Doctor Who Magazine – Issue 574 – March 2022
English | 87 pages | pdf | 35.11 MB
Welcome at Doctor Who Magazine Issue 574 March 2022
Some people find it easier to suspend their disbelief than others. Doctor Who Magazine has, of course, traditionally appealed to viewers with more vivid imaginations. In 1963, if you were the type that dismissed the idea of a time-travelling police box as “a bit far-fetched”, the chances are you wouldn’t have got much past the series’ first episode.
We’ve all met them. As a child it used to annoy me when know-it-all classmates (and even some grown-ups) would point out the occasions when you could see the strings in my beloved Thunderbirds, entirely overlooking the stunning special effects that were the real highlights of those shows. Black-and-white Doctor Who couldn’t call on the same resources enjoyed by Supermarionation producer Gerry Anderson. In The Romans (1965), which is the subject of this issue’s Fact of Fiction, director Christopher Barry had to evoke Nero’s inferno with a montage of distant lights, smoke effects and stock footage. Soon afterwards, director Michael Ferguson – to whom we pay tribute on page 26 – relied on editing sleight-of-hand to create the
impression that London was under threat from an army of robots, when in fact he only had one hero prop to call upon in
The War Machines (1966). I doubt that Barry and Ferguson could have imagined a future where visual effects designers like Ben Pickles – interviewed on page 32 – could create swarms of flying Daleks using the power of computer-generated imagery.
We’ll never know how Russell T Davies’ Mind of the Hodiac would have looked had it joined the Sixth Doctor’s canon of television stories. In the last issue, we discussed how productions such as Revelation of the Daleks (1985) and The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) were enhanced by some of the earliest digital matte technology, but now that Hodiac has finally been produced – more than 35 years after it was written – the special effects are being provided by Big Finish’s sound design and the listeners’ imaginations. With television Doctor Who reaching new heights of technical sophistication and Big Finish offering an opportunity to experience Russell’s very fi rst script for the series, we really are getting the best of past and present worlds.
Our preview of Mind of the Hodiac brings Colin Baker back to the cover of Doctor Who Magazine for the first time in far too many years. Next month, we’ll be making a deeper exploration of the series’ mid-1980s history with an intriguing look at what else could have been for Colin’s Doctor, and his predecessor Peter Davison. Issue 575 is on sale from 3 March.
Until then, take care.
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