Liveblog: The Leisure Hive, episode 4

Titles:  So where were we?  Ah yes, we'd just left the aged Doctor, the French-dressed Romana and a chirruping insect to rip the face off another insect wearing a skin-suit.  Tell me, in which series could you fully expect to write an introductory sentence like that?  I love Doctor Who!

No matter what, though, I'm much more comfortable with Drs. Davison and Colin Baker in the "starfield" credits.  With Tom Baker, they just don't seem to feel right - too clean.  Tom Baker's best years were when the series had a real gritty feel to it.

Reprise: I don't get it - can the Doctor understand the Foamasi language?  And where did they find the second Foamasi?

Liveblog: The Leisure Hive, episode 3

Opening titles:  Let's talk (briefly) about music.  A friend of mine who's a classically trained composer once said he liked this version of the theme music better than any other Who music simply because it offered the right balance of melody and rhythm.  You've gotta hand it to him, he's right.  It really is a nice, iconic theme - probably the most well-remembered of them all, especially starting and finishing with the "sting".

Reprise: Well, it's obvious that the Argoin don't belong to anything like the Galactic Geneva Convention - this sort of thing would be highly frowned upon, using a prisoner as a guinea-pig for arcane experimentry.

Liveblog: The Leisure Hive, episode 2

Credits: Watching them again, they seem much cleaner, brighter - a credits sequence for the video tape era.  It was the source of an interesting, but friendly, disagreement between Jacqueline Hill (initial companion Barbara Wright, and Lexa in the following serial Meglos) and First Doctor William Hartnell - he wanted the series modernised, shot in colour and made much more visually impressive while she felt the series was much better suited to dark angles and mystery.  I can completely accept both points of view - with the romantic in me probably siding with Miss Wright.

Post-reprise: I'm going to go on about, I can tell, but the music really is very intrusive as Pangol goes to the control panel.

Liveblog: The Leisure Hive episode 1

Credits: Bloody hell, that's a change from the old diamond-shaped logo!  At least, it would have been in 1980 when JNT commissioned Sid Sutton to create them.  Sutton then went on to create the similar (but more lurid) 6th Doctor title credits.

By: David Fisher, an underappreciated Doctor Who scriptwriter.  He doesn't rank in the top 5 (for mine, Holmes, Houghton, Hulke, Whitaker and *squints a bit* oh, let's go for John Lucarotti), but his work during a difficult era for Who is still under-regarded.  He had to write for an arrogant, narcissistic leading man who thought himself better at comedy that he was, a producer on a shoestring and three separate script editors who each wanted him completely different script styles from him.  That he did so well with stories like The Androids of Tara and the Stones of Blood is commendable ... if you thought the Hinchcliffe/Williams transition was jarring, try going from for-better-or-worse comic (Adams) to science-at-all-costs (Bidmead).

(Come to think of it, Fisher probably doesn't make the top 10 - I haven't mentioned Dicks, Sherwin, Haisman/Lincoln, Wyatt, Spooner or Cotton, yet).