500 Year Diary: A Doctor Who Podcast

Saturday 1 September 1979

Destiny of the Daleks

It’s the last episode of our fifth season, which means that it’s time to say goodbye to Terry Nation, as the production team turns his final script for the programme into an achingly contemporary Disco Remix of the Dalek–Thal conflict which could only have happened in the last few moments of the 1970s.

Notes and links

500 Year Diary listener Jonathan (Jack) W. Kirk has created a brilliantly funny music video for Peter and Simon’s We Love Terry Nation song. Watch it immediately.

Rock Paper Scissors, or Scissors Paper Rock, or Scissors Paper Stone, or (exotically) Roshambo, is first attested in China in the seventeenth century, before spreading to Japan; it reached the West in the early twentieth century.

Peter interviewed Destiny of the Daleks director Ken Grieve in Doctor Who Magazine Issue 270, published in September 1998.

The Doctor Who Magazine Special Legends — Terry Nation was published in November 2025 and is still available in digital format from the magazine’s website.

Nathan praises Logopolis for a change in an episode of Luke Sims-Jenkins’s Fifth Doctor podcast The Maran Chess Club.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Destiny of the Daleks in Episode 62: Circuit Boards Glued to a Piece of Wood, released on Sunday 17 January 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll warn you earnestly about the rain outside but absolutely refuse to give you an umbrella.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page.

Our extra-curricular podcast hiatus continues this week, but if you have fond memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation you might want to check out the Untitled Star Trek Project Star Trek: The Next Generation commentaries. If you want to hear Joe and Nathan at our most enthusiastic, we can recommend our episodes on Darmok and Who Watches the Watchers, or if you want to hear us hitting ourselves with Klingon pain sticks, you should listen to our episodes on Sub Rosa and Justice.

Saturday 22 November 1975

The Android Invasion

In a sleepy English village on a distant planet, a small group of robots and pachyderms are preparing to invade the Earth, but in a fun and memorable Terry Nation kind of way.

Notes and links

Nathan quickly mentions El Sandifer’s take on this story, suggesting that Letts and Nation were a safe pair of hands, and that this allowed Hinchcliffe and Holmes to focus on the other stories of this season.

Brendan quotes a line from the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of?. As Captain Kirk is being scanned as a template for an android replica, he mutters an uncharacteristically racist line to himself (“Mind your own business, Mr. Spock, I’m sick of your half-breed interference.”), a line that the android replica repeats later, alerting Spock to the fact that he is not the real Kirk.

The Android Invasion was shot in the village of East Hagbourne, south of Oxford, near Didcot. Like Devesham, this story’s fictional village, it has a 17th-century pub called the Fleur de Lys. It turns out that The Avengers never used it as a location, but Steven mentions similar villages in the episodes The Town of No Return (set in Little Bazeley-by-the-Sea) and Murdersville (set in Little Storping-in-the-Swuff). He also mentions Metro-land, a name given to suburban areas built northwest of London in the early 20th century, which were frequently used as locations for The Avengers.

Max Faulkner plays the UNIT soldier who goes off a cliff at the start of Part 1, only to turn up at the pub later in the episode. He also plays a UNIT soldier in The Ambassadors of Death, where he is killed in Part 4, only to appear again (accidentally) at the end of Part 6.

The Stepford Wives was a 1975 thriller set in the town of Stepford, Connecticut, whose female residents are being replaced by subservient robot replicas. The movie poster depicted parts of a disassembled robot wife, including her head.

Steven mentions a number of locations with strange histories that are relevant to this story. Firstly, the towns of Imber in Wiltshire and Tyneham in Dorset, which were evacuated in 1943 to be used by the British Army to train soldiers for the D-Day invasion. Secondly, Survival Town and Doom Town in Nevada, fake towns populated by mannequins, used to assess the likely effects of a nuclear explosion on a populated area. And finally, Inverlair Lodge, used to house foreign intelligence agents during World War II.

According to friend-of-the-podcast Johnny Spandrell, Gary Gillatt is the original source of the phrase squabbling rubber, used to describe scenes in Doctor Who where rubber-headed aliens argue with one another. (According to Peter, Gary credits his mother with inventing the phrase.)

And here on Lance Parkin’s blog, a comprehensive list of every Star Trek story.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Android Invasion in Episode 40: Just Full of Nazis, released on Sunday 16 August 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Steven is @steedstylin.bsky.social, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll continue to offer you ginger pop despite your clear and repeatedly stated preferences.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page.

We’ve got no new episodes to announce right now, for the first time ever, but if you love original Star Trek you might want to check out the Untitled Star Trek Project Star Trek: The Original Series commentaries. If you want to hear Joe and Nathan gushing about vintage television, we can recommend our episodes on The Doomsday Machine and Spectre of the Gun, or if you want to hear us screaming into the void, you should listen to our episodes on The Empath and The Savage Curtain.

Saturday 8 March 1975

Genesis of the Daleks

This week, Nathan, Peter, Simon and Corey are sent back in time on a mission to prevent Doctor Who fandom from concluding that the brilliance of Genesis of the Daleks is somehow not the result of the brilliance of Terry Nation.

Notes and links

Genesis of the Daleks was released on audio in October 1979 as an LP, a vinyl disc holding as much as 60 minutes of audio; the LP was the format that replaced old 78 RPM shellac discs sometime in the 1950s. It was also released as an audio cassette, a more compact and tractable format which became popular in the 1970s. In 1988, it was re-released as part of the BBC Radio Collection, in a two-cassette box which also included Eric Saward’s 1985 radio story Slipback, featuring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant. In 2001, BBC Radio Collection released it on CD, this time accompanied by a different radio story, Exploration Earth (1976), featuring Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. This CD version is still available from Audible UK, Audible US and Audible Australia as a digital audiobook.

Before it was a dystopian Twitter clone, Threads was a dystopian 1984 TV movie depicting the effects of a nuclear holocaust in the English city of Sheffield, described by film scholar Toni A. Perrine as the film “which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture”.

It’s hard to find online accounts of people reacting badly to the way Genesis of the Daleks disrupts established Dalek continuity (such as it was). But the locus classicus of being wrong about this sort of thing is a 1976 review of The Deadly Assassin by Jan Vincent-Rudzki, then president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society; the review is now commonly known as What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who? You can find a copy of it here.

The first edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke (and Terrance Dicks) was published in 1972, and was the first non-fiction book about the show. It included brief summaries of all of the Doctor’s adventures to the end of The Sea Devils. You probably have a PDF copy of it on your DVD copy of The Sea Devils.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Genesis of the Daleks in Episode 35: Bring Back the Drahvins, released on Sunday 12 July 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social; Corey is on Instagram at @mcmahoncorey. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll use the tiny pressure of our thumbs, just enough to break the glass, to completely ruin your day.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, the lads from The Three Handed Game released the second episode of the triptych Back to the Bassinet. It’s Mr. Teddy Bear, in which Cathy Gale tries to set a trap for a notorious assassin, using Steed as bait.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford decided to shake things up a bit by watching a really good episode of Deep Space Nine for a change — a high-concept but mostly technobabble-free episode called Children of Time.

Saturday 23 February 1974

Death to the Daleks

It’s Doctor Who at its most typical this week, as a stranded space expedition is sufficiently beset by natives and Daleks to fill four episodes with daring sacrifices and human escapes until the generically mandatory explosion comes along to set everything to rights.

Notes and links

Nathan’s first encounter with Doctor Who was when his friend Luke showed him The Second Doctor Who Monster Book (1977) sometime in the first half of 1978. It covered the stories from Tom Baker’s first three years, nearly all of which Nathan would have been able to see on repeat on ABC-TV before the end of the year.

While discussing Meglos on Flight Through Entirety, Nathan proclaims a ban on all future Doctor Who scenes involving the imminent sacrifice of the Doctor or a companion. That’s in Episode 69: By the Power of Bad Acting, starting at 18 minutes 37 seconds.

H Rider Haggard was a nineteenth-century British writer of adventure fiction, often set in Africa. His most famous book was King Solomon’s Mines (1885). If not a direct influence on Nation, this book is certainly the start of the lost civilisation subgenre whose tropes abound in Nation’s scripts, particularly this one.

Just over a year after this story aired, the first episode of Terry Nation’s series Survivors was broadcast on BBC 1. Its lead character was played by Carolyn Seymour, who you might remember as an evil leaper in Quantum Leap and in her three appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation — Contagion, First Contact and Face of the Enemy.

Arnold Yarrow, who played Bellal in this story, died in 2024 at the age of 104. He became the oldest living actor to appear in Doctor Who when Earl Cameron, from The Tenth Planet, died in 2020 at the age of 102.

Death to the Daleks got a special VHS release in the UK in 1987. The story wasn’t generally available on video until 1995.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Death to the Daleks in Episode 29: Sand in Your Parrinium, released on Tuesday 19 May 2015. And we returned to the planet Exxilon for a commentary episode in Episode 115: The London Commentary Quartet, released on Sunday 18 June 2017.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll pretend we didn’t hear you when you tell us to stop making low-level threats in each episode’s show notes.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Over on The Three Handed Game, the second episode of the triptych Back to the Bassinet has just dropped. It’s Mr. Teddy Bear, in which Cathy Gale tries to set a trap for a notorious assassin, using Steed as bait.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched an impressively unambitious episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, unimaginatively called Cold Front.

Saturday 7 April 1973

Planet of the Daleks

This week, Jeremy Radick joins us for a desperate mission to a low-effort jungle planet somewhere in the northern reaches of Shepherd’s Bush, as Terry Nation tries to reclaim the glory days when Dalek stories took place on a more modest scale — full of incident and thrilling action sequences, but shot in a studio that had once hosted episodes of Morecambe and Wise.

Notes and links

Simon mentions two images from this story that contributed to our disappointment when we first saw it in the 1980s. They were Chris Achilleos’s action-packed front cover of the novelisation, and a publicity shot taken on the set representing the cavern where the Dalek army was kept in stasis. You can see them both here.

We speculate that cassette tapes might have been a thrilling modern innovation back in 1973, and we were very nearly right. According to the Wikipedia article, they were first invented in 1963, but really only became usable for music in about 1971. So it’s possible most members of the audience had never used one.

Last season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did its one and only Holodeck Goes Wrong episode, A Space Adventure Hour, which gives us the chance to see what a Holodeck Goes Wrong episode looks like in the twenty-first century and also takes an affectionate look at the production history of the Original Series. Oh, and they let Jess Bush use her Australian accent, which is pretty great.

The TARDIS wiki article claims that Terry Nation didn’t know that Doctor Who no longer used individual episode titles, and so he included episode titles in his scripts. James will be disappointed to learn that Episode 1 wasn’t called The Coma: in fact, the episodes were called Destinus (the planet’s name before it was called Spiridon), Mission Survival, Pursued, Escape or Die, The Day Before Eternity, and Victory.

The Dalek army was realised by using dozens of the popular Louis Marx toy Daleks and plaster casts of the toys that could be destroyed in the climactic special effects scene.

VidFIRE is a process that restores a film telerecording — originally shot at 25 frames a second — to the 50 interlaced fields per second of the original videotape recording. It was invented by a member of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, and first used on the VHS release of Planet of Giants.

The colourisation of Part 3 of Planet of the Daleks was made possible because the telerecording process accidentally included artifacts called chroma dots, which were interference patterns caused by the colour encoded video signal. Here’s a 2008 article from The Guardian that explains the process.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Planet of the Daleks in Episode 28: You’re Not Katharine Hepburn, released on Saturday 25 April 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or you won’t believe the length of the sermon we’ll inflict on you on the subject of Personal Continence.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched one of Star Trek’s more embarrassing episodes — an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Outrageous Okona.

Saturday 13 November 1965

The Daleks' Master Plan

This week, we rashly decide to steal the Daleks’ favourite thing and run away, only to find ourselves pursued through time and space for three months, during which time we visit Z Cars, the cricket, a volcano planet or something, and some of BBC Television Centre’s most lavish jungle sets. Toby Hadoke joins us to help us thwart The Daleks’ Master Plan.

Notes and links

On 13 March 2026, it was announced that two missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found by an organisation called Film is Fabulous! among a film collector’s “ramshackle” collection. These were Episode 1, The Nightmare Begins and Episode 3, Devil’s Planet. They were released on iPlayer at Easter.

If you’re a fan of a certain age, you will probably remember the 1983 publication of Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space, which was our first exposure to fan opinion about rare or missing Doctor Who stories. So here’s the first critical response to The Daleks’ Master Plan that most of us encountered: “Quite simply the longest Doctor Who story ever recorded and also one of the best, although it is doubtful if director Douglas Camfield thought so at the time with the tremendous script and production problems doing the story of this length engendered.”

Peter Black was the Daily Mail’s TV critic for more than 20 years, from 1952 to 1997. On Monday 15 February 1965, the Mail published his review of The Web Planet, which included this assessment of the regular characters: “The heroes are the dullest quartet in fiction… the attraction is the ancient one of watching people who are dafter than yourself.”

Toby mentions his earlier take on this story, expressed in Running Through Corridors, Volume 1 (2010), a book consisting of a daily email correspondence between Toby and Rob Shearman as they commit to watching Doctor Who through in order, one episode at a time. It’s a charming book, with something positive to say about even the most obscure or unloved episodes.

Fans of discussions of missing Doctor Who episodes will also enjoy the work of Gavin Rymill (@themindrobber on X), who uses visual reference material, soundtracks and AI to recreate scenes from the missing episodes, as well as Tim’s Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes Podcast, where he talks about the phenomenon of missing episodes and reviews the episodes themselves.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Daleks’ Master Plan in Episode 7: How Would You Address a God?, released on Sunday 31 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Toby is @tobyhadoke.bsky.social, and Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll tell you an interminable shaggy dog story about the airline losing our luggage at Cairo airport while you’re trying to watch the Blakes 7 episode Star One.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, on Startling Barbara Bain, we started our coverage of the justly maligned second season of Space: 1999 by watching its opening episode The Metamorph, featuring the return of Brian Blessed and Catherine Schell to the series, the departure of Victor, Paul and David, that lovely Main Mission set, and the slightest sense that this was more than just a preposterous and dumb space opera. Only 23 episodes left to go!

After their triumphant 200th episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford took this week off. Which gives you the chance to listen to some of our hot takes on episodes of Strange New Worlds before the season finale this coming Thursday.

Saturday 9 October 1965

Mission to the Unknown

In an isolated episode on a distant, inhospitable planet, the Daleks are fomenting an intergalactic conspiracy to overthrow the Solar System. And for arcane budgetary reasons, the Doctor isn’t there to stop them.

Notes and links

On 9 October 2019, exactly 54 years after the first broadcast of Mission to the Unknown, a recreation of the episode was released on YouTube. It had been created by staff, graduates and students of the University of Central Lancashire, using Derek Martinus’s original camera script as well as extant photographic reference material and the surviving soundtrack.

To accompany the recreation, the BBC also released a documentary create by friend-of-the-podcast Josh Snares, including behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with the cast and crew of the recreation, and interviews with Peter Purves (Steven) and Edward de Souza (the original Marc Cory).

The dark concertina-head delegate with scary white triangular eyes is called Sentreal, and he reminds Adam of McDuff, the blue-headed concertina character from the upsettingly named Australian children’s television programme from the 1990s called Johnson and Friends. You can watch the entire run of the series on YouTube. So off you go.

Nathan mentions that his first encounter with The Daleks’ Master Plan was the MP3-CD release from 2001, which he listened to on his beloved and compellingly cheap iPod shuffle (first generation), an adorable and completely impractical flash-memory-based iPod released in 2005, available in 512 MB and 1 GB variations.

Fans of Melvin’s appearances on 500 Year Diary will also enjoy his recent appearance on the Trap One podcast, discussing the recent vinyl LP release of The Rescue.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Mission to the Unknown in Episode 6: Nipples, Dear Listener, released on Tuesday 12 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invite you to a weeks-long conference where we don’t provide any snacks.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

As always, Adam Richard Has a Theory on his daily Doctor Who podcast of the same name. Right now, he’s talking about Colony in Space, but recent topics include cosplay, the Disney Plus era of Doctor Who and an imagined version of the lost 2026 Doctor Who Christmas Special starring Billie Piper.

Just yesterday, on Startling Barbara Bain, we started our coverage of the justly maligned second season of Space: 1999 by watching its opening episode The Metamorph, featuring the return of Brian Blessed and Catherine Schell to the series, the departure of Victor, Paul and David, that lovely Main Mission set, and the slightest sense that this was more than just a preposterous and dumb space opera. Only 23 episodes left to go!

A new triptych has just started on The Three Handed Game called Back to the Bassinet. Episode 1 is Something Nasty in the Nursery — Brendan, Steven and Richard are reunited with a bunch of sitcom actors from their childhoods (or from Richard’s childhood, at least), while Steed and Mrs Peel investigate some leaky civil servants.

On the 200th episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched an episode in the acclaimed final season of Star Trek: Picard called Imposters, featuring a reunion between Picard, Riker and former Maquis defector Ro Laren.

Saturday 22 May 1965

The Chase

This week, Adam Richard and Kevin Burnard join us for a picaresque and shoddily made romp through time and space, with Daleks, followed by a devastating emotional farewell.

Notes and links

The Chase got its first home video release in 1993 in the form of a limited edition two-tape VHS box set which also contained fan-favourite Remembrance of the Daleks. So there was no avoiding it really.

Way back in 2018 (for God’s sake), a massive marathon of Classic Doctor Who episodes was broadcast on Twitch, and the reaction to these ancient televisual artefacts was heartwarmingly positive, and included the meme-ification of Ian’s line from Part Six — “London, 1965!”

Nathan discussed The Chase on an episode of the All of Time and Space podcast called Scooby Who, which was released in June 2021.

Here’s Elizabeth Sandifer’s not-entirely-serious redemptive reading of The Chase, which culminates with an earnest appreciation of the show’s beautiful final scene.

This article on the TARDIS wiki enumerates the further adventures of the Mary Celeste in Doctor Who, including Nardole’s account of the digestion of the entire crew by an Enzomodon ambassador, in The Eaters of Light.

The introduction of time-travelling Daleks inevitably reminds Nathan of Carolyn Seymour’s turn as an evil leaper in Quantum Leap. By the most amazing coincidence, Seymour had played the lead in Season 1 of Terry Nation’s post-pandemic series Survivors in 1975.

A somewhat more modern take on the conflict between the Daleks and the Mechanoids can be found in Daleks! (2020), a five-part animated series written by James Goss and released as part of whatever Time Lord Victorious was. It featured Anjli Mohindra as the Mechanoid Queen.

Some faint praise, perhaps, for Benjamin Cook’s pop-art version of The Daleks, called The Daleks in Colour, which was released in 2023 as part of Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary celebrations.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Chase in Episode 5: She’s Madame Mao, released on Sunday 3 August 2014.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, Kevin is @scribblesscript.bsky.social, and James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll drive a bunch of Mini-Minors into your house and clutter up your living room.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

A new triptych has just started on The Three Handed Game called Back to the Bassinet. Episode 1 is Something Nasty in the Nursery — Brendan, Steven and Richard are reunited with a bunch of sitcom actors from their childhoods (or from Richard’s childhood, at least), while Steed and Mrs Peel investigate some leaky civil servants.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched Captain Sisko take on the Maquis’s most determined musical theatre gay, Michael Eddington, in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called For the Uniform.

Saturday 21 November 1964

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

This week, it’s our annual trip to post-apocalyptic 22nd-century London to see how David, Tyler and Jenny are getting on. Turns out, probably better than we let on last time.

Notes and links

Josh Snares is a Doctor Who documentarian and YouTuber who has actually guested on an episode of Flight Through Entirety. James mentions his version of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which is now apparently no longer available. To make up for this, here is a link to an adorable video where Josh gets to operate a Dalek based on the black Dalek from The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

You and Who was a series of Doctor Who essay anthologies edited by friend-of-the-podcast J R Southall and published between 2012 and 2019. Brendan was one of the contributors.

Andrew Hodson’s Contract Roulette is our way of referring to the fact that sometimes the Doctor just dumps his companion on whatever planet he’s on when the actor’s contract ends. See, for example, Steven, Vicki, Leela and Mel. Its first mention appears to have been in Flight Through Entirety Episode 109: Dark Colours.

James’s speculations about the Doctor and Susan’s relationship are interrupted by Richard accusing him of “lungbarrowing it”. Marc Platt’s Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow (1997) provides an unsuspecting fandom with a definitive answer, apparently, to a question that no one really cared about. According to the TARDIS wiki, it’s established elsewhere that Susan’s real name is either Larn or Arkytior. For Christ’s sake.

Brendan mentions producer Verity Lambert’s correspondence with Donald Baverstock, who was the Controller of Programmes for BBC1 in 1963, when Doctor Who was being created and during its first two years. He resigned from the BBC in 1965 rather than moving over to BBC2.

Terry Nation goes on to create a show set in a post-apocalyptic England after billions of people die of a plague. It’s called Survivors, and it runs for three seasons from 1975 to 1977. It’s clearly inspired by John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. In Series 1, Episode 9, Law and Order, not written by Nation, a disabled man is falsely accused of murder and is executed; when the real killer confesses, they decide not to execute him because he is an essential member of the community. (Sandifer summarises the episode in this essay on Survivors.)

Kenton Moore played the Roboman who drowns himself in the Thames at the beginning of Part 1. He will go on to play Noah in The Ark in Space (1975). He died in May 2025 at the age of 93.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Dalek Invasion of Earth in Episode 3: Bernard Cribbins in Vinyl, released on Sunday 20 July 2014. We discussed it again last year as part of 500 Year Diary Season 2: The Second Coming, in which we discussed the second stories of Doctor Who’s most important monsters and villains. That was Season 2, Episode 1: Daleks Daleks, released on Sunday 27 April 2025.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll cover this story again this time next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Don’t think we won’t.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we gave Barbara a week off and watched The Day After Tomorrow, a one-off educational drama produced by Gerry Anderson between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999. Were we entertained? No. Were we disappointed in any way? Also no.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford said goodbye to Wesley Crusher (for now) in an underwhelming episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Final Mission.

Saturday 11 April 1964

The Keys of Marinus

Terry Nation has left the Daleks at home this week, but he’s still bristling with so many ideas that the TARDIS crew rush through no less than five mini-stories in six weeks, proving that while the sea-bathing on the planet Marinus is basically lethal, there’s still a lot there to keep the tourists occupied.

Notes and links

Nathan refers to the entry on The Keys of Marinus in About Time, a nine-volume series of reference books on the making and reception of Doctor Who through all of the Classic Series and the first five years of the New Series.

Peter mentions a number of story and script ideas that were floating around in the early days of Doctor Who’s production, including The Red Fort by Terry Nation, which was to be set in India during the British Raj but then abandoned in favour of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Masters of Luxor (AKA The Robots) by An Unearthly Child scriptwriter Anthony Coburn, and The Hidden Planet (AKA Beyond the Sun) by Malcolm Hulke, which would have featured a twin planet to Earth which was dominated by women, inevitably.

Simon likens the storytelling in The Keys of Marinus to the books in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, fantasy gamebooks that allowed you to affect the outcome of the story by choosing actions that send you off to different pages of the books. These are still being made, but their heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were among the most popular children’s book series in the world, selling 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998.

Peter asked me to tell you that he made a mistake about this story’s director John Gorrie. He didn’t also direct an episode of Marco Polo (that was John Crockett), but may have directed an episode of The Reign of Terror when its director fell ill.

Fans of podcasts about Terry Nation’s television work will also enjoy Maximum Power, a podcast in which the hosts of Flight Through Entirety and the hosts of the Trap One podcast join forces to discuss Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7.

And here’s a 2015 obituary in The Guardian for Robin Phillips, who plays Altos in this story and who had a long career as an actor, a theatre director, and the artistic director of the Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Keys of Marinus in Episode 2: So Maudlin, released on Saturday 21 June 2014. We returned to Marinus to record a disgracefully inebriated commentary episode in Episode 91: The Velvet Commentary, released on Sunday 30 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll chase you around our ski lodge in a way that is not really acceptable in this more enlightened era.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we gave Barbara a week off and watched The Day After Tomorrow, a one-off educational drama produced by Gerry Anderson between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999. Were we entertained? No. Were we disappointed in any way? Also no.

In the most recent episode of The Three Handed Game, the Annette Andre experience concludes with an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards, in which Miss Andre’s Suzy Miller finds out that her husband is (1) a Cold War sleeper agent, and soon afterwards, (2) dead.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a strange experimental episode of Star Trek: Short Treks called Ephraim and Dot, a vivid, propulsive and charming love letter to the Original Series.

Saturday 21 December 1963

The Daleks

Doctor Who has barely even started when the writer of Episode Five shows up and decides to take the show in a whole different direction. That writer was Terry Nation, and that episode, or possibly the one after that, will change the world forever.

Notes and links

500 Year Diary has already discussed one Terry Nation story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, in Season 2, Episode 1: Daleks Daleks released on 27 April 2025. This episode was part of our season The Second Coming, which looked at how Doctor Who monsters are changed in all kinds of ways by the process of removing them from their original context and making them one of the show’s ongoing concerns.

In that episode of 500YD Season 2, Simon remembers watching an episode of Homicide when he was at university. This was a well-known Australian police procedural on the Seven Network, which ran from 1964 to 1977.

The first scene of Doctor Who shot on location appeared in Part 2 of The Reign of Terror, Guests of Madame Guillotine. In it, the Doctor walks along a country lane in long shot. He’s played by Brian Proudfoot, who also appeared as a different character in The Reign of Terror, as an Aridian in The Chase, as Tigellinus in The Romans, and as the Doctor again in The Space Museum. Edmund Warwick played Darrius in The Keys of Marinus, doubled for Hartnell in a scene from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and played his robot replica in The Chase.

Donald Wilson was the Head of Serials at the BBC when the show was being created. In 1971, he claimed to have come up with the name.

The Masters of Luxor was a Doctor Who script written by Anthony Coburn (who wrote An Unearthly Child), which never made it to production. Even though David Whitaker gave up on the script, some less discerning people saw fit to release it into an unsuspecting world in the form of both a script book and the inevitable Big Finish adaptation.

Here on 500 Year Diary, we like to suggest that in the last three episodes of The Daleks, our heroes are bravely heading into the Dalek City to fetch some more episodes. We get this from Kieran Hodgson’s video Bad Doctor Who Impressions: The Daleks.

Simon has been reading the biography of David Whitaker, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television (2023) by Simon Guerrier.

Peter and Nathan both recognise that The Daleks was very much inspired by both the book (1895) and the film (1960) of H G Wells, The Time Machine.

Flight Through Entirety discussed The Daleks in Episode 1: Horribly Blond(e), released on Sunday 15 June 2014.

And finally, Nathan recklessly spoils an important reveal from the Series 3 Finale of Blakes 7, Terminal, by Terry Nation.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll invite you round to dinner and then leap out at you from behind a pillar brandishing an egg whisk. When you least expect it.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

In the most recent episode of Startling Barbara Bain, we said goodbye to Victor, Paul, David, and that huge beautiful set, while watching the alarmingly mediocre final episode of Season 1 of Space: 1999 — The Last Enemy.

In the most recent episode of The Three Handed Game, the Annette Andre experience continues with an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards, in which Miss Andre’s Suzy Miller finds out that her husband is (1) a Cold War sleeper agent, and soon afterwards, (2) dead.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a brilliant episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks called Where Pleasant Fountains Lie, in which the Chief Engineer’s mother comes aboard the Cerritos, determined to make sure that her son loses his virginity, so that he will be forced to take his rightful place as King of the Planet Hysperia. Things don’t quite go according to plan.

Friday 10 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five

It’s the end of the week, and although some kids and a whole building full of public servants are dead, we all learn that even the ones who walk away from Omelas discover that the real Omelas was inside them all along.

Notes and links

We didn’t have a whole season of Doctor Who in 2009, because David Tennant took a year off to play Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008/2009. In fact, it was during the interval of one of the performances in October 2008 that David Tennant appeared remotely at the National Television Awards to announce his departure from the show.

In the 1998 French and Saunders Christmas Special, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders played overly enthusiastic extras on James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), who ended up being repeatedly duplicated in a panicky crowd scene. (They also played Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet respectively.) Here’s the trailer.

Adam’s ridiculous theory podcast is Adam Richard Has a Theory, available daily wherever you get your podcasts.

Fridge logic is a plot element in TV or film that doesn’t actually make sense, but you only realise that when you go to the fridge to get something afterwards. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term icebox scene to describe a scene that “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox”.

In 2009, there’s a general awareness of child abuse in care homes and in the church, and there are plenty of reports in the newspapers. However, Jimmy Savile’s history of abuse isn’t widely known until after his death in 2011 and an ITV documentary about his life in October 2012. A month before Children of Earth airs, the Plymouth child abuse ring was first reported to police. (Content warnings apply.)

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973) is a beautiful and harrowing short story by Ursula Le Guin about the discovery that our comfort and prosperity depend on the exploitation and immiseration of others. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds covers the same ground in its Season 1 episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach.

In 2025, one of the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story was Isabel J Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole, a satirical response to Le Guin’s story for the vastly more cynical world of 2024. (It did win the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for that year.)

We found Aimee Davies, who played Mica Davies in Children of Earth: she is now a Twitch streamer called Aimsey.

During the tag, Adam recommends two TV shows with actors from Children of Earth. Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo star as detectives in Apple TV’s Criminal Record. In ITV’s Gone, an alarmingly blonde Eve Myles investigates the disappearance of David Morrissey’s wife.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll only pretend to be sad when you head off into space on that cold fusion cruiser.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, its 30th anniversary celebration — Trials and Tribble-ations, in which the crew of the USS Defiant wangle their way into a beloved episode of original Star Trek from 1967.

Thursday 9 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four

Tonight, John Frobisher’s relationship with the 456 turns from sour to ugly, while Captain Jack Harkness’s day starts with humiliation and ends in death. In contrast, the British PM and his advisors are being uncharacteristically dynamic and productive, which doesn’t bode well for anyone really.

Notes and links

The Trolley Problem is a well-known series of thought experiments used to test our moral intuitions about consequentialism, devised by the English moral philosopher Philippa Foot. In it, most people say that if a runaway train is going to kill five unsuspecting people on the track, it’s okay to flip a switch and divert the train onto a track with only one person on it. However, people tend to be less enthusiastic about stopping the train by pushing a person in front of it, even though the outcome is the same. Sometimes people are invited to imagine if it would make any difference if they knew the person to be sacrificed — a variation on the scenario which will become important later.

The film Contagion (2011), directed by Steven Soderbergh, concerns a highly transmissible and deadly pandemic outbreak which kills 25 million people worldwide. In early 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was getting going, the film enjoyed a surge in popularity, going viral, according to this story in The Guardian from January 2020.

Bury Your Gays (also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome) is a trope in media — particularly television, although it predates television — denoting the tendency for gay characters in fiction to suffer tragic outcomes, including but not limited to death.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com and Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll interrupt your next important meeting with our unwelcome and somewhat threatening opinions.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

On Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched a top-tier episode of Star Trek: Voyager, its 100th episode — Timeless. And we’ve got a brilliant Deep Space Nine episode coming along next. So stay tuned.

Wednesday 8 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three

Tonight, Jack finally works out why everyone wants to kill him (and it’s not the reason you might expect), while mere miles away the 456 arrive in Thames House and immediately run up an upsettingly large cleaning bill. Adam Richard and Kevin Burnard join us to discuss Day Three.

Notes and links

In 2017, Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of making a sexual advance towards him at a party when he was 14. Spacey apologised, but also came out in the process, as if his sexual orientation had been some kind of mitigating factor.

The Second Coming (2003) was a TV miniseries written by Russell T Davies, in which a man who works at a video rental store in Manchester turns out to be the Son of God. It will seem familiar to anyone who has watched Aliens of London, not least because the man is played by Christopher Eccleston.

El Sandifer talks about what Martha’s role might have looked like in Children of Earth in her essay on Day Two.

Adam’s daily Doctor Who podcast is called Adam Richard Has a Theory, and it consists of no less than 1315 episodes of Adam’s insightful, implausible and hilarious theories about the show throughout its entire history.

Adam mentions an episode of the British satirical show Brass Eye called Paedogeddon, which aired on Channel 4 in 2001. It was a ridiculous parody current affairs show containing absurd stories about paedophiles, satirising the hysteria and hypocrisy that attended the topic in the British media of the time. You can watch it here.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Kevin is @scribblesscript.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll attend that formal reception you’re planning and behave in a completely unacceptable way.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, the lads at The Three-Handed Game released their latest episode — the first part of an interview with prolific Australian actor Annette Andre, who plays Judy in an episode of The Avengers called Mandrake and Suzy Miller in an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards. She had a massive career in British TV throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. You might know her from her role as Jeannie Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but she appears in all of our favourites — The Saint, The Prisoner, The Persuaders! and The Return of the Saint. (And, for us Australians, Taurus Rising, Cop Shop and Prisoner.)

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford sat through an unbearably dull and silly episode of Star Trek: The Original Series — The Savage Curtain, an episode enlivened only by the guest appearance of a heavily made-up Abraham Lincoln.

Tuesday 7 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two

The 456 said they’d drop round some time this evening, so while they wait, Simon and Nathan chat with Johnny Spandrell and Melvin Peña about villains, childlessness, the Home Office onboarding process, how great Eve Myles is, and whether Torchwood really is appropriate viewing for grownups.

Notes and links

The Big Finish Torchwood range started in 2015 with Torchwood: The Conspiracy, and it will conclude in May 2026 with its 100th monthly release, Joe Lidster’s Fare Well.

The latest iteration of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, is also concerned acout children and the world that we have created for them to grow up in. You can hear Joe and Nathan discussing the pilot on Untitled Star Trek Project Episode 180.

In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, Earth receives an alien message containing 30,000 pages of schematics for a Machine which can transport people across the galaxy. In Children of Earth a far more basic group of aliens order us to build a tank.

Just over a week before Children of Earth was broadcast, John Barrowman complained in the paper that Torchwood had been punished for its success by being given a reduced episode order.

Simon mentions the TV event miniseries of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first of these is probably Roots (1977), a generational story about an enslaved man, Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) who is kidnapped from West Africa. Over eight consecutive nights, we follow his family history until his descendants are liberated after the Civil War. We also mention V (1983), in which lizard aliens camply invade and occupy Earth over two consecutive nights, and The Thorn Birds (1983), in which over four consecutive nights, Richard Chamberlain plays a heterosexual Australian priest with varying results; Bryan Brown also features, playing his customary block of wood.

In May 2021, John Barrowman’s behaviour on the set of both Doctor Who and Torchwood came into question after Noel Clarke was accused by several people of bullying and sexual harassment on set. Barrowman had previously apologised in 2008 for inappropriate behaviour during a live broadcast on BBC Radio 1.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social and Johnny is @johnnyspandrell.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll drive up to your house in a forklift and make off with your gazebo.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

The lads at The Three-Handed Game have just released their latest episode — the first part of an interview with prolific Australian actor Annette Andre, who plays Judy in an episode of The Avengers called Mandrake and Suzy Miller in an episode of The New Avengers called House of Cards. She had a massive career in British TV throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. You might know her from her role as Jeannie Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), but she appears in all of our favourites — The Saint, The Prisoner, The Persuaders! and The Return of the Saint. (And, for us Australians, Taurus Rising, Cop Shop and Prisoner.)

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford said farewell to a surprisingly complex and beautiful kids’ show iteration of Star Trek — Star Trek: Prodigy, whose two-part finale Ouroboros aired in 2024 and which vanished from streaming just a year or so later.

Monday 6 July 2009

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

After 44 years, the 456 are coming back, but before they get here there’s a fair amount of setting up to do. First, remind us how scary and weird children are; second, introduce us to a troupe of amazing new actors; and third, blow up the entire show. Should be fun.

Notes and links

The Torchwood episode with the screaming adult that Nathan struggles to name is Season 2, Episode 11, Adrift, in which Ruth Jones searches for her son Jonah, who disappeared seven months ago, only to discover that he fell into the rift and is now an ugly adult with a massive latex head who screams non-stop for twenty hours a day. Horrible, and in no way entertaining.

Adam refers to Eddie Murphy’s 1983 comedy special Delirious, which caused a stir when it appeared on Netflix in 2017 and everyone discovered the lovable Donkey’s homophobic history. (Murphy apologised for the routine in 1996.) Here’s the clip that seems to have inspired Torchwood S1E2 Day One.

Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi are reunited in Criminal Record (2024) on Apple TV. They play a pair of detectives investigating a murder for which the wrong person may have been convicted. Season 2 will premiere on Apple TV on 22 April.

The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel by John Wyndham about a village whose female residents become mysteriously pregnant after a Doctor who and the Dæmons–style alien incident. The result: two sets of 30 identical Children who operate as two gestalt entities, speaking and thinking in unison. A film adaptation was released in 1960 as Village of the Damned, and it has been adapted several times for both film and television since then.

Inevitably, Nathan refers to El Sandifer’s essay on Children of Earth: Day One.

We also mention Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), which is the story of a husband-and-wife team of radio scriptwriters who live through what slow and largely unseen alien invasion which turns the sea against humanity. It has a lot in common with another five-episode Doctor Who spinoff, The War Between the Land and the Sea.

Ianto talks to his sister about Jack, and Peter is reminded of a similar scene from Beautiful Thing (1996). Directed by Hettie Macdonald (Blink, The Magician’s Apprentice, The Witch’s Familiar), Beautiful Thing is a romantic comedy about a gay boy living with a single mother on a council estate, who falls in love with his next-door neighbour.

Adam talks about anxieties around queer men and children, and mentions the current production of The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, starring Simon Burke. Elocution is a one-hand play in which a queer elocution teacher describes his interactions with a young queer pupil and the hostility he encounters as a result. It was written by Steve J. Spears, and the original production in 1976 starred Gordon Chater.

Frobisher is also the name of one of the Doctor’s comic-book companions — a shape-shifting hardboiled detective who usually takes the form of a penguin.

Here’s the Dead Ringers Torchwood sketch from 2007.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, James is @ohjamessellwood.bsky.social, and Adam is @adamrichard.com.au. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll stand unresponsive in your driveway for hours when you’re trying to drive your kids to work.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Since releasing the Season 3 finale of 500 Year Diary, we’ve released a whole new Doctor Who podcast: The Entirety of Flight Through Entirety. It’s the master feed for all four of our Doctor Who podcasts: Flight Through Entirety, 500 Year Diary, The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and Jodie into Terror. Head over to the website and subscribe, so that you don’t have to keep obsessively refreshing four separate feeds to hear our warm-to-lukewarm takes on every single Doctor Who story.

Over on Startling Barbara Bain, we’re nearing the end of Series 1 and considering the prospect of rewatching Series 2 with some apprehension. Still, in the meantime, we recently watched Space Brain, in which Alpha is apparently attacked by the same foam machine that caused Pat Troughton so much delight in The Seeds of Death.

And finally, on Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford just watched the first episode of Season 2 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Homecoming, a charming and intriguing relaunch, despite a surprising lack of incident.

Thursday 15 August 1991

Timewyrm: Exodus

Our tribute to the great Terrance Dicks concludes this week with a discussion of his first original Doctor Who novel, but we also take the opportunity to talk about what he achieved and how much we all owe him. Kate Orman and Adam Richard join us for Timewyrm: Exodus.

Notes and links

First, some background.

The Virgin New Adventures launched in 1991, as an “official” continuation of our cancelled show. It comprised 61 novels over nearly six years, including books by Classic Series writers Terrance Dicks, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, as well as New Series writers Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies — not to mention five-and-a-half novels by our very own Kate Orman. Virgin lost the rights to Doctor Who in the middle of 1997, but the range continued until the end of 1999, with twenty-one novels featuring Benny Summerfield, a companion created by Paul Cornell for his 1992 novel Love and War.

Terrance Dicks didn’t get to launch the Virgin New Adventures: Timewyrm: Genesys is the second novel in the range. The 28th novel, Terrance’s sequel to State of Decay, was called Blood Harvest, which — together with Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera — was used to launch a second series of original novels, the Virgin Missing Adventures. Finally, when BBC Books acquired the rights to publish original Doctor Who fiction, they launched their series with a novel by Terrance — The Eight Doctors, which is not very highly regarded, sadly.

There are many dystopian novels set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II. Adam mentions Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which depicts life in a United States partitioned between two mutually hostile Axis powers, Germany and Japan.

In an episode of the dreadful British science-fiction series The Tomorrow People (1973–1979), Hitler’s Last Secret, Part 2, Michael Sheard plays a revived Hitler, who is in reality a galactic criminal called Neebor from the planet Vashig. Here’s Neebor’s gruesome (and alarmingly cheap) unmasking for your viewing pleasure. Or not.

Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010) are two novels in the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis. The premise: In 2060, it’s possible to send students and historians back in time, confident in the theory that it’s impossible to change the past. But now three people find themselves trapped in World War II and start to find discrepancies that might change the outcome of the War.

Perhaps unwisely, Peter consults some reviews of Timewyrm: Genesys that he finds on the Time Scales website.

And finally, here’s the text of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, just to remind us all that one day even our most impressive achievements will come to nothing.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Adam is @adamrichard.com.au and Kate is @kateorman.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep going on and on and on at you about this amazing documentary we saw on the History Channel last week.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Mere hours after the release of this episode of 500 Year Diary, over on Maximum Power, we’ll be releasing an epic retrospective of the whole damn show, featuring hosts from every hemisphere, discussing how Blake’s 7 has thrilled, delighted, titillated and enraged us over the years. So until then, keep an eye on the website or on your podcatcher of choice.

Last week, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

Instead of taking Christmas off, Untitled Star Trek Project released one more episode for 2025, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watch another highlight of the franchise, the season premiere of Season 4 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Way of the Warrior. This is one of our favourite episodes of the franchise and of the podcast: you won’t want to miss it.

Wednesday 23 November 1983

The Five Doctors

Well, our ridiculous show has just turned twenty, and so it’s time for everyone both alive and available to celebrate the occasion by reporting first to North Wales and then to the BBC Television Centre. But only one man can give them all exactly the right things to say and do — and that’s the man who knows what colour monsters are.

Notes and links

As Peter observes, 1983 was a big year for Australia’s Doctor Who fans. First of all, Peter Davison visited us for the first time during April, signing books at some shopping centres and presenting at the TV Week Logie awards (don’t ask). Then in May, ABC-TV started a run of Pertwee repeats that included six stories broadcast for the first time in colour in Australia: Claws of Axos, Colony in Space, The Sea Devils, The Mutants, The Time Monster and Frontier in Space. And then, of course, there was The Five Doctors…

Nathan recently recorded another podcast episode on The Five Doctors, this time for The Maran Chess Club, a Doctor Who podcast by Luke Sims-Jenkins which focuses on the Davison Era on TV and in books and audios. Nathan’s episode will be available at Christmas, so like and subscribe now.

We mention that Robert Holmes was the first writer given the opportunity to write the twentieth anniversary story. His treatment was called The Six Doctors. I’m fairly certain that this is the discussion document outlining Holmes’s ideas for the story.

Simon gives pi to thirty decimal places as 3.141592653589793237462643383279, but as he correctly points out, the second 7 there should be an 8. If you feel like outdoing Simon, you can find the first million digits of pi here.

One version of Susan Foreman’s life story was presented on Radio 4 in 1994, in the radio mockumentary Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman?, starring Jane Asher as Susan. Spoiler alert: sick of living on a dystopian post-holocaust Earth, Susan contacts her godfather’s brother Terry, who takes her back in time to the 1960s, where she gets a civil service job and ends up becoming the EC Commissioner for Education.

Terrance Dicks is the author of the best, most influential description of the Doctor’s character, quoted by the Doctor himself in both The Day of the Doctor and Twice Upon a Time. It first appeared in the second 1976 edition of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. Here’s the quote in full: “He is impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero. These days there aren’t so many of them around…”

Peter Haining’s book Doctor Who: A Celebration — Two Decades Through Time and Space (1983) was hugely influential in shaping fan opinion throughout the last few years of the show’s original run. It’s been said that a lot of fannish discourse during the 90s was a reaction against the capsule reviews of each story that Haining wrote for this book.

The Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat House ran for nearly thirty years, starting in 1974. Longleat House was also the site of the Twentieth Anniversary Event, which took place on the 3rd and 4th of April 1983. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend over the two days, but thirty-five thousand turned up on the first day. You can get your commemorative programme here.

Simon introduces his theory that the 20th and 50th anniversaries both signal the start of some kind of decline in the show’s popularity in Flight Through Entirety’s second episode on The Day of the Doctor, Episode 249: It’s No Arc of Infinity.

Flight Through Entirety commented on The Five Doctors in Episode 90: Great Balls of Commentary!, released on Sunday 16 October 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Todd is @toddbeilby.bsky.social, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Brendan is @retrobrendo.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll keep telling you that story about everyone wearing eyepatches on the set of Inferno over and over again.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Just yesterday, we released a new episode of our Space: 1999 commentary podcast, Startling Barbara Bain. In it, we watch an episode called The Infernal Machine, guest starring Leo McKern and his massive scary robot spaceship husband, who turns up on the Moon and starts menacing the base in what is now the traditional fashion.

And last of all, on Untitled Star Trek Project, we’ve just released our Christmas Special, in which Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford are joined by Todd himself to watch the 1989 film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — a film that manages to be heartwarming and fitfully entertaining, despite its many, many obvious flaws.

Saturday 22 November 1980

State of Decay

This week, on a planet where evil carnivorous overlords oppress and prey on a helpless populace, we decide to watch and discuss State of Decay.

Notes and links

As we said last week, Horror of Fang Rock was a hurried replacement for a Terrance Dicks script called The Vampire Mutation, after the Head of Serials Graeme McDonald asked them not to proceed with the script because of a high-profile BBC telemovie called Count Dracula (1977), which was to screen later that year. Doctor Who researcher Paul Scoones has the full story…

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was first published in 1985. Particularly emphasised in the book is the fact that Offred is forbidden to read, and is left alone for hours in her room with nothing to do. This is an echo of the South’s anti-literacy laws, which were used to suppress the education of enslaved people, or black people more generally, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Marxism, mystification is the process by which the ruling class attempts to obscure the true nature of their power and control over society. And so Aukon, Camilla and Zargo invent the Wasting to position themselves as the people’s saviours rather than their oppressors.

Inevitably, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) comes up again as a possible source of inspiration for this story. We talked about it last week as well.

And then, as so often in the 1970s, Doctor Who takes its inspiration from the Hammer Horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s — particularly the nine Dracula films, the first of which, Dracula (1958), starred Christopher Lee as Dracula and our very own Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. In 1972, a very young Lalla Ward appeared in a Hammer Horror film, Vampire Circus, which also starred Adrienne Corri, who played Mena in The Leisure Hive.

Hammer House of Horror (1980) was a short-lived anthology television series created by Hammer Film Productions. Its final episode, The Mark of Satan, aired on ITV on 6 December 1980, the same night as Part 3 of State of Decay. Emrys James, who is Aukon in this story, appeared in both.

Lalla Ward and Emrys James both appeared in the BBC’s production of Hamlet (1980), part of its full set of Shakespeare plays broadcast between 1978 and 1985. Ward played Ophelia, while James played the Player King. (Hamlet was our very own Derek Jacobi, his mother was Doctor Who’s own mother Claire Bloom, and his murderous stepfather Claudius was played by Patrick Stewart.)

Nathan alludes to the Flight Through Entirety episode on The Hand of Fear, whose title encapsulates the typical Hinchcliffe-Era Doctor Who monster: Episode 45: Not Sufficiently Executed Enough.

William Lindsay, who plays Zargo here, also appears in the Blake’s 7 Series D classic Animals, where he plays the Captain, a young Federation officer who joins Servalan in the moderately expensive hotel room bar that she drives around the galaxy during that final season.

By 1981, Terrance was script editing BBC Classic Serials, miniseries adaptations of classic novels, including The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982, starring Tom Baker and Caroline John) and The Invisible Man (1984, inevitably featuring Michael Sheard). By 1985, he was producing them. His career is described in detail in Toby Hadoke’s obituary of Terrance, published in The Guardian in September 2019.

Flight Through Entirety discussed State of Decay in Episode 71: Why is E-Space Green?, released on Sunday 24 April 2016.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Richard is @moggywrangler.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll pop up behind you the next time you’re making a speech and create alarming and ridiculous tableaux to amuse your audience.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

We’ve just released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched the Star Trek: Voyager episode Memorial. Keep an eye out for our next episode — our Christmas special, where we’ll be discussing William Shatner’s towering directorial début, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Saturday 3 September 1977

Horror of Fang Rock

Terrance’s planned vampire story has been unexpectedly cancelled, and he has only a few weeks to come up with a replacement. Fortunately, he’s brilliant. Melvin Peña joins us to discuss Horror of Fang Rock.

Notes and links

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish writer best known for his gothic stories, including the short story Carmilla (1872), which is a foundational vampire story, predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. It’s likely that Terrance Dicks named his vampire queen Camilla after Le Fanu’s character (more of which next week).

The Forsyte Saga is a collection of three novels by John Galsworthy (1867–1933), originally published between 1906 and 1921, and published together in 1922. It chronicles the lives of three generations of the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, starting in the 1880s. Millie Gibson recently appeared in a TV adaptation, The Forsytes, which screened on Channel 5 in late 2025.

Among many other things, Andrew Orton creates digital models of the sets of Classic Doctor Who stories.

If you want to hear more of Peter and Simon in furious disagreement about the quality of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People, here are the relevant episodes of Flight Through Entirety — Episode 220: Centuries of Embittered Religiosity, and Episode 221: Generic Potato Person.

When Season 22 of Doctor Who was first broadcast in Australia in 1985/86, its 45-minute episodes were split in half and broadcast from Monday to Thursdays at 6:30 PM. As a result, we got to experience some pretty terrible cliffhangers. Simon quotes the cliffhanger to our Part 3 of The Two Doctors:

DOCTOR: Perhaps you can lead us to this hacienda?
ANITA: Of course. It’s this way.
[sting]

The Tales of Ratiocination refers to three short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), which are sometimes considered to be the first examples of detective fiction. In each of these stories, a mystery is solved by C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective from Paris. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842), and The Purloined Letter (1844).

The Willem Dafoe/Robert Pattinson movie Melvin mentions is The Lighthouse (2019), in which two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers are isolated in a lighthouse by a storm, alternately making out and hitting each other with axes, apparently.

Here’s an adorable image of Peter, aged about 8, with a small subset of his collection of Target novelisations.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Horror of Fang Rock in Episode 50: The Practical Problem with Leaving Someone Alive, released on Sunday 25 October 2015.

Follow us

Nathan is on Bluesky at @nathanbottomley.com, Simon is @simonmoore.bsky.social, and Melvin is @melvinpena.bsky.social. The 500 Year Diary theme was composed by Cameron Lam.

500 Year Diary shares a social media presence with Flight Through Entirety, which means you can follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon, as well as on X and Facebook. Our website is at https://500yeardiary.com. Please consider rating or reviewing us on Apple Podcasts, or we’ll hide in your basement flicking the lights on and off until you come downstairs and ask us politely to stop.

And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Last week, Maximum Power returned with its field report into the release of the Series 2 blu-ray box set at the British Film Institute.

And we also released another episode of our Star Trek commentary podcast, Untitled Star Trek Project, featuring Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford, who watched The Best of Both Worlds and The Best of Both Worlds, Part II, perhaps two of the most well-known and significant episodes not just of Star Trek: The Next Generation but of the entire Star Trek franchise. We thought they were a bit slow.