Giant Maggots
The hideous larvae of 1973’s The Green Death wormed their way into the minds of a generation. Such memories loom large over fans, and the series itself.
Gian Sammarco as Whizzkid in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988-89).
The Doctor (Colin Baker) is sucked under quicksand in the penultimate cliffhanger to the much-troubled The Trial of a Time Lord (1986).
Giant maggots in The Green Death (1973).
“Although I never got to see the early days, I know it’s not as good as it used to be. But I’m still terribly interested.”
Oh dear. When a TV programme sees fit to include a crude parody of its own fans – in this case, Gian Sammarco playing a character who was basically his comedic ‘Adrian Mole’ persona in space in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988-89) – it’s fair to say things probably aren’t going too well on the PR front.
But did embattled 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner have some justification for his oft-repeated claim that “the memory cheats”? Was there some truth to his suggestion that the picture of early Doctor Who that fans had built up in their heads – in that time before you could watch 1968’s The Web of Fear on the bus to work – might be a little misty-eyed and sentimental?
Yes and no, is the slight fudge of an answer. Because it would be foolish to deny that, with Doctor Who, the stars sometimes align to deliver a Golden Age, while at other times events conspire to do the opposite. So if, during the widely publicised storms and stresses of the mid-1980s – when, due to behind-the-scenes upsets, the later Colin Baker stories and early Sylvester McCoy ones were being pulled together in something approaching blind panic – you found yourself wistfully pining for the Gothic shiver of Tom Baker’s early imperial phase… well, no one would have blamed you.