Thursday 15 August 1991

Timewyrm: Exodus

Our tribute to the great Terrance Dicks concludes this week with a discussion of his first original Doctor Who novel, but we also take the opportunity to talk about what he achieved and how much we all owe him. Kate Orman and Adam Richard join us for Timewyrm: Exodus.

First, some background.

The Virgin New Adventures launched in 1991, as an “official” continuation of our cancelled show. It comprised 61 novels over nearly six years, including books by Classic Series writers Terrance Dicks, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, as well as New Series writers Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies — not to mention five-and-a-half novels by our very own Kate Orman. Virgin lost the rights to Doctor Who in the middle of 1997, but the range continued until the end of 1999, with twenty-one novels featuring Benny Summerfield, a companion created by Paul Cornell for his 1992 novel Love and War.

Terrance Dicks didn’t get to launch the Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys is the second novel in the range. The 28th novel, Terrance’s sequel to State of Decay, was called Blood Harvest, which — together with Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera — was used to launch a second series of original novels, the Virgin Missing Adventures. Finally, when BBC Books acquired the rights to publish original Doctor Who fiction, they launched their series with a novel by Terrance — The Eight Doctors, which is not very highly regarded, sadly.

There are many dystopian novels set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II. Adam mentions Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which depicts life in a United States partitioned between two mutually hostile Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

In an episode of the dreadful British science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–1979), Hitler’s Last Secret, Part 2, Michael Sheard plays a revived Hitler, who is in reality a galactic criminal called Neebor from the planet Vashig. Here’s Neebor’s gruesome (and alarmingly cheap) unmasking for your viewing pleasure. Or not.

Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010) are two novels in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. The premise: In 2060, it’s possible to send students and historians back in time, confident in the theory that it’s impossible to change the past. But now three people find themselves trapped in World War II and start to find discrepancies that might change the outcome of the War.

Perhaps unwisely, Peter consults some reviews of Timewyrm: Genesys that he finds on the Time Scales website.

And finally, here’s the text of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, just to remind us all that one day even our most impressive achievements will come to nothing.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep going on and on and on at you about this amazing documentary we saw on the History Channel last week.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Mere hours after the release of this episode of 500 Year Diary, over on Maximum Power, we’ll be releasing an epic retrospective of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere, discussing how Blake’s 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and enraged us over the years. So until then, keep an eye on the website or on your podcatcher of choice.

Last week, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

Instead of taking Christmas off, Untitled Star Trek Project released one more episode for 2025, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watch another highlight of the franchise, the season premiere of Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Way of the Warrior. This is one of our favourite episodes of the franchise and of the podcast: you won’t want to miss it.

Wednesday 23 November 1983

The Five Doctors

Well, our ridiculous show has just turned twenty, and so it’s time for everyone both alive and available to celebrate the occasion by reporting first to North Wales and then to the BBC Television Centre. But only one man can give them all exactly the right things to say and do — and that’s the man who knows what colour monsters are.

As Peter observes, 1983 was a big year for Australia’s Doctor Who fans. First of all, Peter Davison visited us for the first time during April, signing books at some shopping centres and presenting at the TV Week Logie awards (don’t ask). Then in May, ABC-TV started a run of Pertwee repeats that included six stories broadcast for the first time in colour in Australia: Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Mutants, The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. And then, of course, there was The Five Doctors…

Nathan recently recorded another podcast episode on The Five Doctors, this time for The Maran Chess Club, a Doctor Who podcast by Luke Sims-Jenkins which focuses on the Davison Era on TV and in books and audios. Nathan’s episode will be available at Christmas, so like and subscribe now.

We mention that Robert Holmes was the first writer given the opportunity to write the twentieth anniversary story. His treatment was called The Six Doctors. I’m fairly certain that this is the discussion document outlining Holmes’s ideas for the story.

Simon gives pi to thirty decimal places as 3.141592653589793237462643383279, but as he correctly points out, the second 7 there should be an 8. If you feel like outdoing Simon, you can find the first million digits of pi here.

One version of Susan Foreman’s life story was presented on Radio 4 in 1994, in the radio mockumentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, starring Jane Asher as Susan. Spoiler alert: sick of living on a dystopian post-holocaust Earth, Susan contacts her godfather’s brother Terry, who takes her back in time to the 1960s, where she gets a civil service job and ends up becoming the EC Commissioner for Education.

Terrance Dicks is the author of the best, most influential description of the Doctor’s character, quoted by the Doctor himself in both The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time. It first appeared in the second 1976 edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Here’s the quote in full: “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”

Peter Haining’s book Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983) was hugely influential in shaping fan opinion throughout the last few years of the show’s original run. It’s been said that a lot of fannish discourse during the 90s was a reaction against the capsule reviews of each story that Haining wrote for this book.

The Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House ran for nearly thirty years, starting in 1974. Longleat House was also the site of the Twentieth Anniversary Event, which took place on the 3rd and 4th of April 1983. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend over the two days, but thirty-five thousand turned up on the first day. You can get your commemorative programme here.

Simon introduces his theory that the 20th and 50th anniversaries both signal that start of some kind of decline in the show’s popularity in Flight Through Entirety’s second episode on The Day of the Doctor, Episode 249: It’s No Arc of Infinity.

Flight Through Entirety commented on The Five Doctors in Episode 90: Great Balls of Commentary!, released on Sunday 16 October 2016.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep telling you that story about everyone wearing eyepatches on the set of Inferno over and over again.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Just yesterday, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

And last of all, on Untitled Star Trek Project, we’ve just released our Christmas Special, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford are joined by Todd himself to watch the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — a film that manages to be heartwarming and fitfully entertaining, despite its many, many obvious flaws.

Saturday 22 November 1980

State of Decay

This week, on a planet where evil carnivorous overlords oppress and prey on a helpless populace, we decide to watch and discuss State of Decay.

As we said last week, Horror of Fang Rock was a hurried replacement for a Terrance Dicks script called The Vampire Mutation, after the Head of Serials Graeme McDonald asked them not to proceed with the script because of a high-profile BBC telemovie called Count Dracula (1977), which was to screen later that year. Doctor Who researcher Paul Scoones has the full story…

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. Particularly emphasised in the book is the fact that Offred is forbidden to read, and is left alone for hours in her room with nothing to do. This is an echo of the South’s anti-literacy laws, which were used to suppress the education of enslaved people, or black people more generally, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Marxism, mystification is the process by which the ruling class attempts to obscure the true nature of their power and control over society. And so Aukon, Camilla and Zargo invent the Wasting to position themselves as the people’s saviours rather than their oppressors.

Inevitably, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) comes up again as a possible source of inspiration for this story. We talked about it last week as well.

And then, as so often in the 1970s, Doctor Who takes its inspiration from the Hammer Horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s — particularly the nine Dracula films, the first of which, Dracula (1958), starred Christopher Lee as Dracula and our very own Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 1972, a very young Lalla Ward appeared in a Hammer Horror film, Vampire Circus, which also starred Adrienne Corri, who played Mena in The Leisure Hive.

Hammer House of Horror (1980) was a short-lived anthology television series created by Hammer Film Productions. Its final episode, The Mark of Satan, aired on ITV on 6 December 1980, the same night as Part 3 of State of Decay. Emrys James, who is Aukon in this story, appeared in both.

Lalla Ward and Emrys James both appeared in the BBC’s production of Hamlet (1980), part of its full set of Shakespeare plays broadcast between 1978 and 1985. Ward played Ophelia, while James played the Player King. (Hamlet was our very own Derek Jacobi, his mother was Doctor Who’s own mother Claire Bloom, and his murderous stepfather Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart.)

Nathan alludes to the Flight Through Entirety episode on The Hand of Fear, whose title encapsulates the typical Hinchcliffe-Era Doctor Who monster: Episode 45: Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.

William Lindsay, who plays Zargo here, also appears in the Blake’s 7 Series D classic Animals, where he plays the Captain, a young Federation officer who joins Servalan in the moderately expensive hotel room bar that she drives around the galaxy during that final season.

By 1981, Terrance was script editing BBC Classic Serials, miniseries adaptations of classic novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, starring Tom Baker and Caroline John) and The Invisible Man (1984, inevitably featuring Michael Sheard). By 1985, he was producing them. His career is described in detail in Toby Hadoke’s obituary of Terrance, published in The Guardian in September 2019.

Flight Through Entirety discussed State of Decay in Episode 71: Why is E-Space Green?, released on Sunday 24 April 2016.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll pop up behind you the next time you’re making a speech and create alarming and ridiculous tableaux to amuse your audience.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

We’ve just released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode Memorial. Keep an eye out for our next episode — our Christmas special, where we’ll be discussing William Shatner’s towering directorial début, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Saturday 3 September 1977

Horror of Fang Rock

Terrance’s planned vampire story has been unexpectedly cancelled, and he has only a few weeks to come up with a replacement. Fortunately, he’s brilliant. Melvin Peña joins us to discuss Horror of Fang Rock.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer best known for his gothic stories, including the short story Carmilla (1872), which is a foundational vampire story, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. It’s likely that Terrance Dicks named his vampire queen Camilla after Le Fanu’s character (more of which next week).

The Forsyte Saga is a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy (1867–1933), originally published between 1906 and 1921, and published together in 1922. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, starting in the 1880s. Millie Gibson recently appeared in a TV adaptation, The Forsytes, which screened on Channel 5 in late 2025.

Among many other things, Andrew Orton creates digital models of the sets of Classic Doctor Who stories.

If you want to hear more of Peter and Simon in furious disagreement about the quality of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, here are the relevant episodes of Flight Through Entirety — Episode 220: Centuries of Embittered Religiosity, and Episode 221: Generic Potato Person.

When Season 22 of Doctor Who was first broadcast in Australia in 1985/86, its 45-minute episodes were split in half and broadcast from Monday to Thursdays at 6:30 PM. As a result, we got to experience some pretty terrible cliffhangers. Simon quotes the cliffhanger to our Part 3 of The Two Doctors:

DOCTOR: Perhaps you can lead us to this hacienda?

The Tales of Ratiocination refers to three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), which are sometimes considered to be the first examples of detective fiction. In each of these stories, a mystery is solved by C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective from Paris. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844).

The Willem Dafoe/Robert Pattinson movie Melvin mentions is The Lighthouse (2019), in which two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers are isolated in a lighthouse by a storm, alternately making out and hitting each other with axes, apparently.

Here’s an adorable image of Peter, aged about 8, with a small subset of his collection of Target novelisations.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Horror of Fang Rock in Episode 50: The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive, released on Sunday 25 October 2015.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hide in your basement flicking the lights on and off until you come downstairs and ask us politely to stop.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Maximum Power returned with its field report into the release of the Series 2 blu-ray box set at the British Film Institute.

And we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched The Best of Both Worlds and The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, perhaps two of the most well-known and significant episodes not just of Star Trek: The Next Generation but of the entire Star Trek franchise. We thought they were a bit slow.

Saturday 28 December 1974

Robot

This week, Terrance gives up the script editor’s seat to Bob Holmes — but not before adding a final flourish to his era (and scoring one more paycheque) as the writer of Tom Baker’s first story, Robot.

Donkey Kong Bananza is the latest game in the Donkey Kong series, released on 17 July 2025 alongside the new Nintendo Switch 2. Nathan really likes it, describing it as “like eating a whole bunch of red food colouring and then watching a Japanese game show”.

Nathan mentions the BBC’s 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice whose exteriors were shot on film in Lincolnshire and whose interiors were shot on videotape in tiny, tiny studios. It’s not great, but it does feature some familiar faces, including Moray Watson (Black Orchid) as Mr Bennet, Barbara Shelley (Planet of Fire) as Mrs Gardiner and Clare Higgins (Night of the Doctor, The Magician’s Apprentice) as Kitty. Horrifyingly, the vastly superior 1995 adaptation of the book is now 30 years old.

Richard mentions Susan Jameson in Colony in Space. She had originally been cast by Michael E. Briant as the villainous Morgan, but the casting was vetoed by BBC’s Head of Drama Serials Ronnie Marsh, on the grounds that a sadistic female villain would have been too sexualised for a family audience.

Robot first aired in Australia in April 1976. At about that time, ABC-TV decided to stop buying the series, and so on 24 August 1976 a group of fans decided to picket its Sydney office, which is how the Doctor Who Club of Australia was born. Henry Bland had been appointed Chairman of the ABC in July that year.

Here’s a link to the TARDIS Wikia page of Terrance Dicks’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, where you can see both versions of the cover.

Brendan suggests that one inspiration for Dicks’s script might be a script written by him and Malcolm Hulke for a 1962 episode of The Avengers — The Mauritius Penny. We released a commentary on The Mauritius Penny for Bondfinger back in 2020; of course, many more commentaries on The Avengers are available on The Three-Handed Game.

Here’s the TARDIS Wikia page for Short/Robinson; delightfully, TARDIS Wikia just accepts it as established canon that the two of them are the same person.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Robot in Episode 32: Quentin Crisp Duck Face, released on Saturday 20 June 2015.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll tease your Roomba until it turns on you.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Brendan, Steven and Richard released the latest episode of their Avengers commentary podcast The Three-Handed Game. In The End of Empire #3, they watch and discuss Love All (1969), in which a hefty cleaning lady tricks some misogynist civil servants into falling in love with her and revealing all their most important secrets.

At the start of November, the Blake’s 7 Series 2 blu-ray box set was launched at the British Film institute, and Maximum Power was there to check it out. And to their surprise, they ran into some of the people responsible for the box set’s exciting new modelwork. Check out their latest field report.

And finally, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a perhaps justifiably unloved episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Up the Long Ladder, finding much more to enjoy in it than they expected.

Saturday 19 April 1969

The War Games

This week, 500 Year Diary begins its six-week hagiography of Doctor Who writer, script editor and raconteur Terrance Dicks, with a discussion of his first on-screen script credit The War Games. Ten monster-free episodes culminating in a series-ruining revelation about the Doctor’s backstory — can Terrance make it work?

Nathan was born in Sydney on Sunday 27 April 1969. According to the invaluable BroaDWCast, that was the day of the first screening of The Wheel in Space Part 3 in Australia. (In Sydney, in fact. It was screened later in less important Australian cities.)

Peter and Todd are both right about the World War I location, which was a rubbish dump in Brighton that had previously been used in Richard Attenborough’s 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War.

The Mighty 200 was a fan poll of the first 200 Doctor Who stories published in Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 in October 2009. The results of the Doctor Who Magazine 60th anniversary poll, which included the Capaldi and Whittaker eras for the first time, were published in 2023 across Issues 589 to 594.

Vernon Dobtcheff plays the Scientist here, but he also plays the Terra Nostra Chairman in the Blake’s 7 episode Shadow (1979); on film, he was murdered by Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). He has had a prolific career: his most recent IMDb credit is from 2023, when he was 89 years old.

Inevitably, here’s El Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum essay on The War Games.

Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin left Doctor Who to work on Paul Temple (1969–1971), a series about a crime-solving detective fiction writer and his wife, based on popular radio plays from the 1940s. It was a co-production between the BBC and ZDF in Germany, and it featured many many actors and crew members that would be familiar to fans of classic Doctor Who.

Nathan had been thinking about The Power of Kroll recently because he appeared on the Season 16 episode of Strictly Come Hamster alongside its host Joe Ford, as well as Toby Hadoke and Ioan Morris.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The War Games in Episode 19: Hipster Klingon, released on Sunday 28 December 2014.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll sneak into the judges’ robing room at your trial and tell them you’ve chosen the one who’s too thin.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast Startling Barbara Bain, in which some mysterious immortal beings troll the crew of Moonbase Alpha by giving them everything they ever wanted.

A couple of days ago, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called Waltz, in which Gul Dukat finally becomes the crazed space opera villain his mother always hoped he would be.

And just today, Brendan, Steven and Richard release the latest episode of their Avengers commentary podcast The Three-Handed Game. In The End of Empire #3, they watch and discuss Love All (1969), in which a hefty cleaning lady tricks some misogynist civil servants into falling in love with her and revealing all their most important secrets.

Saturday 26 April 2025

The Well

The surprising return of a decades-old monster leads not only to the urgent revision of a long-dormant TARDIS Wikia page, but also to an unexpected addition to the current season of 500 Year Diary. So join us, as we join Steven B for one more visit to a diamond planet called Midnight — it’s The Well.

In Midnight, Sky Sylvestry was played Lesley Sharp, who had worked with Russell in The Second Coming (2003), where she played the best friend of Christopher Eccleston’s character Stephen Baxter, who (it turns out) was the Second Coming of Christ.

This video on the BBC’s official YouTube channel explains how the Midnight Entity™ ended up in this episode. As Russell himself explains, the Doctor and Belinda were to have met the Orisha, divine spirits who are part of the Yoruba religion, but Russell was concerned that it would be impossible to turn them into Doctor Who monsters while still being respectful of the religious tradition.

Our Doctor Who flashcast The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire recorded our first impressions of The Well just a few weeks ago in Episode 15.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Steven is @steedstylin.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or when you’re not looking we’ll stick a post-it note on your back that says KICK ME.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Keen on more Steven B–based content? Well, you’re in luck: today sees the release of the latest episode of Brendan, Steven and Richard’s Avengers podcast The Three-Handed Game. It’s the first episode of a new triptych called The End of Empire: the boys watch The Gilded Cage, in which Honor Blackman gears up for the next stage of her career by staging a gold robbery in order to trap a criminal mastermind.

Finally, we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called To the Death, which contained levels of latex content hazardous to human health.

Monday 1 December 2008

Enemy of the Bane

We return to Bannerman Road this week for the second coming of Samantha Bond as Mrs Wormwood, and she’s just as wonderful as you would expect. We also get the second coming of Kaagh the Slayer as well, at no extra charge.

We discussed this story’s predecessor Invasion of the Bane in Season 1, Episode 6: Where Kelsey Went.

Not Sufficiently Executed Enough is the title of Flight Through Entirety, Episode 45 on The Hand of Fear. It’s a riff on the Hinchcliffe-Era trope of the villain being an Evil from the Dawn of Time. (See also Sutekh, Morbius and the Master.)

When this episode airs, Anjli Mohindra is 18 years old and Gita Anwar is 39. Nicholas Courtney is 78.

Mrs Wormwood returns in the second box set of the series Rani Takes on the World, The Revenge of Wormwood, released in December 2023. A wonderful six-minute interview with Samantha Bond accompanied the release.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

If you want to hear more of Adam’s theories about the world of Doctor Who, you can tune into his daily Doctor Who podcast Adam Richard Has a Theory.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll open up an unconvincing CGI portal in the middle of Milbury and ruin one of your formative childhood experiences.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, we released another episode of our Space: 1999 podcast Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

And this week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched an episode of Star Trek: Picard with an incredible musical number in the middle, which is, for that reason, immune to any kind of criticism. It’s Two of One.

Saturday 4 June 2005

Boom Town

This week, a New Series villain returns for the first time just six weeks after her first appearance — it’s Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, wonderfully played by Annette Badland. Hannah Cooper and Pete Lambert join us.

The entire UK bans smoking in pubs and restaurants from the middle of 2007, but the ban is announced just a couple of months after Boom Town airs, in October 2005.

Cordelia’s “it’s all about me!” realisation comes in the Series 1 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Out of Mind, Out of Sight way back in 1997.

Annette Badland plays Hazel Woolley on The Archers. She’s known as Poisonous Hazel, and she visited Ambridge in summer 2005, perhaps watching Boom Town on BBC1 while she was there.

The dialogue Nathan tries to remember from The Parting of the Ways is actually Rose responding to the Doctor’s claim that this new race of Daleks was made from dead human beings. Rose says, “That makes them half human,” to which the Dalek Emperor replies, “That is blasphemy.”

Flight Through Entirety discussed Boom Town in Episode 142: Going One-on-One, released on Sunday 4 November 2018.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, Hannah is @hannahcooper.bsky.social, and Pete is @quiteamess.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invite you to join us for some ice-skating. In a very suspicious way.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Yesterday, we released another episode of Startling Barbara Bain. Christopher Lee makes a terrifying visit to Moonbase Alpha, but it’s terrifying mostly because he’s so unexpectedly nice, and one of the Alphans is keen to be awfully mean to him.

And this week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a funny and likeable episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — The Forsaken.

Monday 7 September 1987

Time and the Rani

Another classic 80s villain makes her first reappearance on Doctor Who this week. But what will four serious teenage fanboys make of the fact that she has decided to dress up as Bonnie Langford?

In Dynasty, Kate O’Mara’s character Caress Morrell is the younger sister of Joan Collins’s Alexis Colby. She was in 19 episodes of Dynasty in 1986.

Mel’s delightfully overplayed line in The Reality War comes in just before the Rani beams into UNIT HQ: “She’s ruthless. Worse than ruthless. She’s indifferent to any pain or morality or humanity. The whole universe is just an experiment to her.”

Bonnie Langford’s interview with Benjamin Cook in Doctor Who Magazine appears in Issue 595 from October 2023. Here she is talking about her performance as Mel in the 1980s: “I read Russell’s scripts and thought, ahh, glorious! It is glorious, isn’t it?” says Bonnie. “I just feel really personally grateful, and delighted, and lucky to be able to revisit something that I didn’t necessarily think I did very well before.” Did she really not? “I just thought, oh God, I was really awful in it back in the day. I tried too hard.”

Bondfinger’s short series of commentaries on some of Kate O’Mara’s television performances can be found here.

Just a few days before the broadcast of The Reality War (and the recording of this episode), Russell T Davies posted on Instagram an introduction to the Rani and an explanation of the elements of her character he thought it was important to bring back.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Time and the Rani in Episode 116: Terrified of Tinsel, released on Sunday 25 June 2017.

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at 500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hang you upside down from the ceiling until your face is really, really puffy.

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

This week, we released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — Tapestry. There will be a new episode released next Friday.