Andrew Cartmel’s recollections of his days as Script Editor of the Seventh Doctor era, published as Script Doctor: The Inside Story of Doctor Who 1986- 89, is to be reprinted next month. This is a limited reprint run, with a new cover and interior photos, published by Ten Acre Films. It was last printed as a hardcover in 2014, then a paperback in 2019, from Miwk. In our interview with Cartmel,…

Here we are: the penultimate season of Classic Doctor Who. The penultimate goodbye. After 25 years, this little science-fiction show had taken off to heights no one could have imagined, yet with my sheer luck of being born during the Wilderness Years and seeing Christopher Eccleston kick off his run – albeit from a distance – while I was in primary school, I can’t ever remember a time without…

Dorothy? Moose? McShane? Ace! The girl who found herself caught in the time storm, met the Doctor on Iceworld, and continued to storm time and space. The Doctor’s explosive best friend, a girl with a scarred past and an uncertain future. So much was promised with the introduction of Ace. But did she deliver? When casting a new regular in a long running television series, at least in the 1980s,…

Yes, we review clothes now.  But not just any old clothes, oh no! You wouldn’t find us collating our thoughts on your questionable choice of jeans, or critiquing your style of socks. Today, as ever, we’re talking Doctor Who. Thankfully, the Seventh Doctor era has had a re-evaluation over the last few years. He’s brilliant. The stories are, on the whole, brilliant too. Sylvester McCoy…

In the days before Lovarzi, the Fan Show, Comic-Con, Doctor Puppet, and Class (it wasn’t all bad), it was a hard time to be a Teenage Doctor Who Fan. A TDWF, if you will. I’m talking about the late 1980s when all the cool kids were into RoboCop, the TV talk of the playground was Blackadder the Third, and Stock Aitken Waterman stalked the Earth. There’s a lot of nonsense talk about how school…

Dragonfire is both the end of an era – and the start of a new one. The story about Kane and Iceworld came at the end of Season 24, the start of which introduced Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor. It was a time of great change for the show. Colin Baker had been very publicly sacked (unfairly, I think it’s fair to say) and a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, was brought aboard the show. With…

There’s a train of thought that Sylvester McCoy was only the Doctor from 1987 to 1989 and that, despite appearing briefly in 1996 to regenerate into Paul McGann, he can’t claim to have been the Doctor in the interim period. It’s a compelling argument. It’s an argument with plenty of evidence to support and many people who passionately believe in it. There’s just one slight flaw in it, as far as…