, it would include:

- the knack some episodes have of telling a story around a location, such as 'Digging Out''s lengthy factory sequence, or 'The Pier'. The former is particularly effective for the lingering hand-held camera shots of Corporal Salt (Kenneth Cranham) as he follows a voice which may or may not be that of his wife through the ruined works in the afternoon light, his mind adrift in place and with hindsight time as well.

- John Hawkesworth's character arcs, comparable in structure to those in his earlier series Upstairs Downstairs. That concerning the brittle insecurity of Major/Captain 'Fanny' Francis (casting presumably against type an actor then best known to audiences for a long on-off stint in Coronation Street, and more recently a regular in Emmerdale) is memorable and perhaps the most successful

- the disappearance and reappearance of the supporting cast depending on production block. Particularly noticeable is variety artiste Sapper Baines, played by variety artiste Bryan Burdon in just two episodes, 'Butterfly Winter' and 'The Pier'. The former just happens to include a sequence filmed presumably in Chipping Norton Theatre (given where the relevant exteriors are shot) where Burdon/Baines can do his act.

- the timescale of the series is mapped out but left unstated directly, again following the precedent of (early) Upstairs Downstairs, so it can be adjusted retroactively should a second series have been commissioned

- though dismissed as a "potboiler" by one television historian, and "not... an important series" fixed on "nostalgia and noise" according to Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian (9 January 1979), the juxtapostion of lectures on bombs with melodramatic elements (largely the male protagonists' rollercoaster love lives) and the substantial special effects budget and extensive location filming make it interesting, and (as suggested above) there is some opportunity for real psychological insight.

- at least two unexploded World War Two bombs were discovered as a direct result of one episode, 'Butterfly Winter', so the series helped boost ITV's public service credentials.

- the question of the second series. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Anthony Andrews and Judy Geeson were looking forward to working on series two when the Imperial War Museum's related exhibit opened in spring 1979, and around the same time Jeremy Sinden and Judy Geeson did some charity fundraising connected to keeping the series' profile up after it aired. However, by autumn 1979 and the ITV strike, Anthony Andrews is photographed at Heathrow by the Daily Mirror moving to Los Angeles to look for work, thanks to the cancellation of filming on Brideshead Revisited, suggesting that any hope of a second series was gone by the summer.

- the series drew attention to a change in fashions in leading men. Anthony Andrews was hailed by Nancy Banks-Smith as "one of those golden lads with sensitive mouths", and the Daily Mirror contrasted him, Patrick Ryecart and later John Duttine with a more brutal machismo personified by actors such as Martin Shaw of The Professionals.

Hmm, that's rather a lot of text anyway...

ETA: Reminded of the chapter title 'Circulating stars and satellites' in Doctor Who - The Unfolding Text, the eclipsing of Norma as the principal female character (I don't think there is a female lead as such) by Susan could show how women are used by the series. Judy Geeson initially plays Susan as tough and unsmiling as if she hasn't seen any of the later scripts (probably the case). She is demure and self-sacrificing, and causes pain by being dutiful, where Norma is introduced as a sexual fantasy turned nightmare, ultimately tamed by marriage into the lower ranks. Susan also expresses Brian Ash's increasing confidence in his roles as bomb defuser and officer; Norma personifies the social and material chaos of the Blitz and has little development beyond the 1940 episodes until her wedding in 'With Love from Adolf'. Norma, and Deborah Watling, fulfil their roles in the drama well enough. Given the publicity boost Judy Geeson seems to have had in spring 1979, one suspects she and her agent were hoping for something more to arise for or from Susan.