The buzz around the release of The Sensorites on DVD has surrounded its special features, and this is largely justified. Looking for Peter brings the Who Do You Think You Are? approach of personal history documentary making to the DVD range, but with the difference that the personality concerned, writer Peter R. Newman, died in either 1969 or 1975. Presenter Toby Hadoke, aided by Nothing at the End of the Lane's Richard Bignell and with a contribution from former DWM co-editor/Reynolds and Hearn publisher Marcus Hearn, establishes that 1975 is the required date, looks at Newman's controversial 1959 screenplay Yesterday's Enemy, and discusses his life before and after Doctor Who with his sister Vera and niece Helen, with portraits and family photographs and in a "final twist", a voice recording which shows Peter Newman to have been a gifted orator as well. The overall impression is of a man who was unable to wear his considerable abilities sufficiently lightly to make a success of them for long.

Clive Doig was a name burned on my childhood memories of television-watching, as producer at the close of Vision On and of Take Hart and Eureka among others. In the 1960s he was a vision mixer at the BBC, working on the majority of Doctor Who episodes in William Hartnell's proprietorship of the TARDIS, and in two extras first explains what a vision mixer does and how important that role was in the days of multi-camera television drama, and then identifies the 'Secret Voice' which can be heard on the soundtrack of the sixth episode of the story. Doig is lively and endowed with great powers of recall, and it's good that the Doctor Who world has discovered him.

The Sensorites has long been unjustly maligned - a species who can only tell the difference between each other by wearing sashes are a prompt to the imagination, not lazy writing - and being able to enjoy it in the crisp immediacy of VidFIREd DVD always removed much of the distance between the present day and the environment in which these early Doctor Who stories were produced and watched. The glimpses in the 'Coming Soon' section of The Tomb of the Cybermen re-release (as part of Revisitations 3) suggest that some of the lost force of that story's imagery will be recovered too. More when I've been able to watch the story again.

Intensive deduction by ITV, guided by the need to extend further a successful franchise, has established that Inspector Morse was once Detective Constable Morse; and so audiences have been transported to 1965 to meet him (in the person of Shaun Evans) investigate his first Oxford case. Morse is one of many coppers transferred from a new town police force to help with the murder of an Oxford teenager, but his doggedness wins him the notice of Inspector Fred Thursday (a lugubrious Roger Allam) and together, as the saying goes, they fight crime. Russell Lewis's script was unadventurous, with Morse and Thursday embroiled among police corruption, the sex industry, the secret service and compromised government ministers; if council housing had been involved this would have been clearly Our Friends in the North Oxford. Even Our Friends's Danny Webb was cast as a police bad apple; but dialogue made the other familiar connection, with Cliveden and the Profumo affair, explicit.

There were a few obvious anachronisms; a street seen through a window displayed what looked like 1990s architecture (specifically, the Lincoln College buildings on Bear Lane) and following up an address in Jericho does not take you to the corner of King Edward Street and Oriel Square, with Oriel College in plain sight if soft focus. I'd have wanted to use the present-day New Theatre as an exterior, with added CGI for the sake of faux-authenticity, but instead a different theatre was used. The Lamb and Flag seemed very much its modern self, complete with pub sign, rather than the more run-down edifice which I first entered in 1988 or whatever it looked like in 1965. A plainer pub sign at least would have helped. In-jokes abounded - Morse's radio is a Zenith, which was the name of the independent production company which made the original Inspector Morse series for the old Midlands ITV contractor Central. The first bus we see is heading to Woodstock (as in Last Bus to...) though that was given an in-story justification. John Thaw's daughter Abigail was cast as an Oxford Mail staffer. Shaun Evans's eyes get to morph into John Thaw's at the end too, which was a bit obvious. As in all latterday instalments of the Morse franchise, the character of the university was simplified to make a tale of elite disdain for the lower orders easier to tell, though I was no doubt not the only viewer who felt flattered by the line that Morse was 'too decent' to thrive at Oxford. I expect this pilot to go to series, though its ending, looking forward twenty years, suggests it would be content with an honourable afterlife prefacing Inspector Morse on download and disc packages.

(Typed on the coach - apologies for poor formatting and spelling mistakes.)
So, there I was at Missing Believed Wiped, having sat through a good Dennis Potter play, listened to Kenith Trodd be surprised the audience wasn't as visibly shocked by the 1966 racism, enjoyed Frank Mumford's puppets advertising VP wines and cigarettes (Empire) and singing Burl Ives songs, and watched a lightweight docudrama about a Norwegian agent in the Second World War who impersonates an SS officer, but kills his girlfriend's brother. (This was called The Man Who Changed Faces. It's as if they were trying to tell us something.)

Then followed a brief Pete and Dud sketch from 1978 - great timing, an obsessipn with Anna Raeburn, and the comparison of a Cosmopolitan diagram of a woman's erogenous zones to the London Underground map - and then the mystery 'BBC SciFi Footage'. Why were there so many big name Doctor Who fans in the audience?

Of course, I knew by then (though had been misled earlier in the day.) Mark Gatiss came down from the back and introduced Ralph Montagu of the Doctor Who Restoration Team and Terry Bennett, a former TVS staffer from whose film collection these episodes were recovered. There was a brief chat and Mark Gatiss gave the run DVD order. The Hartnell titles began...

We started with Galaxy 4: Airlock, of which we saw about ten minutes asthe timelot had been arranged with one episode only in mind. Design seems non-naturalistic; the Rill ship seems to involve a lot of ltticework (of thesame pattern as seen on walls in several later Docotr Who stories). Stephanie Bidmead has an impressive speech as the put-upon, exasperated but self-disciplined Maaga, whop knows the flws in her own people's system: how can you run an invasion in space when only the commanding officer is able to think? Until now, I did not know that the Chumblies sparkled. They also lead Vicki off in body-cuffs, and burble along merrily like less dementd Quarks.

The Underwater Menace 2 is... better than one might expect. It's a better opportunity than ep 3 is to see the regulars in action. Troughton's performance is more raw than it will later become, with more physical comedy (he punches his head and pulls a face to illustrate how mad Zaroff is, anticipating his more restrained dismissal of Klieg in Tomb) ; for the first time since the mass junkings we have footage of Jamie in his original Highlanders costume, and Frazer is already eclipsing poor Michael Craze. Anneke Wills doesn't have much to do except run around in a surgical gown and hide. This episode makes explicit that th plot is a school science project taken to extremes; the Doctor even demonstrates the effects of the raising of Atlantis to Ramo in a practical. Troughton's hat countin this part is two - a plastic souwester early on, and then full anemone-like Atlantean priestly headwear for his audience with Thous. Quite mad as a premise, and it flounders a bit, but Menace's reputation is enhanced by this recovery.

Tides of Time 35 - lots of Doctor Who from the usual (Oxford-based or connected) suspects, now uploaded as a PDF. More details here.

Richard Bignell's second published collection of unproduced Doctor Who scripts is The Prison in Space by Dick Sharples, commissioned by producer Peter Bryant and script editor Derrick Sherwin for the 1968/69 season. It was to have followed The Invasion on screen, but was abandoned not long before recording was to begin, with a director already appointed (David Maloney), casting having begun and costume and set design in progress. The Krotons replaced it.

From these scripts it's not difficult to see why The Prison in Space was dropped. The first episode has an uncanny otherness to it which had echoes of the earlier years of Doctor Who as produced by Verity Lambert and John Wiles, before Innes Lloyd (mistakenly credited as the producer of this story on the back cover blurb) moved towards a less reflective monster-of-the-week action-drama format. The garden in which most of the first episode is set is easy to visualize along the lines of the zoological section in The Ark, and the idea of a society where universal female suffrage has led to the end of war but also the redundancy and subjection of men appears intended to ask some light-hearted but searching questions of conventional gender roles. Unfortunately the serial does not deliver, because it is unable and unwilling to depart from comic stereotypes and the reinforcement of the chauvinist attitudes of its period. It is heavily reliant on familiar comic types, from the hapless working-class hero who somehow gets the girl, to the grotesquely libidinous older woman. It includes some genuine horror: depending on how it was executed, the mechanical brainwashing of Zoe in the 'Silver Maiden' could have traumatized child viewers. Zoe's conditioning, though, is notoriously undone by Jamie making good his threat to 'larrup' Zoe from The Wheel in Space, subjecting her to "A (REALLY HARD) SPANKING", undermining the drama and credibility of what has gone before.

There are other uneasinesses too. The prospects of the Doctor using technology stolen from the Dominators a few stories before to copy a method of mind control used by the Cybermen in The Invasion and then threaten the population of Earth with nerve gas in order to win male suffrage are highly distasteful to say the least. The 'dolly-guards' in their black microskirts and cleavage-displaying uniforms, together with Jamie himself swapping kilt for microskirt as he drags up, help confirm the sort of prejudices which Doctor Who, with its mission to broaden the horizons of the Saturday teatime audience, was set up to overcome.

The Prison in Space has good moments - I agree with Jonathan Morris, who reviews the story in one of the appendices, that Patrick Troughton would have excelled in the scene where the Doctor uses copper wire to build an abstract sculpture as part of his 'occupational therapy' while imprisoned - and might have quietly made some impact on Doctor Who lore, with the Doctor putting himself into suspended animation for part of one episode as he would with frequency in the 1970s. Other appendices include Brian Hayles's storyline for his first attempt at a second Ice Warrior story, The Lords of the Red Planet, and Andrew Pixley's summary of the chaotic production history of season six. The scriptbook of The Prison in Space is a valuable exercise in the documentation of Doctor Who history and reveals much about the attitudes of those who were making it at the end of the 1960s; the story itself is a failed experiment whose failure to reach the screen surely had beneficial effects on Doctor Who's longevity.

Another video from the 2009 David Tennant Doctor Who wrap party. Mr Barrowman goes over all Victoria Wood:

The publishers of that most infrequent but most research-intensive of Doctor Who fanzines, Nothing at the End of the Lane, have a second in their series of books of untransmitted scripts imminent. This will be The Prison in Space by Dick Sharples, which until very late in the day was intended to be the fourth story in the 1968/69 season, its slot eventually being filled by The Krotons. It is notorious for its idea of a planet dominated by leather-clad women, not far from the Two Ronnies serial from their 1980 season, The Worm That Turned, but presumably without lots of men in frocks and Diana Dors ruling from Barbara Castle. This celebration of misogyny would not have been Doctor Who's finest hour, if reports are true, though publication of the script will . The cover illustration is suitably lurid, and can be found at the artist's Deviantart page.

Train emergencies necessitating a slower train having to overtake us, a dodgy freight train and failed signals mean that this CrossCountry service from Newcastle is going to be forty minutes late into Leamington Spa, and it won't have picked up much time by Oxford. Joy.

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