GUEST POST Doctor Who: The Most Golden Era?

Peter Chambers weighs the Doctor Who era I remember from my childhood and does not find it wanting.

No Doctor Who fan is without an opinion on which era was a golden era. This is evident in that someone who professes otherwise is not a true Doctor Who fan. Douglas Adams would have understood. And gone for lunch.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, here in Liberal England, that our host remembers that the Pertwee era was the best, because he remembers Pertwee as "my Doctor". Is he right? Can we adduce evidence for this? Or are we condemned to find evidence to the contrary.

I will contend that he is half-right. Does this make me half-right? Are we both half-wrong? I shall explain.

I shall describe an era by the name of the Producer who was in charge at the time. Implicitly I shall claim that the Most Golden Era was within the Classic Period, but the Moffat-Capaldi era featured some material as good as any in the Classic Period. This will not be further discussed here, and is obviously true in the Douglas Adams sense. A list of Producers and the episodes they supervised is given on the Tardis Fandom site.

Our host’s theory that the Most Golden era starts with the first Pertwee episode equates to saying that the serial Spearhead From Space is the start. This is coincidentally the first serial I ever watched, the first colour serial, the first Pertwee episode, and the first Caroline John (Liz Shaw) episode. It is reviewed by a credible commentator who uses the name The Watcher on Who.

The Watcher asks if Spearhead is a 'soft reboot' of Doctor Who. The second Doctor wished to leave the show, and monochrome was to be replaced by colour, which meant that the cost of colour production had to be absorbed by the existing budget. 

The previous production team made some plans for this and used the last monochrome serial, The War Games, to set up the transition. This has been rendered in colour and is now on iPlayer. It is a nice contrast to Spearhead. The previous producer, Derrick Sherwin, stayed on for Spearhead, then handed over to Barry Letts.

Jon Pertwee exits the Tardis surrounded by smoke and collapses on the ground. It is the 1970s. Soon a scientist called Liz Shaw meets a Brigadier in a building in London. Soon they are up to their necks with Autons. A little like the events of 2005 in the Modern era. Start with a bang and work your way up from there.

Pertwee and Letts entertain us until the end of Season 11 – Planet of the Spiders. Then Philip Hinchcliffe becomes Producer and Tom Baker takes over as the Doctor. This starts what is known as the Hinchcliffe-Holmes years, which I believe is the second part of the Most Golden era. 

Robert Holmes was sometimes script editor, and sometimes writer. Many of your favourite episodes from that time might turn out to be written by him, possibly under a pseudonym. Spearhead was one. The Deadly Assassin was another. (Did he and Moffat ever go down the pub? Who knows...)

The Hinchcliffe-Holmes years continued until the end of Season 14, when the team met the most frightening monster to threaten Doctor Who. No, not Bonnie Langford, Mary Whitehouse.

Mrs Whitehouse spoke out for a moral majority of people in Britain that no one could quite remember the names of. The National Viewers and Listeners Association. They contended that some giant spiders and people running down corridors from monsters in cheap plastic costumes constituted a threat to the moral character of the nation. 

Some of the senior management of the BBC agreed with them. The show Had To Change! Hinchcliffe was shown the door. Gothic horror and drama was out. Light entertainment was in. Comedy. Escapism. The Most Golden era was over.

Robert Holmes provided a low key note of revenge in Season 15 – a transitional season – in The Sun Makers, when Louise Jameson is shown throwing Capitalist Landlords from the top of "kilometre high towers". Philip – thou art avenged!

So perhaps Jonathan is half-right and I am half-wrong. Or so it seems. Please avoid pressing Like or Subscribe as these functions are not provided here. Perhaps comment down below, and certainly watch a few favourites over on iPlayer. 

There is no paid sponsorship, but do have a pint of real ale in your local before it is closed down by a Private Equity firm. Or it burns down due to wild fires and climate change. You heard it first in The Green Death. Which also warned you about AI.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire. The photo of Jon Pertwee is from New Zealand Archives.

The Joy of Six 1524

"You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say 'that’s outside the Overton window' as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them." Liberal Democrat Tom Reeve introduces us to the Overtons.

"Since 2021, Ellison’s personal foundation – the Larry Ellison Foundation – has donated or pledged at least £257m to the Tony Blair Institute, making it a think tank like no other in the UK. Ellison donations have helped it grow to more than 900 staff, working in at least 45 countries." Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin take us inside the Tony Blair Institute and introduce us to its main funder.

Steve Webb says the triple lock cannot last forever, but scrapping it now would trigger a retirement disaster.

"What happened to the master con man? For one thing, as the former reality show star should know, people get bored. The same old Trump shtick gets tiresome; the public's patience with his excuses wears thin. They have heard all the lies, all the Biden blame-shifting, all the 'two weeks away' deadline-shifting. It’s stale." Jennifer Rubin says Donald Trump is losing his grip on US voters.

Chloe Duteil, Daniel Cumming and Jon Winder look back to how London, Paris and New York coped with past heatwaves: "When seeking outdoor relief, most 19th-century New Yorkers headed to the beach – the city is an island, after all. But by the 20th century, they were also planing block parties with plenty of ice from corner store bodegas. On occasion, they also cracked open fire hydrants – a relief strategy that has become a classic trope of New York City summers."

Morgan Jeffery talks to people from Film is Fabulous!, the organisation that recently found, preserved and screened two lost Doctor Who episodes.

Sylvester McCoy and Sheila Hancock on The Happiness Patrol

In this British Film Institute video Sylvester McCoy, Sheila Hancock and members of it production team discuss the 1988 Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol.

You can watch all three parts of it on the BBC website.

My Doctor was Jon Pertwee, though in those days the Brigadier and Roger Delgado were a large part of the success of the show. These days I'm not a great Doctor Who fan, but I am a Sheila Hancock fan.

GUEST POST Political lessons from science fiction

Peter Chambers turns to Dirk Gently and Battlestar Galactica to help him understand what is happening in the world.

The Electric Monk is a character introduced by Douglas Adams in his 1987 novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The Monk is a machine intelligence in the service of an alien who visits Earth before life as we know it arose here. It probably looked like Julian Glover wearing an unconvincing rubber mask. It was about as diligent as a human.

The alien had a problem. Its ship – shamelessly copied from the Dr Who serial City of Death – was then about as reliable as SpaceX Starship. The normal rockets were not functioning. But the alien decided that a tech-hack might work. It would take off on Warp Drive. From a planetary surface. With no Tech Support.

Now before SF fans choke on their pints of Dow Bridge Centurion (4.0 per cent), pause for a bit. It was desperate and there was some oppression stuff and illiberal anti-democratic stuff needing doing out in the galaxy. It possibly had a PPE degree, and was used to trading off risk. Or at least closing the agenda. Naturally it could inspect the Warp Drive itself. But what a faff!

This is where the Electric Monk came in. The alien’s people had invented these MI when they wanted reassurance about things, without being diligent about things, or – by crikey – sweating the detail. So the alien asked the Monk to check the Warp Drive. The Monk assured the alien that all was well. Which is about as useful as a ferry safety check conducted by Chris Grayling and the SNP.

Chop chop. Switches on, batteries to power, warp to speed, retract landing legs. Boom.

End of alien. Normal life starts on Earth. Here we are. Then we invent GPT.

We now have something that will draft that conference speech for you. And check it. And do a schedule. And reassure you that the speech will be fine. Even accept that minor correction you made. Progress. Which is a term seldom heard in Market Harborough.

The hard six

The line "Sometimes you have to roll the hard six" occurs in episode 1.10 of the 2004 American SF series Battlestar Galactica, which is titled The Hand of God.

Edward James Olmos plays Commander Adama, Mary McDonnell plays President Laura Roslin, Katee Sackhoff plays Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, and Jamie Bamber tries to play Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama. The Executive Producer (lead writer) was Ron D. Moore. Ron used a team writing approach, and his writers bible included portraying the BSG as a USN carrier and the convention that those enemies of humanity, the Cylons, were monotheists. The Cylons know who created them, so surely the whole world was a creation?

The situation in 1.10 is desperate. The human fleet is very low on fuel. They either land on a planet or find some fuel or fuel ore. A scout locates a defended enemy base with a fuel refinery. The Commander and his pilots draft a plan to take the enemy base. It is high-risk, high-reward. There will be losses of irreplaceable pilots and machines, including civilian freighters. They take the plan to the political administration. President Roslin listens:

Adama: If you keep running from the school-yard bully he keeps on chasing you, but the moment you turn around and stop and you punch him really hard in a sensitive spot, he'll think twice about coming back again.

So it's either this, or run out of fuel and be annihilated. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.

Roslin: Well the Freighters are yours. Good hunting.

You can watch this scene online.

The term "hard six" originates in the dice game craps. There it means a pair of threes on two dice. The probability is 1 in 36, which is 2.777 recurring percent. The payoff is high. It would have to be in an episode where a good outcome is moderate losses of irreplaceable people. The payoff would have to change the game.

There follows some well scripted action involving the "which hand is the ball in?" subterfuge with large explosions and dead AI. Which was the point of the episode in series one.

This is all easy to do in a scripted drama. It is routinely used by hacks. Ron D. Moore used it this once in series one.

In real life, with limited uncertain information, it may still have to happen. Contemporaries say that Operation Market Garden fell into that category. It was said to be worth the risk at the time. Later historians and writers endlessly second-guess that.

And what for the Lib Dems in 2019? There was a lack of solid information, high risk, possible high reward. But it did not work. Sometimes it does not. Was it right?

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

Richard Jefferies Museum plans new Centre for Arts and Wildlife

The Richard Jefferies Museum, which is housed in the writer's birthplace at Coate Farm, Swindon, is raising money to fund its plans for a new Centre for Arts and Wildlife. You can read all about those plans on the museum website.

A spokesperson for the trust that runs the museum told the Swindon Advertiser:

"Our little museum has been growing – more events, more activities, more volunteers and more visitors.

"But we think it is time to grow some more, by creating something that will help the old farm site accommodate everything that's going on.

"So, we have come up with an idea for a new building to honour the things that were important to Jefferies, and are important to us."

You can read more about Richard Jefferies and his importance as a writer and thinker on the museum website.

Back in the Nineties I wrote my MA dissertation about Jefferies and gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture. The lecture took place in the church hall at Aldbourne in Wiltshire – the village where the classic Doctor Who story The Dæmons was filmed in 1971.

The Joy of Six 1414

"The speech made Labour and Starmer less popular, especially among Labour’s own voters. It significantly boosted immigration as an issue in people’s minds. There is no evidence it helped to reduce support for Reform, or convince Reform voters that they should vote Labour." Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte have researched what happens when mainstream parties capitulate to the far right.

Claire Wilmot examines how the far right has embraced deepfake technology: "A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe 'because of migrants' told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren't real, but I was missing the point: 'It's about us showing everyone what’s really happening.'"

"Alarmingly, the new data show an accelerating pattern of decline in our bird populations, whether on our farmland, wetlands, uplands or seas, as they are pushed past their limits. Notably, seabirds have crashed in number, many hit hard by avian influenza, on top of a cocktail of growing pressures." Helena Horton finds that wild bird numbers continue to fall in UK. with some species in dramatic freefall.

"Elizabeth I and Mary I are the only women named in the national curriculum, while in 2023 women appeared in just 6 per cent of GCSE and A-level history exam questions." Richard Adams reports on research from End Sexism in Schools.

Pamela Fisher on the days when Nanpantan near Loughborough was an inland holiday resort.

Seth Thévoz asks an important question: which London club did Doctor Who belong to?

The Joy of Six 1400

"Most of the older children have been sent to so-called re-education camps scattered throughout Russia, where they are subjected to relentless propaganda aimed at erasing their Ukrainian identity. Younger children have been placed with Russian families, renamed, stripped of their language, and put on a path toward permanent adoption. These acts are not only morally reprehensible but also flagrant violations of international law." Irwin Redlener says Russia must return the children it has abducted from Ukraine.

Peter Sagar reports that universities in the North of England are missing out on government funding to designed to help attract leading researchers to the UK.

Michael Vazquez and Michael Prinzing on their research, which shows that philosophy graduates rank higher than those who studied any other subject on verbal and logical reasoning. They also tend to display more intellectual virtues, such as curiosity and open-mindedness. (At this point I shall look modest and say nothing.)

"There’s an expectation that if you’ve done well, in entertainment particularly, you know… 'which college did you go to?' – meaning which college in Oxford. I've had that a few times. I enjoy saying ;Woodham Comprehensive School'." Mark Gatiss talks to The Bee about his childhood, family and work, his advice for writers, Bookish – and the life-changing phenomenon that was Terrance Dicks; Doctor Who novels.

Rhakotis Magazine reviews the reopened Jewry Wall Museum in Leicester: "The architectural refurb has sensitively brought the 70s stylings back to life, adding much needed light and improving access. ... Although [it is] on a much smaller scale, I would place it in the same rank as London’s Southbank Centre or Barbican."

"So why am I worried about her? Because for reasons I cannot fathom, her literary reputation seems to be lagging behind those of her English contemporaries, namely Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner." Jessica Francis Kane champions the work of Penelope Fitzgerald.

GUEST POST When Doctor Who saved us from the gaping inferno

Peter Chambers takes us back to a Doctor Who story from the Jon Pertwee era that warns against being seduced by the prospect of cheap and abundant energy.

Inferno is the final serial of the seventh series of the Doctor Who classic era, broadcast in 1970. The Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, and his companion Liz Shaw was played by Caroline John. The writer was Don Houghton and script editor Terrance Dicks. 

This was the final serial with Liz Shaw, and the one that Caroline John liked the best. Today we would say that the writers gave the companion some agency. The name Liz Shaw has reoccurred several times in science fiction since. It seems to have made an impression. 

Inferno is two stories in one. One is a parallel worlds story, and the other is an ecological shocker. The latter plot was a standing Dicks theme. Houghton suggested a plot based on the real-life Project Mohole. 

The idea was that a large state-backed project would exploit gas from beneath the Earth’s crust that was “infinitely more powerful” than North Sea gas, which was being introduced at the time. It would turn out that the risk assessment for the project was not complete and it had been sold on an optimistic schedule. 

The parallel worlds plot is said to have been introduced to increase the number of episodes that could be produced for the outlay on scenery. In doing so, it introduced one of the canonical parallel worlds realisations. The logic and grammar are congruent with the IF-THEN-ELSE episode of Person of Interest. Perhaps the young Christopher Nolan liked it? 

The meat of the parallel worlds story is that the other world (timeline) that the Doctor visits is a totalitarian Britain. The Doctor is held without trial by the Brigade-Leader under a 1943 emergency powers act. Section-Leader Shaw advises kindly advises him to confess to being a “political” so he could serve “only two or three years in the camps”. 

Oddly female employees have more formal respect, being addressed by title and surname, rather by first name only. Petra the PA becomes Doctor Williams. In the UK timeline the Brigadier always refers to Dr Shaw as Miss Shaw. Women could face the firing squad equally with men. This prefigures the 1975 TV drama State of Emergency. Society must be protected. Just a few freedoms must be suspended. For now. 

Having a dictatorship means that the Republic Mohole is drilled faster than the one in the United Kingdom – not only trains run on time! Risk assessment is even more cursory. Completion happens days earlier. So does destruction by volcanic activity. 

The Doctor – alone – can escape. Liz has to shoot the Brigade-Leader, killing and dying to save people she would never meet. Once returned, the Doctor will not take no for an answer and successfully argues to have Project Inferno shut down. Maybe go with Net Zero instead? Or super-energised hydrogen? 

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

You can watch Inferno on BBC iPlayer.

Peter Chambers has written a previous guest post about a Doctor Who serial from this era: The Green Death.

The Joy of Six 1280

"There is a strand of conservatism that is protectionist and isolationist but for any admirer of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher to go along with these policies is extraordinary. Trump represents a repudiation of their values on free trade and internationalism." David Gauke explains why Conservatives should have no truck with Trump.

Wera Hobhouse says it's time we had an open and honest conversation about legalising euthanasia.

Despite the fact that governments have spent the last 40 years giving capitalism's loudest voices mostly what they want, such as lower top tax rates and weaker trades unions, in the last 10 years GDP per hour worked has grown by less than one per cent a year. Read Chris Dillow on Labour and the Conservatives' shared belief in "the Scooby-Doo theory of capitalism".

At least 2000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories, reports Steve Rose.

"As a statistician with 20 years of experience in the field of ecology, I recently faced a challenging moment. In August, some colleagues in Canada published a response to a paper that I co-wrote a decade ago, showing that the method my co-authors and I proposed back then is fundamentally flawed." Oliver Gimenez reflects on having a paper of his shown to be wrong.

"Tom Baker was in his fifth full year as the Doctor and was the well-recognised face of the series across the UK. Cleese was also a household name, but for comedy. He had started to build his comedy reputation in the late 1960s and solidified this with his work on the first three series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus between 1969 and 1973 before ascending to comedy royalty with Fawlty Towers, which he created with his then-wife Connie Booth." Oliver J. Wake on the coming together of two giants of Seventies television.

Aldbourne: John Barleycorn was there before Mr Magister

Last time we were in Aldbourne we saw Jon Pertwee get the better of The Master, or Mr Magister as he was known in this Wiltshire village.

But before the Doctor was in Aldbourne, another BBC camera crew had been there. Click on the still above to watch Desmond Hawkins's meditation on changing attitudes to the countryside and whether village life can still exist in 20th century.

Early on there is much talk of the downs and the ancient bones buried on them. This put me in mind of "the man in the hill" in Richard Jefferies's Wood Magic:

"There never was a yesterday," whispered the wind presently, "and there will never be a tomorrow. It is all one long today. When the man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here."

Jefferies duly gets a namecheck, but the film soon moves on to look at social change in the village. New houses, newcomers, changing farming methods and a groovy Sixties chick.

We see the Aldbourne Carnival, and the parish council meets in the hall where I once gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture.

But the eeriness has not quite done with us. The film ends with an old boy singing John Barleycorn Must Die.

Peter Butterworth was involved in the two most famous prison camp escapes of World War II

There's a well-known - and true - story about the Carry On actor Peter Butterworth. As a prisoner of war during the second world war, he was one of the vaulters who helped in the famous Wooden Horse escape.

When he heard in 1950 that a film was being made about the escape, he auditioned for a part. Only to be told that he "didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough". Which is why you won't see him in the trailer above.

Stalag Luft 3 was also the camp from which The Great Escape took place later in the war. In that, the man who was to play Farmer Fiddler, Brother Belcher and Citizen Bidet helped dispose of sand and with forging documents.

Butterworth's involvement in what are probably the two most famous escapes of the war may not have been a coincidence. While a prisoner he had been recruited into the secretive MI9, which existed to organise and encourage escapes by prisoners of war.

Another future Carry On actor involved in this line of work was Jon Pertwee. For a time he worked for Ian Fleming in Naval Intelligence, and one of the things he did was train Naval officers in escape techniques.

The office tea was made by a bright young Able Seaman who would later be Commissioned and write the Royal Navy's guide to the Japanese navy.

His name was Jim Callaghan.

GUEST POST Jon Pertwee's Doctor tackled many of the problems we face today

A Doctor Who serial from 1973 has a surprising degree of relevance to the world of 2024, argues Peter Chambers.

The Green Death is a serial in series 10 of the classic Doctor Who era, broadcast in 1973. The Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, and the companion Jo Grant was played by Katy Manning. The serial is often remembered for the generous send-off for Jo is given  and is available on iPlayer.

Pertwee was the third Doctor, taking over the role in Spearhead from Space. He was exiled to Earth by the writers to save the show money during the transition to colour TV, yet this period led to some of the most interesting stories in the history of the programme as they had to emphasise plot and drama rather than settings and space technology.

This serial features several issues that Barry Letts and Terence Dicks were interested in, primarily ecology. The others, which recur in classic Who, are brainwashing, women's equality, and the fate of the powerless. Letts wrote the script with Robert Sloman, Dicks was the script editor.

The action starts with Pertwee's Doctor bumbling in the lab in his endless quest to make the TARDIS do what he wants. In this case travel to Metebelis III to obtain a giant blue crystal.

Jo and the Brigadier separately decide that they want to travel to Wales to visit an ecologist group and Global Chemicals, who are in the news. The latter is a fairly obvious device to inform us who is running the Evil Plot. As is common, the Brigadier has orders to drop everything and assist some friends of the Establishment.

Jo accepts a lift from him and is dropped off at The Nuthatch which turns out to be a farm full of ecologists, musicians, mycologists and mathematicians. Their informal leader is Clifford Jones, who is using his Nobel Prize money to research alternatives to meat to alleviate world hunger. 

When Jo blunders in, Jones explains their work, including a water-source heat-pump powered by electricity from a windmill. Today we would say wind turbine. Today you can buy Quorn in a supermarket, and I write this in a building that has a solar PV array.

The Brigadier arrives at Global Chemicals and is misinformed about their operation. The company aims to get good PR by hiring local workers just laid off by the National Coal Board. The local pit is closing but "the government has given a green light for oil".

A picket line disperses when Global's MD, Stevens, promises energy with minimal waste pollution and jobs for all. The Brigadier politely nods, knowing he is ignorant of the science.

At The Nuthatch, Professor Jones dismisses this. He asserts that the Global process would produce a great deal of toxic waste. They must logically have a plan to quietly dispose of it. There is a big disused hole in the ground - the mine - and Global are insistent that it be sealed up.

The consequences of the closure are mainly borne by the few working-class miners maintaining the mine for the National Coal Board. Someone must take a look, and it is Jo and some miners. Lacking plot-armour, the miners are attacked by giant green maggots ('The Green Death'), while Jo escapes with last-minute help from the Doctor.

In the middle of the serial there is the expected action. The Brigadier drives around organising things, Jo discovers frightening things, Mike Yates is beaten up (again) by thugs, Sergeant Benton deploys the troops whose weapons are useless (again), the Doctor uses Venusian Aikido on some guards at Global.

Taking the initiative, the Doctor slips into Global and sees the tubes that discharge toxic waste into the mine. He proceeds to the top floor to confront the management. He finds the 'boss' is a computer system called BOSS, part of a global computer network designed to brainwash humans and obtain control, reducing humans to serfs under algorithmic command. This is an issue today, with the FANG - Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet) - playing the role of BOSS.

In the final episode of The Green Death, the Doctor demonstrates that a brainwashing unit designed for humans does not work on a Time Lord. He de-programmes Stevens, who conducts a cyber-attack on BOSS as he dies. BOSS is destroyed.

Jo gets engaged to Clifford Jones and leaves UNIT. The UNIT survivors all cheer at a party at the Nuthatch. The Doctor quietly slips away.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

The Joy of Six 1182

"Highlighting these cases is vital because they take place day in, day out, in courts up and down the country, and until this year, with the introduction of the pilot, we’ve not been able to shine a light on this important area of court business." Polly Rippon reports from the normally secretive family courts.

Anna Minton says the tide may finally be turning against the demolition of council estates: "Estate regeneration schemes have seen more than 100 of London's council estates demolished and replaced with developments of predominantly luxury apartments, redefining the British capital and fuelling the housing crisis. Communities across London have been displaced and tens of thousands of new homes have been built, but the vast majority are financially far out of reach for people seeking to buy a home, while thousands lie empty and unsold."

Mary Gagen explains why keeping one mature street tree is far better for humans and nature than planting lots of new ones.

"We’re  shocked  saddened and disgusted to see that our fellow Kensington blog From The Hornets Nest have been taken down. Yes. The whole blog." THis Is North Kensington on the worrying reason for the sudden disappearance of a popular blog.

"In April 1948, when the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos football team requested permission to play a charitable football match against an English select side at the New Meadowbank sports ground, they were denied permission by the City Corporation's General Purposes Committee. When they had been allowed to play there in 1946, 17,000 spectators had turned out to watch a 2-2 draw." Threadinburgh on the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos, the trailblazing women’s football team denied a sporting chance by the authorities.

Ian Visits chooses five Doctor Who episodes that feature the London Underground.

More than 800 episodes of Doctor Who available on BBC iPlayer

My Doctor was Jon Pertwee, though Roger Delgado as The Master and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier did just as much to make those years special.

To celebrate the show's 60th birthday, the BBC has put every Doctor Who episode it can  - more than 800 - and many other related programmes on iPlayer.

Though I fully approved of the show's revival in 2005, I rarely watch it. Perhaps, with its talk of 'story arcs' and 'showrunners', I feel has it has its devoted adult fans too much in mind.

So if you click on the image above you will be taken to the the first of the five episodes of the 1971 story The Daemons.

With is flavours of folk horror, M.R. James and Dennis Wheatley, The Daemons is very 1971 indeed.

And I have another reason for liking it. The Daemons was filmed at Aldbourne in Wiltshire, and in September 1996 I gave the Richard Jefferies Society Birthday Lecture in that village's Memorial Hall.

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Alwyn Turner argues that the roots of the Daleks are to be found in the second world war: "That night 165 people were killed, hundreds of houses were destroyed and Llandaff Cathedral was so badly damaged that it was closed for the next 15 months. A couple of hundred yards from the cathedral, ten-year-old Terry Nation was alone in an Anderson shelter. ... He spent that night and many others sheltering from the Luftwaffe’s bombs on his own, reading adventure stories and listening to incongruously cheerful programmes on the radio."

"The Conservatives now have a choice, they’ve even invented a new buzzword ‘headroom’, to describe the leeway they have. They could reject that Faragist populism wholesale and address the problems that confront people every day – food inflation, high rents/mortgages, bus and train cuts, crumbling public buildings – but they actively choose not to." Matthew Pennell says Rishi Sunak has brought with him  bad working practices from the corporate world and transferred them into the public affairs realm.

Municipal Dreams on the London County Council's open-air schools for delicate children.

Rose Staveley-Wadham looks at how the press covered the story during the Loch Ness Monster boom of the 1930s.

"Exploring the Midlands slowly and meticulously on foot also leads to other schemas materialising for dividing up the region. The jokey local name 'Banburyshire' for the uplands, partly in the Cotswolds, in the far south of Warwickshire, south western Northamptonshire and northern Oxfordshire, turns out to have a lot of grounding in topographical fact." Josh Allen introduces his no-cars-required walking guide to the English Midlands.

"Lewis works with analogies all the time – and the older you are of course, the more transparent the analogy.  In some ways, reading Narnia books as an adult makes you actually nostalgic for an age when you saw 'through a glass darkly'." Conrad Brunstrom reread C.S. Lewis's Narnia books during Covid lockdown.

Julian Sands was in The Box of Delights

There has been no news of the actor Julian Sands since he disappeared last month while walking in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. It seems we have to fear the worst.

Late last year, the Guardian published a piece on the making of The Box of Delights. In it the director of the series, Renny Rye, recalled:

Julian Sands also loved the story and wanted to be involved, even though he’d just finished The Killing Fields and I’d already cast most of the parts. He just has one line as a Greek soldier. 

Devin Stanfield, who played Kay Harker, was also interviewed:

I got on well with the adult cast. Pat Troughton was charming, kind and patient. I remember waiting with him for hours until we were needed on a night shoot with hundreds of extras in the grounds of Hereford Cathedral. We had an in-depth discussion about how his being impaled with a lightning rod was achieved in The Omen.

The Joy of Six 1051

Charlotte Tobitt explains why the Tory MP arrested on suspicion of rape has not been named in the media.

Liam Thorp on the errors that have led to Liverpool City Council's electricity bill going up by millions of pounds: "The report ... really needs to be read to be believed. It charts a remarkable catalogue of mistakes, failures and communication bypasses that have somehow led this cash-strapped council, already under government intervention, to add a further £5 million onto its electricity bill and potentially cost the city, its schools and its fire service a total added cost of £16 million."

"The term neurodiversity was coined in 1988 by Australian sociologist Judy Singer. It means that neurological differences should be recognised and respected. Rather than using drugs to change the behaviour associated with disorders, such as ADHD and autism, society should be more accommodating of neurologically diverse people." Matthew Smith asks what the future holds for Ritalin, the drug with a long and varied history that has latterly been used to treat attention problems in children.

"Profits grew. Participation slumped. The latest figures show it dropped by 25 per cent in the first five years Harrison was in the job. And that was before the pandemic, when it plummeted again." Andy Bull marks the departure of Tom Harrison, chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board.

"Train Landscape shows us the interior of a third class railway compartment done out in the livery of the Southern Railway, circa 1939, an interior Ravilious has drawn with loving attention to detail. It isn’t just any compartment, but a specific one, with saggy seat cushions and a window sash that is worn with use. We’re in a specific location too, passing beneath the white horse carved into the hillside above the Wiltshire town of Westbury." James Russell contributed an essay to the catalogue of the Eric Ravilous exhibition in Winchester that has just closed.

William Cook meets Bernard Cribbins.

Jon Pertwee on playing Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge

Interviewed in costume between West End performances of a Worzel Gummidge show, here is Jon Pertwee in 1982.

Runaway Railway (1966)

A hybrid of The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery made for children in 1966, you say? With Ronnie Barker and Jon Pertwee in the cast? Count me in.

Pertwee is not the film's only link with Doctor Who. Among the child actors is Roberta Tovey, who appeared in the two films in which Peter Cushing played the Doctor.

Sadly, I did not see Runaway Railway when Talking Pictures TV screened it as part of their Saturday morning pictures the other day, but I was alerted to it by a Twitter thread from Tim Dunn.

There is a short article on the film with stills on the Obscure Train Moves blog and you can enjoy the first few minutes above.

Then you can watch the whole thing online, but I didn't tell you that.