For Whovians who may not know, because Baker opted out of the 20th anniversary special, that’s a wax work of him from Madam Tussaud’s for the promo pic. But there are some other pics with the cast having some fun with him.
A historic moment for Doctor Who. July 7 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of arguably the most important episode of the show, that being “The War Games” part 8.
By this time, we obviously knew right from the first episode the Doctor wasn’t a human being from Earth, we knew that he came from another race of people from whom he’d cut himself off for some reason, we knew he possessed some amazing technology in the form of the TARDIS (whether or not he could make it work properly), and we also knew from “The Time Meddler” his TARDIS wasn’t unique and at least one more member of his own people (i.e. the Meddling Monk) was loose in the universe. Also he could be recast… er, “renewed”.
And finally, on July 7 1969, we found out who the people were that he came from. The Time Lords had been alluded to a couple of weeks earlier…
…but here the Doctor is identified as one of them himself. And thereafter everything changed for the show.
I wonder what 1969 audiences made of this. The production of the show was famously ad hoc right from the beginning because it had a nearly year-long weekly turnaround, which meant it had a distinct propensity for problems, particularly during the sixth season. This block of stories kicked off with one six-parter being cut to five episodes, with that sixth episode being grafted onto the following four-parter which meant those five episodes were markedly shorter than usual, then “The Krotons” had to be rushed into production when another story fell through, then most of “The Seeds of Death” had to be written by Terrance Dicks cos the behind the scenes chaos was too much for Brian Hayles to finish it, and then… there was “The War Games”, filled out to a remarkable ten episodes after two other stories fell through.
And the Time Lords were evidently as ad hoc a creation as the series itself, Dicks brought up the idea of the Doctor being captured by his own people and then Derrick Sherwin seems to have coined the name casually, and that seems to have been, you know, it. Fairly casual and with ramifications for the series ever since. What did people think in 1969? Did they think the Time Lords were a kind of crap plot device or something? Did they think it was an adequate revelation after six years of not knowing where the Doctor came from? We know that, years down the track, a lot of people were unhappy about how the Time Lords came across in “The Deadly Assassin” compared to their earlier appearances, but what did people think of them in 1969 when they were introduced?
Anyway, arguably the most important episode of the show ever also wound up being its single worst-rating episode too, at least until “Battlefield” aired 20 years later. The ratings were generally on the slide and bottomed out here; 3.5 million people watched it at the time, and not that many more people watched the next two episodes. Whatever people thought at the time… well, not many people thought it. The ironies of history, eh.
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