The Doctor is finally free to wander space and time again – but on his very first trip, he finds his horizons suddenly limited…

By EDDIE ROBSON

A Passage to India

Having been briefed to write a story in two primary locations that didn’t intersect, Robert Holmes ingeniously opted to have the two locations be vastly different in scale. The serial was entitled The Labyrinth, then Out of the Labyrinth and then Peepshow. (The Carnival of Monsters title only arrived after production was complete.) The concept meant the miniscope interior sequences could be set anywhere.

Notably, these weren’t the only Holmes-scripted TV episodes broadcast in 1973 to revolve around British colonial India. The second season of the BBC1 drama The Regiment (left) included two instalments written by Holmes: Depot (2 March 1973) and North West Frontier (4 May 1973). This series followed the Cotswold Regiment of the British army; the first had been about the Boer War, but the second concerned India in the early years of the 20th century. Was this Holmes doubling up on his research, or just indulging his own preoccupations? “It’s a period that interests me, from late Victorian through to the 1920s,” he later remarked. “I enjoyed the idea of putting this fossilised social group into a fossilised situation. They were all very deliberate stereotypes.”