Advent #13

(This post has been rated ‘GEEK’ for Doctor Who content.)

After last year’s understandable absence, I’m pleased to report that there’s once again a new Doctor Who blu-ray set on my Christmas list, and this time it’s 1979’s season seventeen. The claim is often made that Doctor Who is always best when you’re eight – and I was eight in 1979 and Doctor Who has never been better, so that all checks out.

The impending boxset contains all five transmitted stories, plus yet another version of Shada, the one that got away, which over the past 40 years has gone from being the most missing of stories, to a story you bump into at every turn. (Needless to say, I’m stupidly excited at the prospect of yet another version of the thing!)

Beating off stiff competition from Daleks, Davros and giant green blobs, the best of the batch is City of Death, story two, ‘the one with all the Mona Lisas’. With the original script falling through, and with almost no time left before the cameras had to roll, for once the old Hollywood cliché of having to writing a new script overnight is pretty much accurate – and it fell to the poor script-editor to write a replacement four part story in just one weekend. It should have been a disaster…

Except that, as it happened, the script-editor that year was one Douglas Adams just before becoming incredibly famous (and rich) as the author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (so I suppose working on Doctor Who was his last ‘proper’ job). Meaning that not only did he do it on time, he also in the process wrote quite possibly the best Doctor Who story ever made.

I know, I know : highly, but not infinitely, improbable.