Season 10 - Jon Pertwee - Planet of the Daleks

The fourth serial of the tenth season of Doctor Who sees the Doctor and Jo stranded on a planet that has danger seeping from its very pores. Spiradon is a planet inhabited by aliens known as Spiradons who have developed the ability to generate an anti-reflecting light wave which renders them invisible. As well as the Spiradons the planet also boosts a large population of venomous fungus and plants. Spiradon has been taken over by a troupe of Daleks who have subjugated the inhabitants in an attempt to perfect the art of invisibility.

The Doctor and Jo overcome the dangers of Spiradon with the aid of a group of stranded Thals and the Doctor finds himself once again standing in between the universe and his mortal enemy, the Daleks.

Season 10 - Jon Pertwee - The Three Doctors

On the second day of ‘Our Year with the Doctor’ we sat down to watch the 1972 season 10 episode ‘The Three Doctors’. This was a great episode and is a fan-favourite because not only was it released to mark the Doctor’s tenth year of television but it was also the first Doctor Who episode to feature a previous incarnation of the Doctor returning to our screen, alongside the current Doctor. In fact, as the name suggests, this episode featured all three of the early Doctors, William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and the current Doctor Jon Pertwee.

This episode, much like most episodes of the period, was made up of 4 segments each with a 25 minute duration and was originally aired on 30^th December 1972 and for the following 3 weeks after. This episode introduced a legendary Time Lord known as ‘Omega’, he was initially introduced as an alternative to the Master following the death of Roger Delgado. The intention was to fill the need for a rogue Time Lord character. Omega has often been revered through Time Lord history as one of the founding fathers and the Gallifrey’s ‘greatest hero’, he was a stellar engineer who was working on developing time travel until he was lost and believed dead when his experiments created a supernova and he fell into the resulting black hole.

Season 8 - Jon Pertwee - The Claws of Axos

So today is the first day of our year with the doctor and we’ve decided to start off with a Jon Pertwee episode.  This evening we sat down to watch 'The Claws of Axos' which was originally broadcast in 1971 as part of the 8th Season of Doctor Who. The episode was written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, directed by Michael Ferguson and was split into 4 broadcasts of equal length with the first airing on 13/03/1971 at 17.15.

This episode, as was the case with many episodes from this era, was mainly filmed around the Kent, England area. In the future we plan on visiting some of the locations so look out for future blogs on the locations of ‘The Claws of Axos’. 

Jon Pertwee’s time as the doctor was a really exciting and interesting time for the show, they had taken a step away from the traditional storylines and, for the first time, they had started to film Doctor who in colour. Early colour television, though a far cry from the colour television we see today, was very exciting and ‘Doctor Who’ was not afraid to test the boundaries of what this new technology could do.