Jon Pertwee

Patrick Troughton was my first Doctor, but if I am totally honest, I can only remember watching a very few of his last season stories first time round, and I was very young at the time. I grew up with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, though. I have memories of practically every Jon Pertwee story, some hazy, but some particularly clear, and so this is surely going to have an effect on the way that I view them.

What do I expect, then? Well, for one thing, no more recons! Every story from now on exists in the archives in one form or another. For another thing – colour! “Spearhead from Space” wasn’t just Jon Pertwee’s first story, it was also the first to be filmed and broadcast in colour. That’s a point too. We never had a colour TV until, I would say, Tom Baker’s second or third season, so unless it was round a mate’s house I never originally saw these Pertwee stories in colour. I have since noticed though that in these early colour stories it seemed as if they had been told to thrown the kitchen sink at it and make the most of colour, since colour schemes tended to be exceptionally bright and garish, and often you’d get a sort of fringing around some of the brightest, like, if I remember correctly, bright green things would sometimes have a red halo around them. Which also reminds me that the arrival of colour ushered in the era of CSO – Colour Separation Overlay, also known as Chromakey. This opened a new era of Special Effects possibilities for the show, although without doubt it came to be overused, and had its limitations as well.

As we saw at the end of The War Games that the Doctor was exiled to Earth by the Time Lords. This was supposedly an economically driven decision, since it was argued that stories set on contemporary Earth would surely represent a cheaper way of making the show. That’s a point which has been contested since, I think, but nevertheless, the success of Troughton stories set on contemporary Earth, like “The Web of Fear” encouraged the production team to go ahead with this radical redrawing of the show’s parameters. What it did do was increase the number of regular characters, with UNIT’s Brigadier, Sergeant Benton, and from the 8^th series onwards, Captain Yates.

I’m at risk of writing my Pertwee retrospective here before actually viewing the stories, so I’ll end with this observation. I didn’t really have any great expectations of the Hartnell era, because I had never watched those stories as a kid. Coming to the Troughton era, I really enjoyed some of the stories, but was disappointed by more than I would have thought. I just hope that I’m not going to have my illusions about the Pertwee era shattered as a whole.

Now, as I said, I have actually seen every Pertwee story, so I can’t just pretend that I’m going in blind as I did to a large extent with both previous Doctors. So, before I watch any of the stories again I’m going to set down the way that I would rank the stories now. This is doubtless going to throw up some anomalies. There are stories which I have only very hazy memories of at best, and so these are probably going to be ranked a hell of a lot lower than they probably deserve – “Inferno” from season 7 being an obvious example. But at least this will provide us with a comparison point, when we rank all the stories after I’ve watched them again.

For reference, after each story there will be a guide to how well I remember it: -

VC= Very Clearly – probably watched within the last couple of years

C = Clearly – has probably been watched more than once in the last ten years

NC – Not Crystal – may not have been watched for a long time, but plot details are remembered, maybe through reading the Target Novelisation

H – Hazy – probably never watched since first time around

VH – Very Hazy

Pre-Watching Jon Pertwee story ranking

Spearhead from Space – VC

Carnival of Monsters - VC

The Day of the Daleks - VC

Terror of the Autons – VC

The Time Warrior - VC

The Daemons – C

The Three Doctors – VC

Frontier in Space - NC

The Sea Devils – C

Planet of the Daleks – VC

Death to the Daleks - VC

The Mind of Evil – C

The Time Monster - NC

The Curse of Peladon – NC

The Green Death - NC

The Claws of Axos – NC

Invasion of the Dinosaurs – VC

The Monster of Peladon - VC

The Mutants - NC

The Colony in Space – NC

The Silurians - NC

Inferno – VH

The Ambassadors of Death – VH

Planet of the Spiders - VC