Doctor Who VII.1-4: Spearhead from Space

This was the last 'season opener' to be broadcast before I was born. I watched it tonight as part of a group born, for the most part, over twenty years later. Thus this viewing was received consciously in the shadow of Davies and Moffat. Liz's line about a man who travels through time and space in a police box was, in the context of Spearhead's original broadcast, a mocking farewell to the programme's old format; now it is a self-aware championing of what has endured (despite the plans of Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant), the triumphant transformation of what common prejudice tells us should be ridiculous into heroic epic, while retaining street-corner proportions. Some of Spearhead's oddness now looks prescient - the Doctor's shower won't be repeated until 'The Lodger' forty years later, for example. While Matt Smith's Doctor had no alternative but to get on with Craig and fit into his life, Jon Pertwee's Doctor is by comparison featherbedded by the fantasy-adventure force of UNIT, though they are still rather austere and yet to enjoy 'Action by HAVOC' or become the family-ensemble which flattered Pertwee's comfort zone. That being said, he's more a disjointed Eccleston-like Doctor here than he later became, even the soon-dropped waddling gait being a symbol of a Time Lord on edge and caught out.