Second Time Around

Second Time Around

"As we complete work on this documentary, 62 of Patrick Troughton's 119 episodes are still missing..."

Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing.

And when you apply it to some of of the 'Doctor Who' DVD extras, you can't helping thinking that some people knew more than they were letting on at the time.

'Second Time Around' can be found on the July 2012 release of 'The Krotons' and it's interesting how the talk of the missing episodes of the Patrick Troughton era is played immediately before the discussion of 'The Enemy Of The World' and 'The Web Of Fear'.

At this point, fandom was still coming down from the relative high of the return of 'Galaxy 4 : Air Lock' and 'The Underwater Menace' Episode Two, and the latter of these is represented in Ed Stradling's documentary with a number of clips that whetted the appetite for seeing a bit more of the life and times of Professor Zaroff.

The Season Five holdings in the BBC Archives now look much more healthy, and maybe I'm seeing patterns that aren't really there, but you can't help wondering...

 This overview of 1966-1969 reminds us of how little we know about some of these stories, even with the wonder of telesnaps, but the sheer weekly panic of getting the show on air is something we tend to forget about.

The wrench the Hartnell era feels when Verity Lambert leaves has been ably covered in both fact and fiction, but an equivalent of 'An Adventure In Space And Time' for Troughton's time on the show would have a much more confusing narrative.

The Second Doctor's three seasons, despite seeming fairly consistent on screen, have an awful lot of cooks involved with the broth, as Lloyd & Davis morph into Bryant & Sherwin with a dash of Pemberton and a healthy injection of Dicks at the tail-end.

Scripts collapse all over the place and Robert Holmes seemingly only comes on board 'Doctor Who' by accident when prisons in space seem like not such a good idea after all.

And concepts such as the Time Lords come out of the blue, not having been even thought about a few weeks earlier.

Quite rightly, you'd never get away with such a situation these days, but desperation, like hindsight, can also be a wonderful thing sometimes...

(Written by Andrew Trowbridge)