News Update...

No doubt you have read in the news today of spy agencies being able to eavesdrop on us via android phones and smart TV sets. Seems one of the hack programs developed jointly by the CIA and MI5 has been named a "Weeping Angel". It affects some Samsung TVs. When you think the set is switched off, it isn't really - so it can listen in on your conversations. In other words, it does nothing when you are looking at it - but don't turn away... This has come from a bunch of wikileaked papers. No-one has confirmed, and the hack may have already been overcome in the last year or two, but Samsung say they are taking the claims seriously.

Meanwhile the BBC have released what looks like a very spoilery image for the conclusion to Series 10 - featuring Mondasian Cybermen. I will be extremely surprised if this is the big surprise for the closing episode(s) - it's just far too early for them to be releasing this if it is. Think of it more as a lure to get fans to watch - including those that may have drifted away from the programme of late. Apparently Capaldi loves this version of the Cybermen, so they may be a leaving gift from Mr Moffat.

Story 176 - Fear Her

In which the TARDIS materialises in East London, on the eve of the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games. In Dame Kelly Holmes Close, they see missing persons posters for a number of children, and the householders are suspicious of strangers. Cars driving down the road stall when they pass over a hole which the council are filling in. An old lady named Maeve claims to have seen one of the children vanish into thin air from his front lawn. The Doctor notices that it is unseasonably cold in the area. Rose sees the silhouette of a girl at a window, watching them. The girl's mother, Trish Webber, is reluctant to talk. The Doctor and Rose pose as police officers in order to investigate. They see a cat walk into a cardboard box and disappear. The Doctor detects a metallic odour in the air. Rose hears a noise coming from a garage. When she opens the door she is attacked by a swirling black mass. The Doctor's sonic screwdriver reduces it to a small inert ball. Back in the TARDIS, this is found to be simple graphite, of the kind used in pencils.

They decide to go and see Trish and her daughter, Chloe. Mr Webber died a year ago, and was a brutal man who terrorised his family - especially Chloe. The girl is an avid drawer. Her pictures depict the missing children, and the cat which vanished. The Doctor suspects that Chloe has become possessed by some alien entity which has been taking what she draws. Trish confirms that the pictures sometimes are seen to move. Rose discovers that Chloe has drawn a huge picture of her father in her wardrobe, and it appears to be alive. People are becoming pictures, and pictures are coming to life. The Doctor hypnotises Chloe and learns that she has become inhabited by an Isolus child. These plant-like creatures travel through space in vast family units, and thrive on the companionship of their siblings. One of their pods was knocked off course and came to land in the street. The Isolus was attracted to Chloe as she was also very lonely. Later, on returning to the TARDIS, Chloe draws the Doctor and his ship, and both vanish.

The opening ceremony for the Games is about to begin, and Chloe decides to draw the stadium. The Isolus needs more companions. The BBC commentators are shocked to see everyone in the stadium vanish. This still isn't enough, and so Chloe begins to draw the entire planet Earth. Remembering that the Doctor had mentioned that the Isolus pod would have been drawn to heat, and that it first appeared at the time the hole in the road was being filled with hot tar, Rose breaks open the road surface. She finds the pod. It is attracted to the heat of the passing Olympic torch, and the Isolus leaves Chloe to return to it, launching itself back into space. The drawing of Mr Webber is still alive and threatening to emerge from the wardrobe. Trish helps her daughter overcome her fear of her father, and the drawing becomes inert. All the missing people are returned, and Rose sees the Doctor on TV lighting the Olympic flame. As everyone celebrates, the Doctor tells Rose that he feels a storm approaching...

Fear Her was written by Matthew Graham - best known for Life on Mars - and was first broadcast on June 24th, 2006.
It was originally being prepared for Series 3, but the eleventh episode of Series 2 had hit major problems. This was to have been an expensive episode, based around Arthurian legend, to be written by Stephen Fry. It needed extensive rewrites, and Fry was just too busy to devote more time to it. Graham's script was therefore brought forward, but to be made very cheaply - with the money being reallocated elsewhere in the series - The Impossible Planet two-parter being one of the main beneficiaries.
There is very little night filming, the locations being kept to one residential cul-de-sac and its environs. The cast is also small, and there is little CGI. All of these things will work against the story, and it has become the least liked of all the New Series episodes (at least up to the winter of 2013, when it ranked 240th place - of 241 - in the DWM 50th Anniversary poll).
The problem is, it just isn't scary. Creepy children really should be scary, but Chloe merely comes across as selfish and annoying. The absence of night filming doesn't help - it's all filmed with very flat lighting, on grey overcast days. The inclusion of dialogue about the temperature drop does not convince that the rest of London is in mid-summer. This has clearly been filmed in January / February.

The other big problem it has is the overly saccharine tone of the resolution. Real TV newsreader / commentator Huw Edwards is called upon to deliver some truly cringeworthy dialogue about the power of love, and the Doctor's lighting of the Olympic flame is clearly meant to be a punch-the-air moment, when all it does is make you want to punch the people responsible for making this instead.
I suspect that on paper this story might just stand up as okay, minus the aforementioned sweetness, but on TV it fails miserably. The best bit for me? The last 30 seconds - filmed at night - when the Doctor claims that a storm is approaching. The rest of the story should have had the feel of those closing seconds.
So, a good cast is wasted. Trish is played by Nina Sosanya, who had starred beside Tennant in RTD's Casanova. Maeve is Edna Dore, who had appeared in Eastenders for a number of years. Chloe is Abisola Agbaje. A good enough young actor but miscast - or misdirected - here.

Story Arc points: Even this is mishandled, as - inexplicably - a BBC newsman knows about Torchwood, and mentions them on air to billions of people watching across the planet. The Doctor once more invokes the Shadow Proclamation.

Tardisode: A segment from a TV police bulletin called "Crime Crackers", about the child disappearances in Dame Kelly Holmes Close, with the presenter inviting the public to call in if they have any information. We then see a wardrobe, inside which there is a pair of glowing red eyes, and a gruff voice says "I'm coming...".

Overall then? Terrance Dicks used to say that his main job as script editor on Doctor Who was to make sure that people weren't watching the Test Card on a Saturday evening. Fear Her isn't quite as bad as the Test Card, but not by much. The Test Card was certainly creepier.
Things you might like to know:

• After references to Spock in the first series (The Empty Child), the Doctor here gets Chloe to make a Vulcan salute - reinforcing Star Trek as fictional in this universe.
• The Doctor tells Rose about his family - stating that he was a father once.
• It was hoped that Kelly Holmes would cameo as a torch bearer, but she was working on the Dancing on Ice series at the time. The street was named after her instead.
• For the real 2012 Olympics, current Doctor Matt Smith really did carry the torch over a short stretch of Cardiff Bay. Unbelievably, a small section of fans wanted David Tennant to light the flame at the Olympic stadium - thus making the conclusion to Fear Her a reality.
• Two possible story titles that went unused: "Chloe Webber Destroys The World", and "You're A Bad Girl, Chloe Webber".
• This is one of those rare stories in which no-one dies.
• Graham initially came up with the idea of an alien that removed all the beauty from the world, but it was Russell T Davies who suggested drawings and paintings coming to life.
• Graham claimed that he had received a lot of positive comments about the story from children, and it was them he was aiming it at. He dismissed the negative views of the adults, saying it wasn't aimed at them. All well and good, but what happened to "the children's series that adults adore", eh? A good Doctor Who story pleases different age groups at different levels, and should be constructed as such.
• When trying to come up with a name for his main character in Life On Mars, Graham asked his son - who came up with the surname Tyler, after Rose's name.
• There's an advert on a wall for Shayne Ward's greatest hits album. Ward won the X-Factor in 2005, and had that year's Christmas No.1. At the time of writing, nearly 5 years on from the summer of 2012, he has yet to release a greatest hits package.
• And Papua New Guinea did not surprise anyone in the shot put at London 2012.

B is for... Berger

Pragmatic First Officer and Chief Navigator on a space-freighter which was approaching Earth, in the year 2526. The planet was on high alert due to a forthcoming conference, and the freighter crew were worried that they would lose their bonuses for late delivery of their cargo. Little did they know that the silos in the hold contained thousands of Cybermen - a force that would invade the planet once the conference had been destroyed by a massive bomb hidden in a cave system nearby. After the Doctor had defused the bomb, he took the TARDIS to the freighter to look for the source of the detonation signal. Berger discovered that her colleague, Ringway, who claimed to have the crew's best interests at heart, was really a Cyberman agent. She and Captain Briggs tried to help the Doctor defeat the Cybermen, but they were captured. Berger was one of those left on the ship as it was turned into a flying bomb. She attempted to talk Adric into joining them in the escape pod after Lt. Scott freed them from the bridge. After the freighter had fallen back through time some 65 million years and been destroyed - with Adric still aboard - Berger, Briggs and Scott were returned to their own time by the Doctor.

Played by: June Bland. Appearances: Earthshock (1982).

• The first of two appearances in the series by Bland. She'll return as Elizabeth Rowlinson, the blind landlady of the Gore Crow Hotel who has her sight restored by Queen Morgaine in the 1989 story Battlefield.

B is for... Beresford, Major

Major Beresford took command of the British section of UNIT when the Brigadier was called away to Geneva, shortly before his retirement. Sir Colin Thackeray of the World Ecology Bureau brought the Doctor in to help investigate the discovery of a plant form, found deep in the Antarctic permafrost. This proved to be alien in origin - one of a pair of Krynoid seed pods. This infected a scientist, who began to mutate into a Krynoid. He was destroyed when the base was sabotaged. The Doctor followed the second pod to England, and the home of the ruthless plant-obsessed millionaire Harrison Chase. After discovering that Chase was going to cultivate the creature, the Doctor escaped and went to WEB where he met Beresford. Despite being a senior member of UNIT, he was skeptical about the threat the Krynoid posed - until reports started to come in of flora-related deaths in the immediate vicinity of Chase's mansion.
He gave the Doctor some new military defoliant, and a soldier to help him deploy it, then led an assault on the house with a laser-weapon attachment. This proved ineffectual against the growing Krynoid, and so he retreated and called in the RAF to bomb the site.

Played by: John Acheson. Appearances: The Seeds of Doom (1976).

B is for... Benton

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's stalwart right-hand man at UNIT.
Fiercely loyal, brave and dependable, he joined the organisation in its formative stages. He was with them, as a Corporal, when they began investigating International Electromatics, the computer technology firm owned by millionaire Tobias Vaughn. Benton was given a plain clothes assignment to follow the Doctor and Jamie, and to bring them to UNIT's temporary mobile HQ. Later, the Doctor's companions talked him into taking them into London as they wanted to photograph the Cybermen that were hidden in the city's sewer network.

After the Cyberman invasion had begun, Benton manned the radio which allowed the Brigadier to liaise with the missile base at Henlow Down. They destroyed the invasion fleet.
Benton was next seen at UNIT HQ during the incident at UK Space Control, when General Carrington attempted to provoke an interplanetary war. He was now a Sergeant.
He then joined the Brigadier at the drilling project nicknamed the "Inferno Project". On the parallel Earth, the Doctor encountered his alter-ego - the boorish, sadistic Platoon Under-Leader Benton, who was transformed into a savage Primord creature.

Tasked with following the Chinese Red Army delegate Captain Chin-Lee during an international peace conference, Benton was overpowered by an hypnotic force - the work of the Master and his alien mind parasite. The Brigadier wasn't impressed, and Benton hated letting his colleagues down. He took part in the convoy to transport the banned Thunderbolt nerve gas missile, and was wounded in the ambush when it was stolen. Despite his injury, he was keen to remain on duty and to help locate the missing Captain Yates. The Brigadier admired his determination to make up for his earlier failure. He was soon given temporary governorship of Stangmoor Prison, after UNIT had retaken it from a convict revolt.
When the Doctor and Jo got into difficulty in the village of Devil's End, Benton joined Mike Yates in travelling to find them - taking the Brigadier's helicopter. Benton rescued the local white witch, Miss Hawthorne, for which she was eternally grateful. She seemed to become quite enamoured of him, which he found rather uncomfortable. He proved himself an excellent pistol marksman, but prone to be susceptible to airborne cloaks. When the Doctor used Bessie's remote control to capture the Master, it was Benton who took him into custody. He missed out on the pub though, as Miss Hawthorne dragged him into a fertility dance around the village maypole.

After an encounter with the Daleks and their Ogron servants, in which Jo tried to feed him but was stopped by mean Captain Yates, Benton met up with the Master once again. He was due to take some leave, but he was dragged off to the Newton Institute when the Brigadier was called upon to act as an observer to Professor Thascales' temporal experiments. Benton grasped the concept behind the TOMTIT device fairly quickly. Tasked with guarding the device, the Master tried to trick Benton into leaving it when he impersonated the Brigadier over the phone. Benton saw through the deception immediately, when the Master referred to him as "my dear fellow" - something his commanding officer would never do. He made it look as if he had fallen for the trick, but then climbed in through a window to capture the Master when he arrived. Unfortunately, the Master trumped his "oldest trick in the book" ploy with an even older trick - the classic "pretending someone has just come into the room behind you" one.
Later, when trapped with the TOMTIT device, along with Ruth Ingram and Stuart Hyde, the machine caused Benton to regress to babyhood. On being returned to normal after the device had been disabled, Benton found himself naked but for a nappy in front of his colleagues.

When the Time Lord Omega attempted to abduct the Doctor, Benton found himself meeting the Second incarnation of his friend again. Once more, he proved more open-minded than his superior when he accepted that he, the Doctor and the Brigadier had been transported through a Black Hole to another universe. He also took the TARDIS interior in his stride - saying that nothing the Doctor did could ever surprise him. Throwing litter at alien entities was not his finest moment, it has to be said.
Some time later, London began to be plagued by appearances of prehistoric creatures. Benton suddenly found himself facing treachery in his own team, when it became clear that Yates was working for the enemy. His loyalty to the Doctor was absolute, and despite the possibility of court martial he permitted the Doctor to escape - allowing him to knock him out with his Venusian martial arts. Such was the faith the Brigadier had in his sergeant, he had Benton put himself under arrest. He rather enjoyed punching General Finch - but the Brigadier advised him against getting used to hitting superior officers.
Away from the action, Benton was renowned for the quality of his coffee. When the Doctor had to replicate the experiment that had killed Prof. Clegg, Benton volunteered to do it in his stead, as he was dispensable and the Doctor wasn't. This wasn't the only time Benton was prepared to offer up his own life for his colleagues.
With Yates retired from UNIT, Benton found himself promoted to Warrant Officer. Used to having his men follow his orders, he was exasperated by Sarah Jane Smith, as she was not a member of UNIT. The resolution to the problem of the giant K1 Robot was provided by Benton, as he recalled what Prof. Kettlewell had said about the living metal and his anti-pollution metal virus.
In the village of Tulloch, near Loch Ness, the Brigadier used Benton's friendliness with the hotel landlord to smooth their search for the bugging device they suspected was hidden on the premises.

Our last sighting of Benton - now Regimental Sergeant Major - was at the Space Defence Station at Devesham. He was based there with Surgeon Lt. Harry Sullivan when astronaut Guy Crayford re-established contact and prepared to return to Earth after going missing in deep space. He mentioned going ballroom dancing with his younger sister - the only reference to his family. Benton was knocked out, and substituted with a lethal android replica.
When the Fifth Doctor met up with the now-retired Brigadier at Brendon School in 1977, he was informed that Benton had also left UNIT, and was now a used car salesman.

Played by John Levene, Darren Plant (baby Benton). Appearances: The Invasion (1968), then regularly in UNIT stories from The Ambassadors of Death (1970) to The Android Invasion (1975).

• We last see Benton lying on the ground at the Devesham space centre - dead for all we know. A very poor conclusion for such a well-loved character. All the more surprising when you consider that The Android Invasion was directed by Levene's producer, Barry Letts. Luckily his survival gets a mention in Mawdryn Undead - but his new role as a car salesman just doesn't ring true.
• I almost began this post with the old joke: "Benton - first name 'Sergeant' - ..." His christian name has never appeared on screen, but fan fiction has gone with John.
• If Letts was Levene's producer, then Douglas Camfield was his director. Levene had played one of the Cybermen in The Moonbase, and his next role was as one of the Yeti in The Web of Fear - directed by Camfield. He saw the potential in this very insecure young actor, and so cast him as Corporal Benton in a couple of episodes of The Invasion. Another actor was to have played the soldier manning the radio in the later episodes, but he got the sack for persistent lateness - you can guess who by noting who suddenly disappears - and Levene got a call back.
• Camfield intended to use Benton in his next story to be directed - Inferno - so Letts had him brought back for a few episodes of the preceding story in order to better establish him as the Brigadier's No.2.
• The way Ambassadors of Death is edited, it looks like Benton might be the person who poisons poor Dr Lennox in the UNIT cells.
• Levene reprised the role of Benton in the first ever unofficial video spin-off - BBV's "War Time". Michael Wisher played his father. It has recently been re-released on DVD as "War Time Chronicles" with other Pertwee era BBV material. He has also made a couple of Big Finish audios.
• Levene was based in the USA for a number of years but has now returned to his native Salisbury, Wiltshire. Check out the DVD extra by Toby Hadoke on the special edition of Claws of Axos, as well as Levene's video tours of his home town on his website (available on You Tube as well). He's a lovely guy, and gives Tom Baker a good run for his money in the English Eccentrics stakes. Chris Chibnall is a known fan of the Pertwee era - so here's looking forward to the return of Benton.

B is for... Benoit

Roger Benoit was a French scientist who was second-in-command at the Moonbase which housed the Gravitron device. In the year 2070, this machine helped control the weather on Earth by manipulating air pressure. The Doctor began searching for the cause of a mystery illness amongst the crew, and invoked Benoit's ire when he got under his feet. Later, Ben saved the Frenchman's life after he went out onto the lunar surface to repair a piece of damaged equipment. He was attacked by a Cyberman, but Ben destroyed it with a bottle of plastic solvent. Benoit was at the controls of the Gravitron when it sent the Cybermen and their spacecraft hurtling into space.

Played by: Andre Maranne. Appearances: The Moonbase (1967).

• British TV and cinema's go-to actor for French characters, Maranne had a career spanning four decades. He's best known for playing the sensible sergeants to Herbert Lom's increasingly neurotic Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther movies, He also appeared in the classic Fawlty Towers episode "The Gourmet Night", and was a Spectre operative in Thunderball, amongst many, many other roles.
• The character of Benoit was to have been called Jules, but it was found that another of the Moonbase crew already had this name. This was after his name tag had been made up. This is why he wears the little neckerchief - to hide the initial "J".

February's Figurines

Two figurines from the Classic Series this month. The first is Commander Azaxyr from The Monster of Peladon. Nearly 100 issues in, and this is the first Ice Warrior release from that era.
Joining Azaxyr is what is termed a "Suicide Squad" Dalek - from Destiny of the Daleks. It has the yellow and red bombs mounted round the bottom of the neck section. Of course, most of the suicide squad Daleks we saw on screen were the rough light-weight vacuum-formed ones. This figurine looks quite good in comparison. The accompanying magazine tells the story of the Dalek props that were available for this story, and explains why they looked so mismatched.
Next month is another Cyber-Leader - this time the one from Silver Nemesis. Then we will be getting a Marshman from Full Circle, and The Veil from Heaven Sent. I believe the next larger scale special edition is due out shortly as well - the King Hydroflax Robot.