'DWB' Issue 69

'DWB' Issue 69

Andrew Cartmel is leaving 'Doctor Who' to work on 'Casualty', Sophie Aldred will be in eight episodes of Season 27 and at least one episode of 'The Curse Of Fenric' will be 30 minutes long.

Well, this sounds like September 1989 to me and everyone is getting mildly excited that Sylvester McCoy has got a new darker jacket in all the publicity photos for 'Battlefield'...

Issue 69 of 'DWB' (as it's stopped calling itself 'Doctor Who Bulletin' by this point) runs to an impressive 44 pages for £2.95 and dips its toes into the wider waters of telefantasy with features on 'Batman', 'The Twilight Zone' and various incarnations of 'Star Trek' plus an interview with Gerald Harper about 'Adam Adamant Lives!'.

In some ways, the things that didn't happen make just as interesting reading. The production team calling themselves 'Coast To Coast' (nothing to do with the early evening news show from TVS as far as I can tell) are still planning to do a 'Doctor Who' movie and the BFI may or may not have a missing episode from Season 3. One wonders whether that was meant to be 'Day Of Armageddon' or 'Air Lock'..?

Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy are all appearing in pantomime over the Christmas period, with Sylvester's appearance in 'Aladdin' at Manchester also boasting Paul Nicholas, Paul Shane, Eartha Kitt amongst its cast, a Special Appearance by Garfield (it is not clear how this worked on the day as surely not every Appearance would be Special?) and sponsorship by Cadbury's Crunchie, according to the rather busy poster.

There's an analysis of the viewing figures for 'Blake's 7' with the episode in which Blakes and Travis fought an 'Oval' (sic) being one of the more popular ones, clocking up an impressive 10 million viewers.

'Doctor Who' Magazine is celebrating its tenth birthday and is being joined in the market by two new titles in the form of 'Fantasy Zone' from Marvel and 'TV Zone' from Visual Imagination.

A fair chunk of this edition is taken up with the results of the Series Survey which places 'The Talons Of Weng-Chiang' at the top of the pile, but has little good to say about 'The Twin Dilemma'. The style adopted in this list is to credit the stories in the format (Writer / Director) which leads us to the odd situation whereby Colin Baker's debut is apparently the work of Steven / Moffat.

This survey shows just how popular Robert Holmes was with the readership at the time, gaining 74% of the vote for Favourite Writer, with Terrance Dicks trailing in second place at 4%.

If you want a closer look at this issue, it just happens to be the subject of today's video, which may be watched here.

But boo to everyone for voting 'The Gunfighters' into sixth position in the 'All-Time Clangers' list. Besides, that's a badly-chosen phrase in the first place, as surely everybody with an ounce of sense loves the 'Clangers'?

(By Andrew Trowbridge)