C is for... Cotton

A senior security guard on Skybase One, which orbited the planet Solos. He and his partner Stubbs were playing chess one day when an alarm sounded indicating that a storage bay door had malfunctioned. This was the work of the Doctor, who had been sent to the Skybase by the Time Lords to deliver a message capsule to someone on the station. This proved to be the young Solonian rebel Ky. Cotton and his partner were unhappy at being away from Earth, and this dissatisfaction led them to co-operate with the Doctor against their commander - the Marshal. Unhappy that Solos was to be handed back to its native population, the Marshal had decided to seize control of it for himself, changing the toxic atmosphere to make it breathable for humans. He arranged for the Administrator sent to Solos to arrange the handover to be assassinated. Cotton and Stubbs joined the Doctor and Jo on Solos, where they took refuge in the thesium mines. The Marshal discovered their treachery and tried to seal them all in the tunnels, which were pumped full of poison gas. Cotton and the others took refuge in the home of Prof. Sondergaard. On returning to the Skybase, Stubbs was killed. Cotton and Jo were imprisoned with Ky and Sondergaard in the station's refuelling chamber. They were freed when Ky evolved into a super-being. Once the Marshal had been destroyed by Ky, Cotton was placed in charge of the Skybase - to begin preparations for the return to Earth.

Played by: Rick James. Appearances: The Mutants (1972).

C is for... Costello, Suzie

Captain Jack Harkness' second-in-command at Torchwood's Cardiff base. She became obsessed with her investigations into the Resurrection Glove - a metal gauntlet which could bring people back to life for a minute or so. This obsession led her to steal an alien weapon and use it to murder people, so that she could use the Glove on them. Torchwood was then called in to investigate these same crimes. WPC Gwen Cooper saw the alien bladed weapon when she visited Torchwood's Hub - being worked on by Suzie - but Jack Retconned her so that she would not remember the visit. The image stayed with her, however, and she realised who the killer was. On going to the Hub she met Suzie as she was about to flee. Suzie explained that it was impossible to walk away from Torchwood, and that her crimes were sure to be found out soon. She was going to shoot Gwen when Jack appeared. She shot him instead, then killed herself.
Her body was stored in the Hub's vaults. Some time later, the police called in the team to help investigate a number of murders where the victims' blood had been used to write "Torchwood" at the crime scene. A link between the victims was found - a support group which Suzie had attended. Jack decided to bring her back with the Glove to learn more. It was Gwen who successfully resurrected her, and bizarrely Suzie stayed alive for more than a minute or two. She had planned her resurrection well in advance, by overdosing one of the support group with Retcon to the extent that he had become psychotic. He was caught and locked up in the cells, where he recited a poem on hearing the word "Torchwood" which voice-activated a power failure and lock-down of the Hub. Suzie had worked on Gwen, convincing her that she only wanted to visit her terminally ill father who was in hospital, and that she posed no risk. Gwen smuggled her out of the Hub before the power failure. The Glove had created a link between the two women, however. Suzie was being kept alive by draining Gwen's life-force. She would live, whilst Gwen would die. At the hospital she murdered her father, whom she had always despised. Trying to flee the country at a ferry port, Torchwood caught up with her. She could not be killed until the Glove was destroyed. Her body was returned to the Hub.

Played by: Indira Varma. Appearances: TW 1.1 Everything Changes, TW 1.8 They Keep Killing Suzie (2006).

• Suzie Costello was scheduled to reappear in the second series of Torchwood, being resurrected once again, but Indira Varma was pregnant at the time and so this never came to pass.

C is for... Cory, Marc

A member of Earth's Space Security Service, Cory was sent to the hostile jungle planet of Kembel in the year 3999 to investigate the inordinate amount of space traffic which had been reported around that inhospitable world. He travelled there in a spacecraft operated by astronaut Gordon Lowery and his co-pilot Jeff Garvey, keeping his identity and purpose concealed. The ship crash-landed, and Cory had to assist with repairs. One alien spaceship in particular had interested the authorities - one belonging to the Daleks. Cory found out that the Daleks were planning an attack on the rest of the cosmos, beginning with the Solar System. To achieve this aim, they had assembled an alliance composed of members from the outer galaxies. Garvey became infected with the venom from a Varga Plant, and Cory was forced to kill him. He told Lowery of his mission, and of how he was licenced to appropriate his spaceship and to kill without compunction if necessary. Later, Lowery was also infected, and Cory had to kill him as well. The Daleks found the ship and destroyed it. Cory recorded his findings, intending to fire the message into space using a rocket, but he was tracked down by a Dalek patrol and exterminated before he could do so.

Played by: Edward de Souza. Appearances: Mission to the Unknown (1965).

• Terry Nation clearly had James Bond in mind when he created Cory, as he actually uses the phrase "licenced to kill" at one point. The plan was to spin the Daleks off into their own TV series, with a group of space secret agents as the new protagonists.
• De Souza, whose name derives from Portuguese-Indian descent, has strong Hammer connections, having appeared in The Phantom of the Opera, and Kiss of the Vampire. He appears in one of the Bond movies - The Spy Who Loved Me - as an Arab sheikh who turns out to be an old university chum of Bond's.
• The Doctor finds Cory's skeletal remains, and his message recording, in The Daleks' Master Plan. He plays it to Bret Vyon, Steven and Katarina, and it is different to the one which Cory has recorded in this episode, and not voiced by De Souza.
• It should be noted that no images of Cory exist from this episode. The only official BBC pictures were of the Daleks and their alien allies (including Malpha chatting up outgoing producer Verity Lambert). No screencaps exist either, as the episode was junked, so the image above comes from one of the fan reconstructions which can be found on You Tube.

C is for... Corwyn, Gemma

Chief medical officer on Station W3 in Earth orbit in the late 21st Century. She was responsible for the psychological as well as the physical health of the crew. Gemma was a widow, her husband having died in an accident in the asteroid belt some years before. She took care of the Doctor when he and Jamie were found on the drifting Silver Carrier spaceship. She quickly sensed that Jamie was not being honest in his explanation of how they came to be there, and spotted immediately when he used a name off of a piece of medical equipment to give the Doctor a name. As strange events began to occur on the station - known simply as The Wheel - Gemma became increasingly alarmed that her friend, the station commander Jarvis Bennett, was becoming mentally unwell. He had always been rather obstinate in his ways, but his refusal to accept rational explanations for the occurrences alarmed her. The Doctor became firm friends with her, and she accepted his warnings that the Cybermen were infiltrating the station. She assisted with the Doctor's plan to prevent the crew being mentally subjugated by the Cybermen. She found out that the invaders were going to poison the station's oxygen supply and was able to warn the Doctor, but at the cost of her own life. Her death prompted Bennett to make a suicidal attack on the Cybermen. It was clear that he had deep feelings for her, beyond their professional relationship - feelings she may well have shared.

Played by: Anne Ridler. Appearances: The Wheel in Space (1968).

• Ridler was wife to Emrys Jones, who played the Master of the Land of Fiction in The Mind Robber, which closely followed this story.
• Corwyn dies at the end of Part Five, yet the plot depends upon Jamie and Zoe seeing her dead body and reporting this at the start of Part Six - prompting Bennett's suicidal confrontation with one of the Cybermen. As they wouldn't pay for Ridler to appear as a corpse for an episode, a still photograph of her lying lifeless on the floor is clearly used for when Jamie and Zoe come upon her body.

C is for... Cornish, Ralph

Head of Mission Control at the UK's Space Centre, responsible for its latest Mars mission. This flight - Mars Probe 7 - had run into problems. Communications had failed, but the craft had lifted off as scheduled on its return voyage. Cornish had sent up Recovery 7 to intercept it, only to lose contact with that ship as well. As the Brigadier was monitoring events at the Space Centre, the Doctor became involved. He identified a strange noise received at Mission Control as an alien message, and correctly predicted the expected response. The Doctor offered Cornish his help in solving the mystery. He convinced him that his three astronauts - two from the Probe ship and one from the Recovery vessel - were being held elsewhere, and the astronauts who had returned from Mars were not what they seemed. Cornish fought against the obstructions of his superior, Sir James Quinlan, and the head of space security, General Carrington, to allow the Doctor to make a solo space flight to search for the missing men. Carrington had engineered the abduction of the astronauts - really alien ambassadors - in order to turn world opinion against them as he was obsessively convinced they posed a threat to the Earth. He took over Cornish's control room in order to stage a public unmasking of the aliens to provoke a conflict with them. UNIT was able to prevent Carrington's planned TV broadcast, and the Doctor left his assistant Liz Shaw with Cornish to help arrange the peaceful swap of his astronauts for the ambassadors.

Played by: Ronald Allen. Appearances: The Ambassadors of Death (1970).

• Allen had previously appeared as Chief Navigator Rago in The Dominators.
• He was best known for his long-running role as David Hunter in shaky-walled soap Crossroads, but for many he will always be remembered as Uncle Quentin in The Comic Strip Presents... Five Go Mad in Dorset.

C is for... Cordo

Citizen of Megropolis One, on the planet Pluto. He was a lowly D-Grade worker, whose job was to help maintain one of the artificial suns. When his father died, he had to pay a Death Tax. The plan he had invested in had increased in price, and he suddenly found that he could not afford the additional taxes imposed by the Company. He was already working double shifts, and had no way of making up the deficit. In despair, he went to the roof of the Megropolis in order to throw himself off. He was stopped by the Doctor and Leela. Cordo took them down into the undercity where a rebel group was known to operate. His natural timidity was enhanced by the anxiety-inducing drug which the Company injected into the air supply. However, he decided to join the rebels, and when the Doctor was captured he alone agreed to go with Leela and K9 to assist them in rescuing him from the detention centre. He later helped the Doctor save Leela from public execution, and took part in the revolution which overthrew the Collector and Gatherer Hade.

Played by: Roy Macready. Appearances: The Sunmakers (1977).

Inspirations - The Macra Terror

The monsters for Ian Stuart Black's third and final story for Doctor Who changed throughout the scripting process, as one early title called this "Doctor Who and the Spidermen", and another was "Doctor Who and the Insect-Men". This confusion seems to have seeped into the finished programme, as the Macra are referred to as insects and even bacteria at different points. On screen, however, when you can actually see them in all the gloom and the smoke, they are clearly massive crabs. The clearest view remains the 8mm footage of the Shawcraft Models workshops, which appears as an extra on The Chase DVD. Only one was ever built. It was massive, and cost the same as a family car. The size, and the lack of maneuverability, doomed them to be one-hit wonders, until the advent of CGI.
Giant insects or other mutated creatures remind us instantly of the Science Fiction movies of the 1950's. One in particular - Roger Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) - is worth a look. Not only are the crabs of comparable size to the Macra, but they are also more than merely animals. They ingest the minds of their victims along with their bodies, and so gain great intelligence.
The name "Macra" may derive from the Latin name for the giant Japanese Spider Crab - Macrocheira Kaempferi. It has the biggest leg span of any arthropod.

The location for this adventure is known simply as the Colony. We had our first visit to an Earth colony only a couple of stories ago. This one is run along the lines of a holiday camp. After the Second World War a number of military camps around the coast of Britain were bought up by Billy Butlin, who had opened his first inexpensive holiday camp in 1936. People had more income and more leisure time, but cheap foreign travel had yet to take off. Rather than stay at a hotel in one of the big resorts like Blackpool you could have an all-inclusive holiday in simple chalet accommodation, in a camp with its own entertainment centre. There were strict rules - making some people compare them to POW camps. These days you would be arrested and reported to Social Services for leaving a small child alone in a chalet whilst you supped beer and danced, but it was the done thing in the early days of the holiday camps. A sign would be put up if a baby was heard to be crying in one of the huts. The entertainments ranged from the usual music and comedy acts to participatory activities - such as beauty pageants and knobbly-knees competitions.
In the Colony, music seems to be the big thing. There are endless jaunty jingles to encourage the workers, and we see a majorette troupe and preparations for a dance contest.
For many years the BBC banned jingles on the radio, as they were felt to be a form of brainwashing. The pirate stations used them a lot. Note the way Kenny Everett used them when he was given his "radio show" on TV.  During the Second World War and through into the 1960's, however, the BBC had broadcast Workers' Playtime, and Music While You Work, as it was felt that light music did aid productivity, as well as taking people's minds off their repetitive work. More on the subject of brainwashing below.
The people in charge are clearly the descendants of the crew of the spaceship which brought the colonists here from "the Earth planet" - having titles like the Pilot.

Like Corman's crab monsters, the Macra are parasites. Rather than feed on the humans, they have taken the Controller hostage and have mentally conditioned the colonists to work for them - mining a gas which they thrive on. It is never specified if the Macra were native to this world, or have infiltrated it along with other planets. Gridlock seems to say that they were established on a number of planets before they devolved. The 2007 story goes some way to exonerate the Doctor, who appears to gleefully commit genocide here.
The Macra condition their victims whilst they sleep, making them not only glad to work for them, but making them blot out the Macras' existence all together. There are no Macra here. The Macra do not exist. Brainwashing came to the fore in the 1950's, when people questioned how the Chinese seemed to be able to get people to admit to all sorts of things. People who had been opposed to the Maoist regime suddenly became loyal party members. During the Korean war, a number of POW's appeared to speak out against their own government. The phrase first saw print in a Miami newspaper in September 1950. Later, the phrase would come to be used to describe the techniques used by some religious cults to recruit and retain members.
The Manchurian Candidate - published in 1952 and made into a movie ten years later - features brainwashing of prisoners, being made to carry out an assassination. George Orwell's novel 1984 also features psychological torture techniques being used to make people conform. This book, and especially its critically acclaimed BBC adaptation, gives us the image of the Controller's face on large screens - like that of Big Brother.

In one scene here we see the Pilot and his Chief of Police, Ola, attempt to condition Medok, who has seen the Macra and is prepared to warn everyone about them. This fails, as his previous conditioning has obviously also failed. The Doctor prevents Jamie and Polly from being taken over, but is not so lucky with Ben, who is made into a loyal puppet of the regime and is prepared to denounce his friends to the authorities when they break the rules.
Ola seems to have been inspired by Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's feared head of security, though he looks more like Georgy Malenkov, the man who succeeded Stalin. Coming between Stalin and Khrushchev, his two years in power are almost forgotten now.
Something else which might have been on Black's mind when he came to write this are the works of Franz Kafka. Bearing in mind that the Macra weren't always going to be specifically crab-like, we have Metamorphosis, where a man's psychological alienation leads him to transform into a beetle. Other works, such as The Castle and The Trial deal with the stultifying effects of bureaucracy. It is no mere coincidence that the man in charge of the mines is named Officia. The Colony has its rules, which are never to be broken, until the Doctor comes along and baldly states that bad rules were made to be broken.
Next time, we're off to the airport to wave goodbye to Ben and Polly. Everyone will be seeing double, as we find out that two different menaces have been operating in the London region at the same time. (And it will be three by the next story).