500 Year Diary: A Doctor Who Podcast Flight Through Entirety

It feels like only a year ago that Doctor Who underwent a strange and cataclysmic soft reboot, and it looks like it’s happening again this week. Or is it?
Notes and links
Paul Cornell’s negative review of Terror of the Autons was originally published in DWB Issue 112, way back in April 1993. Here it is republished in the old Usenet forum rec.arts.drwho (or at least the version of it to be found on Google Groups right now).
Jeremy Bentham (yes, a relation) was the co-founder of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society back in the 70s. To us, he was more famous for contributing a section to Peter Haining’s 1983 coffee-table book Doctor Who: A Celebration, a section which briefly covered every Doctor Who story up to the final story of Season 20, The King’s Demons. We mentioned it last week; it...

In the first week of the 1970s, Doctor Who is back, with a new Doctor, a new alien threat, new companions and a new earthbound premise. So what makes it the same show?
Notes and links
Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is well known for regularly going into a coma to heal himself. He does that in this story, in The Dæmons, in Planet of the Daleks, in The Monster of Peladon and in Planet of the Spiders. (I’ve probably left some out.) This phenomenon is so well known that is has a name — the Pertwee death pose — characterised by Pertwee lying flat on his back with one knee bent. Flight Through Entirety named its Jon Pertwee retrospective after this — Episode 31: One Knee up for Pertwee.
When Peter and Simon refer to “625-line Pertwees”, what they mean is the episodes that still existed in their original...

A big week for beginnings this week, with a new Doctor, a new origin story for the Daleks, and a whole new approach to defeating the bad guys. Oh, and a new podcast to discuss them all on. So let’s welcome Patrick Troughton to the studio floor, as we discuss The Power of the Daleks.
Notes and links
The most recent Blu-ray release of The Power of the Daleks was the Special Edition in 2020, which includes a compilation of all the surviving footage, including material shot on an 8mm film camera pointing at a TV screen. This material was also included on the Lost in Time DVD release way back in 2004.
Simon also mentions a site which chronicles the upsetting history of Doctor Who’s missing episodes. It’s called The Destruction of Time, and it’s well worth reading, if a bit dispiriting at...