Friends, firstly apologies for not keeping the updates coming. 

The last two and a bit years have been turbulent and distressing for everyone and I hope this message finds you all well. While Brexit, Covid and the war in Ukraine have surely impacted on us all, I have been keeping myself busy working on several freelance commissions and thought it was time for an update.

THE BLACK ARCHIVE: KINDA (Obverse Books - forthcoming. Due December 2022)

Just as Covid restricted us all to working from home or furlough or no job at all, I was in the middle of researching and writing for the forthcoming Obverse Books Black Archive on Kinda. It's a particular favourite of mine from Season 19 of Doctor Who. After publishing the book about Warriors' Gate in 2019, I fancied the challenge of writing about what has come to be regarded, despite its flaws, as one of the most intriguing stories in the canon. At this stage, I don't want to say much about the book. The research at BBC Written Archives, after much delay because of Covid, was completed in August last year but that was the icing on a particular cake in terms of where this book led me and the new insights I've been provided with. 

With Obverse switching back to a bi-monthly publication schedule after the book was commissioned, I had a generous amount of time to write and I hope the results will have been worth it. The current manuscript is now with my editor at Obverse and I have no doubt we'll be going through that in due course as we hit the run-up to publication this year. I'm quietly excited for this one.

ROBIN HOOD AT HAMMER: Two Tales From Sherwood Forest (Due for release in August 2022)

I'm currently putting the final touches to an essay for the book that will accompany Indicator's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Hammer's Sword of Sherwood Forest and A Challenge for Robin Hood, the two films featuring the quintessentially British character that the studio made in the 1960s.

From Indicator's site:

"For 1960’s Sword of Sherwood Forest, Richard Greene (The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Castle of Fu Manchu) reprises the role he made famous in the classic television series The Adventures of Robin Hood. Directed by Terence Fisher (The Gorgon, The Revenge of Frankenstein), and starring Peter Cushing (The Devil’s Men, Corruption) as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham, the film sees Robin Hood thwart a plot to assassinate the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jack Gwillm, Jason and the Argonauts, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb). The film also boasts an uncredited early role for Oliver Reed (The System, The Damned).

In 1967’s A Challenge for Robin Hood, Barrie Ingham (The Day of the Jackal) dons the Lincoln green as he and his merrie men hide out in Sherwood Forest after his cousin (Peter Blythe, Frankenstein Created Woman) frames him for murder. This action-packed adventure features acting support from Gay Hamilton (Barry Lyndon, The Duellists) and Leon Greene (Adventures of a Private Eye, Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate).

This 2-disc Limited Edition set contains a double-sided poster, an 80-page book, and extensive new and archival extra features, including the much-loved Children’s Film Foundation film Robin Hood Junior (1975), starring Keith Chegwin (Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop) as the diminutive hero."

DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE

Back in September 2021 it was also a pleasure to be asked to review BBC Studios Blu-ray release of the animated The Evil of the Daleks for DOCTOR WHO MAGAZINE issue 570, which hit the stands last October. 

My thanks to the team for asking me to contribute to a magazine I've been reading since it first appeared as a Marvel weekly in 1979. The Evil of the Daleks is also a firm favourite so it was serendipitous that my first contribution was an opportunity to review its animated reincarnation.

HAMMER VOLUME SIX: Night Shadows - Limited Edition (Released June 2021)

I completed a further commission for Indicator's box set release last summer and wrote the essay for the booklet accompanying the Blu-ray edition of Hammer's Captain Clegg for this release. It was a great opportunity to write about a Hammer film I had such a soft spot for and I spent some time researching the life and times of Russell Thorndyke, the author of the original books that Hammer's Captain Clegg was inspired by and to understand where the character of Clegg originated.

"Hammer Volume Six: Night Shadows revives four consummate Hammer classics from the early sixties, exemplifying some of Hammer's best work in the horror and thriller genres. Edgar Allan Poe looms large in The Shadow of the Cat, a macabre ‘old dark house’ tale of feline revenge, starring André Morell (Cash on Demand) and Barbara Shelley (The Camp on Blood Island); Peter Cushing (The Gorgon, Corruption) and Oliver Reed (The Scarlet Blade) star in Captain Clegg, which sees Hammer fuse horror and adventure in an eighteenth-century-set tale of smugglers and marsh phantoms; Herbert Lom (Mysterious Island) stars as The Phantom of the Opera in Hammer’s acclaimed production of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic classic, whilst Freddie Francis (Torture Garden) directs Nightmare, a spooky psychological thriller in the Les Diaboliques vein, which benefits from full-blooded central performances by Moira Redmond (Jigsaw) and Jennie Linden (A Severed Head). 

This collection contains a wealth of new and archival extra features, including documentaries and appreciations, interviews with actors and crew members, audio commentaries, and extensive booklets. Strictly limited to 6,000 numbered units." 

Due for release by Indicator on 19 April 2021, this limited edition Blu-Ray of Ken Loach's Fatherland(1986) features my new essay on the film in the booklet that accompanies the first pressing.

Loach's film, which was released after a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s where he found it difficult to get work commissioned and financed, is all the more intriguing in that it was his only collaboration, to date, with the much admired writer Trevor Griffiths. Griffiths a successful theatre playwright had, like Loach, moved from television and into cinema. Both had a formidable creative and political sensibility running throughout their work and my essay, 'Third Man', chronicles their interweaving, parallel careers through to the development and writing of Fatherland.

My own interest in Loach's and Griffiths' work has grown since I first watched Fatherland on Channel 4 (who had co-funded the film) in the late 1980s. I was happy to revisit their careers to fulfil the essay brief to contextualise their work and its political drive. With a particular focus on Griffiths, the essay discusses each of Fatherland's collaborators, their shared politics of the left, their work for theatre, television and cinema and the way each has developed their own voice through their respective techniques in directing and writing. It also underlines their differences, coming into sharp relief in the many compromises that both had to make during the making of Fatherland. Each had something to say in the film, often from different perspectives, about media, culture and history, Europe and political struggle in a decade where the left was in retreat, particularly in Britain.

As this essay was researched and written last summer, during the lockdown in May and June 2020, it was a challenge to complete it while voluntarily shielding and on furlough. The impact of the coronavirus also prevented me from looking through Loach's and Griffiths' papers held at the BFI national archive. This was particularly upsetting as it would have been very rewarding to look more closely at the development of Fatherland's script and the correspondence between Loach and Griffiths. Fortunately, David Archibald's article on Loach's approach to acting, written for The Drouth in 2018, offered some of those insights from the archive.

I also had some familiarity with Griffiths' television work when I had first researched and reviewed his superb political drama Bill Brand, made for Thames in 1976 and released on DVD in 2011. The material gathered for that review was then extended through a deep read of several texts on Griffiths and Loach as well as newspaper and magazine research (thanks to the access provided by Manchester Central Library's online newspaper archives and to Film Comment's invaluable online archive during the first lockdown) to uncover contemporary interviews with Loach and Griffiths when Fatherland was released in 1986. 

I am particularly indebted to the work, published since the 1980s, of Graham Fuller, Stanton B. Garner, John Hill, Stephen Lacey, Jacob Leigh and John Tulloch whose chapters and books on the work of Loach, Griffiths and producer Tony Garnett were extremely helpful in the writing of the essay. 

The initial draft originally came in at 3600 words and through about three further drafts this came down to 3185 (still over the word count) in the final edit. Although a large chunk of about 145 words was cut without too much consequence during that last edit, the loss of an extended section on Barry Hines' two-part television play The Price of Coal (1977) was somewhat unfortunate. It was a pleasure writing this essay while re-visiting the politically prescient Fatherland, a somewhat neglected Loach film. I hope it offers the relevant context to those who may be unfamiliar with much of Griffiths' work in theatre, television and film prior to his collaboration with Loach.

FATHERLAND - INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• High Definition remaster
  
• Original mono audio
  
• Language Barriers (2021): new interview with editor Jonathan Morris
  
• Talk About Work (1971): Ken Loach’s documentary for the Central Office of Information, photographed by Chris Menges, interviewing young people about their work
  
• Right to Work March (1972): documentary film of a five-week protest march from Glasgow to London that saw the participation of a number of cultural figures, including Loach and other filmmakers
  
• Image gallery: publicity and promotional material
  
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
  
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Frank Collins, an archival interview with Ken Loach, an extract from Loach on Loach, an overview of contemporary critical responses, new writing on the short films, and film credits
  
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
  
• Limited edition of 3,000 copies
   

#PHILTD136
BBFC cert: 15
REGION FREE
EAN: 5060697920192

It's good to see some of Loach's less regarded work on Blu-ray with Indicator's release of Fatherland alongside their limited edition of Loach's Carla's Song (1996) in April 2021. Both are available to pre-order from their website.

Due for release on 28 October 2019 by Indicator, this limited edition Blu-Ray of Alan Parker's film Birdy (1984) features my new essay on the film in the booklet that accompanies the first pressing.

Birdy remains one of my favourite films of the 1980s and the commission to write the new essay from Powerhouse was an opportunity to not only revisit a film I had seen on release and revisited on VHS and DVD but also to return to the original novel by William Wharton.

The essay, ‘In a dream, I'm trying to decide what I am’, attempts to track the development of the script prior to Parker's involvement and how Wharton's strange, often abstract, narrative about the transformation of two friends in the aftermath of the Second World War (it was altered to the Vietnam conflict for the film) was brought to the screen by Parker.

Birdy is another iteration of Wharton's personality, one forged through his participation in the War, his relatively poor background and his childhood obsessions.Tracing the numerous avatars of Wharton involved a close re-reading of the novel Birdy and Wharton's posthumous war biography Shrapnel, tracing Wharton's double life - as abstract painter and author - through numerous interviews, in documents on Parker's own website, and then trying to tie those in with a delve through Parker's papers, donated to the BFI archives.

The papers at the BFI provided a fascinating insight into how Parker shaped Sandy Kroopf and Jack Behr’s script and attempted to retain as much of the ‘the “one person” schizophrenia of the book’ and remain true to the author's identity or identities.

Thanks to Nigel Good and Carolyne Bevan of the BFI Special Collections team I was able to access the draft scripts, Parker's letters and memos about the script, the notes on use of Garrett Brown's Skycam to shoot some of the flying sequences, technical notes about canaries, and his correspondence with Michael Reidenback. Reidenback, hoping to secure a role in the film, eventually provided Parker with a lot of research into army psychiatric units and their treatments of mental patients in the post-Vietnam era. This material left the impression that Parker clearly wanted to get the details right about what we eventually saw on screen. It also shed some further light on Wharton's own elusive personality and reclusive life.

The original draft of the essay was approximately 4600 words by November 2017. By the time I delivered the final draft, in December 2017, this had been reshaped and edited to approximately 3000 words. Finally, this release of Birdy has been a little while coming but it is heartening to know that this was not only down to Indicator's desire to secure Parker for a commentary and produce a number of relevant special features but also to go the extra mile and commission a new 2K remaster of the film.

But here it is at last. Enjoy.

INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 2K remaster supervised and approved by director Alan Parker
• Original stereo audio
• New and exclusive audio commentary with director Alan Parker and the BFI’s Justin Johnson
• Learning to Fly (2019): new and exclusive interview with screenwriters Jack Behr and Sandy Kroopf
• Keith Gordon on William Wharton (2019): the actor and filmmaker shares his experiences of adapting Wharton for the screen
• No Hard Feelings (1974): Alan Parker’s early film is an unsentimental view of wartime London through the eyes of a troubled young man
• Original theatrical trailer
• Image gallery: on-set and promotional photography
• New and improved English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Frank Collins, an overview of contemporary critical responses, archival articles, and film credits
• Limited Edition of 5,000 copies
• All extras subject to change

#PHILTD028
BBFC cert: 15
REGION FREE
EAN: 5037899071083

Purchase directly from the Powerhouse website.

Yes, my lovely readers I am still here. I know the Cathode Ray Tube site has been silent for well over a year but I just thought you might like to know that I haven't been idle. I've just been out and about writing for other sites and publications in the brief pauses I can find during my full-time job.

I'd love to write more and, in fact, I'd like nothing better than to write every day and earn a living from it but my job is all-consuming of my time and energy at the moment. However, more paid work would be lovely and I remain, as always, a writer for hire.

So... by way of promoting my wares here's a brief run down of where you can find my latest keyboard twiddlings.

Doctor Who - Series 9 and Christmas Special: The Husbands of River Song
Click above for ALL of the Series 9 episode and 2015's festive special coverage at the splendid film and television review site Frame Rated posted between September and December 2015. Plus there's a three-part overview of Series 8 too! More Doctor Who soon.

Other television reviews at Frame Rated
Outlander Seasons One and Two, Penny Dreadful Seasons Two and Three and The Man in the High Castle Season One and Sherlock: The Abominable Bride are just some of the other shows I've covered in the last year. Latest The Man in the High Castle and Sherlock reviews are forthcoming. 

Film reviews at Frame Rated
You'll also find my reviews (including Blu-ray releases) of Spectre (2015), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Kes (1969). Plus you can also read a brief tribute article about David Bowie and his work on screens big and small: Cracked Actor

For those avid Blu-ray watchers out there I was also commissioned to write essays for a number of Arrow Film and Video releases this year, including:

The Count Yorga Collection
For the first pressing of the Blu-ray of Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga, released in August 2016, the enclosed booklet featured my essay about the films: A Tale of Unspeakable Cravings.

Woody Allen: Seven Films 1986 to 1991
Due out in February 2017, this Blu-ray box set containing Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, September, Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alice and Shadows and Fog features a book of new writing about the films. I've completed an essay 'The air is full of electricity' about September (1987), which will also gain a standalone Blu-ray release in March 2017.

Cathode Ray Tube remains blessed with visitors even though nothing new has been posted for some time and I remain ever grateful many of you still enjoy the material archived here. If I can overcome a few personal obstacles I hope I can be back here with new posts in 2017. Until then, I wish all readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Wonderful Books has now announced the Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special, a gorgeously designed and humourous homage to the RADIO TIMES Doctor Who 10th Anniversary Special originally published in 1973.

The (Not-RADIO TIMES) Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special showcases writer and designer Paul Smith's talents in a 36 page fanzine covering the last 8 years of Doctor Who's return to our screens. Paul has designed and written the fanzine in collaboration with an array of contributors, commissioning commentary from professional and fan writers Andrew Blair, Alison Jane Campbell, Johnny Candon, Frank Collins (that's my good self), Martin Day, Philip Sandifer, JR Southall, Keith Topping and Alex Wilcock and design from artists Lydia Butz, Benoit Drombey, Jason Fletcher, Alea LeFevre, Jon Pinto, Westley Smith, James Taylor, Will Thompson and more. What a talented bunch!

You will probably recall Paul's stunning work on The Wonderful Book of Dr Who 1965, a tongue-in-cheek look at the very first year of Doctor Who and itself a witty homage to BBC Books' The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011. This proved to be a huge success as an online flipbook (more than 26,500 views on Issuu.com to date) and the positive reaction led to Paul producing a small number of printed copies, now into a second print run, with extra content. The Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special similarly offers a visual treat and a witty, affectionate tribute to the series.

The Dr Who 8th Anniversary Special - a not-for-profit publication - can now be previewed and ordered from Wonderful Books.

And here's Part Three of my research notes on Steven Moffat's 2007 drama Jekyll.

These are the last notes combined, rewritten and edited from two drafts of the material. This final part features many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it specifically looks at narrative structure and the use of memory and flashback in Jekyll. 

I suggest you put the kettle on again, make some tea and take your time. The first part is here and the second part is here. The first part looked at the relationship between the 'Jekyll' figure of Tom Jackman and his alter-ego Hyde and the second instalment looked at the female characters and how the series evoked the female Gothic within the parallel narratives featuring Tom's wife Claire and her duplicate Alice Cameron.

The notes were part of the research for a chapter I was writing on Moffat's Doctor Who but Jekyll is only used briefly in the finished piece. You'll be able to read my contribution to the forthcoming book The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era, edited by Andrew O'Day, when it's published by I.B.Tauris next year. Many thanks to Andrew for supporting my idea to make the approximately 9,000 words on Jekyll available.

And here's Part Two of my research notes on Steven Moffat's 2007 drama Jekyll.

The following is a partly combined, rewritten and edited version of two drafts of the material. It does look at Jekyll in context with many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it also touches on many other themes and ideas that the six-part drama explored that were outside of the remit of my original chapter.

This is quite a long article so I've split it into three parts. I suggest you put the kettle on again, make some tea and take your time. The first part is here. Where the first part looked at the relationship between the 'Jekyll' figure of Tom Jackman and his alter-ego Hyde, this second instalment looks at the female characters and how the series evoked the female Gothic within the parallel narratives featuring Tom's wife Claire and her duplicate Alice Cameron.

Part Three in the next few days. Enjoy.

By way of an explanation, the material about Jekyll (BBC 2007) I'm presenting here started life as research for a chapter I'd been asked to contribute to the forthcoming book The Eleventh Hour: A Critical Celebration of the Matt Smith and Steven Moffat Era, edited by Andrew O'Day and to be published by I.B.Tauris next year.

Andrew had asked me to include Steven Moffat's 2007 series Jekyll in my examination of Moffat's very recognisable signature in Doctor Who and with one thing and another I amassed a close reading of Jekyll that amounted to about 8,000 words on its own. The only problem? Not enough room to include much of that in a chapter that was predominantly about Doctor Who. In fact, I could have written an entire chapter, possibly even a book, about Jekyll by the time I'd finished. With the chapter finished, it struck me recently that it seemed a shame not to share the Jekyll material with a wider audience.

The following is a partly combined, rewritten and edited version of two drafts of the material. It does look at Jekyll in context with many of the recognisable motifs that can be found in the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who and it also touches on many other themes and ideas that the six-part drama explored that were outside of the remit of my original chapter. This is quite a long article so I'm going to split it into three parts. I suggest you put the kettle on, make some tea and take your time. Part One today and Parts Two and Three in the next few days. Enjoy.

Once again I've been asked to throw a few ideas around about classic Doctor Who for that august publication Celestial Toyroom, the publication of choice for all Doctor Who Appreciation Society members. To coincide with the launch of the new series they've had the decorators in and spruced up their own website www.dwasonline.co.uk so why not pop over or, better still, join. Once again, thanks to editor Tony Jordan for letting my self-indulgence get into print!

For issue 384, the cover of which is an homage to the Virgin Missing Adventures, I've been let loose on Season 13 of the original series. Yep, the 'Gothic' one. So, without further ado here's:

Season 13: Gothic Who
Part 1 / The Gothic continuum

(c) 2010 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission. If you'd like to commission the author please email via the blog.

Gothic broadcasting policy
With the transmission of Terror Of The Zygons in August and September 1975 and the subsequent run of stories in Season 13, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and his script editor Robert Holmes completed their transformation of Doctor Who. They had swept aside the modernising period overseen by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, where the series had reflected and popularised many contemporary social and political concerns of the early 1970s in its storylines, and had turned instead to Grand Guignol adventure stories, to a pastiche of familiar ‘ripping yarns’ within the science fiction and horror genres, to perfect a sustained run of stories that have often been labelled as ‘Gothic’ by fandom.

The truncating of the previous season to 20 weeks then held over the four episodes of Terror Of The Zygons that were completed for Season 12. The story commenced the next season in August rather than January and indicated that current producer Philip Hinchcliffe not only wanted to demarcate his episodes from those of Letts and Dicks but wanted to return the series to a late summer start as opposed to a New Year one. Psychologically, it meant that most episodes would be transmitted during the long winter evenings deemed more suitable for telling darker, Gothic stories and strategically they would also be shown during a period when more people would be watching television. This policy, combined with the emphasis on the Gothic adventure story that Robert Holmes was keen to develop, ensured that between the period of 1974 and 1976 the series attracted huge audiences and developed a distinctly adult flavour.

The Hinchcliffe and Holmes partnership used a wide range of Gothic characteristics to define their era. English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, is generally credited with originating the genre. Gothic fiction offered a ‘pleasant terror’, extended the Romantic literary form, supplementing it with melodrama and parody, even self-parody (something that Holmes would exploit), that embodied extreme emotion, the vicarious thrills of fearfulness, atmosphere and an appreciation of the sublime (Edmund Burke described the sublime as anything that “is productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling” – and by example the co-existence of terror, pain and delight). The Gothic style is full of blasted landscapes, decaying buildings, psychological and physical torture, doubles, secrets and curses. The style used extremes of the mysterious and fantastic that David Punter in The Literature Of Terror: A History Of Gothic Fictions, in part, summarises as: “an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense”.

Tele-Gothic
Doctor Who at this time was not an isolated example of how the Gothic genre was being expressed on television. Season 13, with its surface narratives full of castles, threatening jungles, monsters and mummies, linked directly into the contemporary popularisation of the form as well as a British televisual legacy that had already explored the same genre tropes. Just before the transmission of The Brain Of Morbius the BBC had aired their annual Ghost Story For Christmas ‘The Ash Tree’ in December 1975, a striking version of the M.R. James story, but even that tradition stretched back to the first adaptation ‘The Stalls Of Barchester’ in 1971. Bearing this in mind, Doctor Who’s penchant for mixing science fiction and the Gothic sat within a continuum of similar programmes, acknowledging such anthology series as Out Of The Unknown (BBC 1965 - 1971) and Late Night Horror (BBC 1968).

A key influence on the Hinchcliffe and Holmes approach to the Gothic would also have been Mystery And Imagination (ABC/Thames 1968 – 1970) with its very modern approach to adapting Stoker, Le Fanu, Stevenson and Shelley. Further to these influences were the children’s supernatural anthology Shadows (ITV 1975), various plays - including a much regarded ‘Play Of The Month’ adaptation of The Picture Of Dorian Gray (BBC 1976) - and the later Supernatural (BBC 1977) horror anthology series and, probably the zenith of the BBC’s infatuation with the Gothic, their prestigious adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (as 1977’s highly acclaimed Count Dracula) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1981).

Both the BBC and ITV also regularly scheduled seasons of classic horror and science fiction films during the period of 1975-1977, perhaps introducing and augmenting the young viewer’s experience of Doctor Who’s Gothic stories with choice selections from, amongst others, the Universal, AIP and Hammer archives. In 1975, as Terror Of The Zygons began transmission a season of fantastic films, stretching from August to September on BBC2, was already underway and included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Quatermass 2 (1957), The Tell Tale Heart (1963), The Premature Burial (1961) This Island Earth (1955), Barbarella (1968) The Cat and the Canary (1939) The Comedy of Terrors (1963). Similarly, when The Masque Of Mandragora went out in September 1976 on two Saturday late evenings you could indulge in double bills of The Mad Genius (1931) The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Walking Dead (1936) and Dracula - Prince Of Darkness (1966).

The bohemian masochist
As Season 13 unfolded, where was the figure of the Doctor located in the Hinchcliffe and Holmes Gothic pastiche? The Doctor was reinstated as alien outcast in this period – moving away from the avuncular, patriarchal father figure of Pertwee - and became a figure representative of the Gothic novel’s tragic outsider, at odds with himself, society and the cosmos. He reassumed the form of outlaw, undergoing a Romantic metamorphosis into the Shelleyan and Byronic hero. The series returned to the central idea of the Doctor as the outcast-hero, expelled from the Gallifrey of his childhood, an alienated misfit. As a truly Byronic figure the Doctor defined his own moral code, defied the oppressive authority of his enemies through his self-sufficiency and independence and often through his egotistical sense of his own superiority.

He became Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer, yearning for a place in society but doomed never to find it. This was elegantly summarised by Holmes in the opening scene of Part One of Pyramids Of Mars, where the Doctor gloomily proclaims to Sarah, "The Earth isn't my home, Sarah. I'm a Time Lord." After she mockingly acknowledges his status, he retorts to her, "You don't understand the implications. I'm not a human being. I walk in eternity."


Having the Doctor positioned within the Gothic and the Byronic subtext of the wandering hero, he also helped to demarcate and then repeat an underlying theme of the Gothic - the destabilising paranoia that threatens to reveal and perplex, via the use of the supernatural or the fantastic, social and "natural" distinctions concerning masculinity and male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications. It is an aspect of the Gothic that is rarely explored in relation to Season 13 and develops from the idea of the Doctor representing the male English ‘aristocrat’, a common Gothic symbol of confused masculinity and sexuality, where the Gothic also suggests a Victorian repression coupled with lurid "secret" lives - the fear of sexuality on the one hand and the struggle for sexual expression on the other - nurtured and given strength in the castles and subterranean vaults which the Gothic style popularised. Whilst the Doctor never demonstrated his own sexuality in Season 13, his presence does act as a catalyst to unearthing the troubling forms of masculinity and sexual aggression present in the adventures.

The Doctor as the locus for masochism and sadism in the narratives could be offered as an underlying proposition in Season 13. He is attacked and tortured by the monstrous and the alien or often, in acts of self sacrifice, submits to painful processes to recover information, effect an escape or accelerate the destruction of the threat. Whilst we have witnessed scenes of the Doctor interrogated and tortured before, most notably in a truly physical sense in the Pertwee era, these sequences became more prominent during the Hinchcliffe productions, conferring upon them a potential masochism on the Doctor’s part, where he must endure and, perhaps even gain pleasure or humiliation, from self-inflicted pain and trauma.

The reverse of this relationship was the increased sadism on the part of those wishing to harm the Doctor. The aliens and evil humans seemed to gain gratification by inflicting physical or mental pain on him and other characters. There was a palpable delight in torment or excessive cruelty from the monstrous foes and Season 13 specifically utilised the motifs of sadism, helplessness, and human destruction. It is an aspect of power that formed a significant feature of Gothic art and literature and as American critic Mark Edmundson says, "You cannot have Gothic without a cruel hero-villain; without a cringing victim; and without a terrible place…in which the drama can unfold".

And the drama unfolded in the form of six serials which I'll now examine.

Forward to Part 2: Tentacles and penetration
Forward to Part 3: Pyramid Power
Forward to Part 4: Brains and Byronic androids
Forward to Part 5: The Mary Whitehouse experience

This week The Guardian TV Club review of Troy Kennedy Martin's seminal drama Edge Of Darkness (the television version not the Mel 'sugartits' Gibson film about to be unleashed upon on us) added further insult to the injury of their previous 'Top 50 Dramas Of All Time' article in which the series had already been dismissed as 'the hobby horse of fanatics'.

Naturally, this made a lot of ordinarily fluffy and mild mannered people rather cross. Including me. After venting my spleen on Twitter, the bat signal went up from the lovely Iain Hepburn, award winning digital journalist, and one of the purveyors of The Thumbcast blog. Give us a quote, he said.

Well, 1,630 words later, I did. And The Thumbcast posted the whole lot. A pleasure working with you, gentlemen. So, if you enjoy a decent bit of telly and felt the poncy TV crits got it absurdly wrong or The Guardian's reviewer John Crace didn't have a clue, then pop over and have a read. You might just return to your fluffy and mild mannered state but I couldn't guarantee it. I'm feeling better already...now where's Mark Lawson? I've got a bone to pick with him.

Modish spectaculars
As the costume design for Doctor Who heartily reflected the fashion explosion of the 1960s, other forces were also at work as the series’ set designers became ever more ambitious. Designers including Colin Shaw (The Moonbase) Chris Thompson (The Evil Of the Daleks) Martin Johnson (The Tomb Of The Cybermen) Peter Kindred (Fury From The Deep), and Roger Cheveley (The War Games) all created signature set designs for the series. At the heart of many of these designs – from the Emperor Dalek’s throne room, the honeycomb like cells of the ice tombs on Telos, to the Pop Art minimalism of the War Room – was an attempt to widen the visual scale of the programme, to infuse a sense of awe and power into the look of the series albeit on a very modest budget. Once again, the design of the series was influenced by the advances in industrial and computer design, the use of new materials and techniques and by the work of other production designers, particularly in the science fiction and spy film genres.

The Cybermen were arguably the pinnacle of costume design development in the mid-1960s period of Doctor Who and remain as an iconic representation of how their design changed in a period where fashion, particularly French and British design, reflected the optimism of the space-age, embraced the use and combination of new materials and set the look for the future that would reverberate into the present day. Doctor Who got into the groove and costume designers Daphne Dare, Martin Baugh, Barbara Lane, Sandra Reid, Bobi Bartlett and Nicholas Bullen all clearly grabbed the opportunity to bring signature 1960s futuristic designs to the series, reflecting the explosion of creativity that they found themselves in the middle of.

The design team was clearly influenced, as were many others of the period, by British designers like Mary Quant and John Bates, and the French futurist triumvirate of Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne and Andre Courreges.

Cardin’s definitive "Cosmos" collection of 1966, featuring woollen mini-shift dresses with huge cut-outs or graphic target patterns of different colours, worn with domed felt helmets, had a major and lasting influence on how we thought we would dress in the future. "The clothes that I prefer are those I invent for a life that doesn't exist yet - the world of tomorrow," he was quoted. This influence seeped into a vast array of films and television shows in the mid 1960s and through to the mid-1970s. If Dior embodied the old guard, dressing the stoical aristocratic beauties clinging onto their pre-war way of life, then Cardin was the torchbearer of a world of social and sexual revolutions, industry mechanisation, and space travel.

As the '60s dawned, Cardin's vision tuned into the Futuristic movement that was echoed in his purity of line, the geometric shapes and graphic silhouettes that he fabricated from body-conscious jersey, vinyl, Perspex, and a fabric called "Cardine" that he invented to mould into 3D patterns. “I was on the moon in this period," reflects Cardin, who also dressed the Beatles in their definitive collarless suits. The collarless Nehru jackets they wore for their famous Shea Stadium performance of 1965, a blend of minimalism and modernism, would influence countless television programmes and films; everyone from Blofeld in the James Bond films through to Ed Straker in Gerry Anderson’s UFO. The Nehru style can be predominantly seen in the costume designs for The Power Of The Daleks, The Enemy Of The World and for the War Lord and War Chief of The War Games. The ‘spy vibe’ would continue well into Doctor Who’s run in the 1970s, with the crowning glory of the Nehru suited Roger Delgado, oozing Bond villainy as The Master.
Courrèges graduated in engineering before studying fashion and textile design. In 1961 he established his own fashion house and began to develop a different look. His Spring collection of 1964 showed radically different clothes. These designs included angular mini dresses and trouser suits using heavyweight fabrics like gabardine. Many of the outfits had cut-out midriffs and backs and were worn without a bra. These were matched with flat boots, goggles and helmets suggested by the equipment worn by astronauts. The stark shapes and white and silver colour scheme immediately earned the collection the name ‘Space Age’. Courrèges influence on Doctor Who could probably be traced back to the costumes for Maaga and her Draahvins in Galaxy Four that embrace the futuristic and military look. Many of the costumes we see in The Power Of the Daleks (the utility suits and goggles), The Macra Terror (an exaggerated militarism using PVC and goggles), and through to The Seeds Death (the Earth based security forces encompass Perspex helmets, PVC and vacuum cleaner attachments) are all influenced by Courrèges’ minimalist futurism.
Paco Rabanne was a trained architect turned fashion designer. His architectural background led him to use disks cut from metal or plastic, linked with wire and other interesting techniques when he created his fashions. In his hi-tech 1960s period he produced metal, vinyl and plastic link dresses. These fashion experiments were important in pushing the boundaries of acceptable clothing to wear on the street. In 1966 Rabanne created his version of the moon-girl look in Perspex and metal and also plastic and acrylic. Rabanne is best remembered for his 1969 gold metal sculptured dress that inspired outfits for the film Barbarella. His influence, and that of Barbarella, can be seen in the costumes for The Space Pirates, for example, where the future gains a certain exoticism and a kitsch quality with oversized insignia and metallic trims on suits.

Dedicated follower of fashion
But when did Doctor Who really go Mod? Although there were definitely some very Mod touches with Dodo Chaplet’s costumes in The Celestial Toymaker, featuring bold Cardin ‘Cosmos’ like symmetric shapes, things really began to stir with the arrival of Anneke Wills in 1966, who played Polly sporting some fantastic costumes by Finnish designers Marimekko. Her debut in The War Machines brought the series into an age where designers imagined a utopian future and the rapid pace of science altered the relationship between the body and technology and a series of visual proposals emerged that suggested not only how we would dress in the future but also how costume and set design would reflect the concerns of the age: pollution, security, nuclear conflict, fall-out, communication and surveillance.
On Doctor Who, it is the work of costume designer Martin Baugh that should be singled out here. Baugh was responsible for some of the series’ major design statements in The Wheel In Space, The Ice Warriors and The Enemy of the World. In The Ice Warriors, his psychedelic costume designs for the scientists of Britannicus Base were based on the patterns of printed circuits. The idea came from his belief that in the future there might be machines that can automatically spray clothes onto a person. This immediately brings his costume designs into the realm of fashion futurologists such as Cardin, Rabanne and Courrèges, all trained either as engineers or architects, and their use of new materials like vinyl and PVC, geometrical forms and mathematical precision, and sculptural qualities and motifs such as circles, targets, lightning bolts.

Like Cardin, Baugh designed costumes to suggest a uniform, where a small group formed some kind of futuristic army or technical crew. His later designs for The Enemy Of The World and The Wheel In Space take the popular jumpsuit look, immortalised in the 1960s by the John Bates designs for Diana Rigg in The Avengers, and using synthetics to produce a highly utilitarian look whilst also exaggerating the silhouette and providing much freedom of movement. This figure-hugging suit was also passed on to the character of Zoe Herriot, equally infamous for her tight fitting sparkly cat suit as worn in The Mind Robber. Baugh was also clearly capitalising on the ‘spy vibe’ of the late 1960s, films like Modesty Blaise, Barbarella and especially the exceptional work of costume designer Giulio Coltellacci in the Italian science fiction film The 10^th Victim.

Within the same period as Courreges' Moon Girl collection (1964), Coltellacci made great use of fun elements like geometric cut-outs, two-tone and striped motifs, and PVC boots and helmet/visors. Coltellacci’s influence can clearly be seen in Mary Peach’s wonderful leather outfits in The Enemy Of The World as well as the PVC black and white geometric one piece and helmet designs for the guards’ outfits. The black and white styling also informed the cat suits and padded jackets of the command crew in The Wheel In Space. Tanya Lernov, played by Clare Jenkins, was certainly a combination of Ursula Andress and Diana Rigg in her figure hugging design that was part space suit, part leisure wear.

Other contributions from designers Nicholas Bullen on The Krotons and The War Games and by Sylvia James on The Seeds Of Death saw out the influence of futuristic fashions in the series. Increasingly, the space age dream was being replaced by references to hippie and protest culture. Bullen’s work on The War Games is outstanding as it embraces historical periods as well as the ultra-futuristic wear of the War Lords and the War Chief. It could be best summed up as a greatest hits of 1960s fashion. James’ designs for the operators of T- Mat radically avoids figure-hugging sexiness and the costumes are actually rather unflattering, particularly for the male characters, even though they do use modern materials like vinyl and PVC. The major drawback for the designers of Doctor Who in the late 1960s was that all of their work was being transmitted in black and white and there is a frustrating sense that the Troughton stories aren’t quite in the groove because they don’t embrace the explosion of colour that epitomised so much of 1960s design.

Designing Who 2 (c) 2009 Frank Collins. If you wish to quote from this article please ask the author's permission. Hey, why don't you commission me to write some more!

> Part 3: Pop Art Sets And Star Gates
< Part 1: Cyber Suits You, Sir!

Once again it is my pleasure to present a recently published article from the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's magazine Celestial Toyroom. Just published in the Christmas issue 380/381(with a splendid Target books homage by cover artist Lee Carey), this is a companion piece to the earlier essay on design in the Classic Series, which you can find here, that covered the work of Peter Brachacki and Ray Cusick.

As Doctor Who cemented its popularity and continued into the late 1960s, it wasn’t just the leading man that underwent a bit of a change. As William Hartnell became Patrick Troughton, the series also emerged from a post-war European aesthetic where Daleks, spaceships and stiff upper lips all reflected Britain’s desire to at least be seen as a player on the political world stage whilst subtly exorcising its various, collective demons of the Second World War. To an extent, the early years of the series, in terms of its design at least, were still trying to shrug off the austerity of the 1950s and reach back to a pre-war European design intellectualism.


Design, especially fashion, architecture and industrial design, embraced the twin concerns of 1960s society – looking optimistically forward into the future, egged on by NASA’s progress in landing a man on the moon, with a quiet agonising about the Cold War and hope for protection against the spectre of nuclear war. The imagery of the Cybermen and the couture of the times reflected the fear of nuclear war in the gas-mask like aesthetics of helmets and futuristic plastic survival suits as well as Pedler’s notion that advanced humans would replace their entire bodies with plastics and metal. Early US space suits, another major influence on the look of the Cybermen, were adapted from pressure suits designed for pilots of high altitude military and experimental aircraft. The first designs for use in space were the American A7L and Soviet Krechet suits. These were designed for walking on the moon during the space race of the 1960's and provided the basis for those used aboard space station and shuttle missions.

There is also the development of the humble wet suit to consider too. In the early 1960s, the British Dunlop Sports Company brought out its yellow Aquaforte neoprene wetsuit, whose high visibility was designed to improve diver safety. Now the foam rubber was sandwiched between two protective fabric outer layers, greatly increasing the tear-resistance of the material. An external layer also meant that decorative colours, logos, and patterns could be made with panels and strips sewn into various shapes. The development of the space suit and the wet suit from the 1960s to the 1980s resembled the Cybermen design similarly evolving from the jersey and vinyl outfits of The Tenth Planet, the looser silver boiler suit of The Moonbase through to the silver wetsuits of The Invasion and The Wheel In Space, all augmented by furniture coverings, vacuum cleaner tubing and practice golf balls to complete the iconic look. By the 1980s, the men from Mondas (or Telos, take your pick) were also getting serious with modified flight suits.

> Part 2:  Mods On The Moon