H is for... Host, Heavenly

 

The Heavenly Host were the service robots assigned to look after passengers on Max Capricorn space cruises, which originated on the planet Sto. For their voyage to Earth at Christmas, 2008, on a replica of the ill-fated Titanic, the Host were redesigned to look like angels, replete with wings and halos. Unbeknown to passengers and crew, Capricorn was about to be ousted from his own company, and so he had decided to sabotage this cruise. The Captain - Hardaker - had been paid to turn off the force-shields and magnetise the hull so that the ship would be struck by meteoroids. It would crash onto the planet below, and lead to ruin for the board members who wanted to take over the company. Capricorn had reprogrammed the Host to kill all survivors. They were capable of hovering, and could remove their halos and use them as lethal weapons. They were susceptible to powerful electromagnetic surges, however. The Doctor was able to trick them by pointing out that he was neither passenger or crewman and should not be killed, as he was really a stowaway. He ordered them to take him to the person in charge, after guessing that Capricorn himself was hidden on board in a reinforced area of the ship. The Host had in their programming the order to answer three questions asked of them, but took this very literally. Once Capricorn had been killed by waitress Astrid Peth, and control of the ship taken back by Midshipman Frame, the Host were deactivated.

Played by: Paul Kasey. Appearances: Voyage of the Damned (2007).

• Russell T Davies was inspired by The Robots of Death for the way the look and sound of the Host - beautiful, calmly spoken killers.

H is for... Hopper

Hopper was the captain of a rocket ship which had been hired by an archaeological expedition to take them to the planet Telos. The expedition leader was Professor Parry, and it was being financed by a couple named Eric Klieg and Kaftan. They had come to investigate the last resting place of the Cybermen. 

Shortly after a pair of giant metal doors was uncovered, Hopper lost one of his men when he was electrocuted trying to open them. Kaftan had offered a financial reward to open them. Later, Hopper reported that the rocket had been sabotaged. He refused to allow the expedition members to stay overnight in the ship, as they would have gotten in the way of repair work. The Doctor suspected that the sabotage was the handiwork of Kaftan's manservant Toberman.

After the expedition succeeded in accessing a lower level of the Cyberman tombs, Victoria had to fetch Hopper to rescue the party. Kaftan had locked the expedition members in, then pulled a gun on Victoria.

Hopper and his co-pilot, Jim, succeeded in opening the hatch to the lower level and employed smoke bombs to allow the party to escape the revived Cybermen.

Hopper eventually took the few surviving members of the expedition back to Earth.

Played by: George Roubicek. Appearances: The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967).

• Austrian born Roubicek mostly works in dubbing of foreign language films these days. He appeared in two James Bond movies - You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me - as Russian characters, but he is also one of that elite group of Doctor Who actors who have played Imperial Officers in a Star Wars movie. Roubicek is the officer who reports to Darth Vader just after his initial entrance at the beginning of the movie.

H is for... Hopley, Maggie

Maggie Hopley was a young woman encountered by Torchwood's Owen Harper one night. He had seen her acting suspiciously on the edge of a rooftop. As he suspected, she was planning on throwing herself off the building. It transpired that her husband had been killed in a car accident on their wedding day. Owen, who had recently been brought back from the dead, told her of a mission he had just undertaken with Torchwood, which involved a wealthy recluse named Parker who was determined to cling to life using alien technology. The artefact he was using didn't really prolong life - it was just his own willpower which was doing this. The object - known as the Pulse - was simply a device sent by an alien race as a message to humanity that they were not alone in the universe.

Seeing a new reason to stay alive, Maggie decided not to end her own life.

Played By: Christine Bottomley. Appearances: TW 2.8: A Day in the Death (2008).

H is for... Hooper, Minnie

A friend of Wilf Mott who became a member of his pensioner group - the Silver Cloak. Their job was to look out for signs of the Doctor and report back to Wilf. The Silver Cloak increased their activities around Christmas 2010, after people started having disturbing nightmares which featured the ex-Prime Minister Harold Saxon. Minnie, who had once been locked in a Police Box after misbehaving in her youth, was with Wilf when the Doctor was tracked down to an area of the London docks. Minnie found the Doctor to be rather attractive, and even pinched his bottom whilst getting a photograph taken with him.

Played by: June Whitfield. Appearances: The End of Time Part 1 (2009).

• Whitfield, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 93, was long regarded as a bit of a national treasure. Her career in comedy spanned 7 decades, and she worked with many of the comedy greats, such as Tony Hancock and the Carry On team. Best known in the UK, she reached a wider audience through her appearances in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. One non-comedic role she enjoyed was her portrayal as BBC radio's Miss Marple.

Inspirations - Revelation of the Daleks

Revelation of the Daleks was written by Eric Saward during another of his breaks between contracts. A script editor commissioning themselves was frowned upon, especially by the Writers Guild, as it denied other writers work.

Saward spent his holiday on the island of Rhodes, and elements of this trip fed into the story.

The main inspiration is the Evelyn Waugh novelette The Loved One, first published in 1948, which tells of the Hollywood funeral parlour business. Waugh had been invited there to discuss adapting his novel Brideshead Revisited for the big screen, and he was inspired on his return to write about the Hollywood culture he had encountered, and about the ex-pat British contingent he met there. The funerary setting came from a visit to the Forest Lawn cemetery where he chatted to some of the morticians. Forest Lawn is the final resting place of hundreds of celebrities from the entertainment business.

The Loved One is a dark comedy, which tells the story of an Englishman named Dennis Barlow, who gets a job at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. A friend kills himself after being sacked by his studio, and Barlow is tasked with arranging his funeral, which takes him to the Whispering Glades funeral service, where he comes into contact with employee Aimee Thanatogenos, and her senior Mr Joyboy. There then follows a love triangle as Thanatogenos was in love with Joyboy until Barlow came along. However, Barlow has not been honest with her about what he does, and when she finds out this ultimately leads to her committing suicide, which she does by injecting herself with embalming fluid. Joyboy has Barlow help him conceal this by cremating her and interring the ashes at Happier Hunting Ground. Concerned about Barlow damaging the British community in Hollywood, his friends pay for him to return to England, and a rumour is started that he and Aimee have run away together.

The story was filmed in 1965, with Rod Steiger playing Joyboy.

So, elements which come from the novelette include the funeral parlour setting, the dark comedy this setting inspires, the similarly named senior mortician Mr Joyboy / Mr Jobel, and a death by embalming fluid. 

Thanatos was the Greek god of non-violent death, (brother of Hypnos, god of sleep), and Thanatogenos is a mixed Greek / Latin name meaning roughly "beloved of the race of death". The parallel character in Revelation of the Daleks is Miss Tasambeker, whose name comes from a monastery - Tsambika - which Saward found on Rhodes. This is where he also got the name Stengos.

Whilst on the island, Saward also came upon the Knights of Rhodes, who were the inspiration for the assassin Orcini and his Grand Order of Oberon (named after the Faerie King in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream).

The Knights of Rhodes originated as the Knights Hospitaller, founded around 1099 in Jerusalem to provide support for pilgrims going to the Holy Land. Their patron saint was John the Baptist. After the fall of the city to the Saracens they relocated to Rhodes around 1310, after briefly setting up their base on Cyprus. On Rhodes, the organisation became more of a military one, fighting against the Ottomans. They were eventually forced to leave Rhodes and set up a permanent base on Malta around 1530.

They are nothing to do with the Knights Templar, who were a rival organisation set up with similar aims - to protect pilgrims - and who were suppressed  in 1312.

Orcini's name derives from Orsini, one of the oldest Roman noble families, which has furnished a number of Popes (Celestine III, Nicholas III and Benedict XIII). They also furnished a Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. The name comes from ursinus, meaning "bear-like".

Orcini's relationship with his squire, Bostock, is inspired by that between Cervantes' knight Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. The character of Baldrick in the Blackadder series is also an inspiration for Bostock, certainly in terms of personal hygiene. As well as being a village in Cheshire, Bostock is also the name of a sweet pastry.

As with a lot of stories being script edited by Saward at this time, he obviously cares far more about the guest characters and their stories than he does about the regulars. Once again, we have to wait until the halfway mark before the Doctor and companion get even close to the main plot. Instead of being stuck in the TARDIS, as with Vengeance on Varos or Timelash, we have them on a lengthy diversion towards the action, as with Attack of the Cybermen or The Two Doctors. This might be because the script editor does not actually like this particular Doctor / companion pairing.

The other main inspiration for this story is the fact that it is the latest sequel to Genesis of the Daleks, in that Dalek stories now are following Davros' timeline rather than randomly jumping around the Dalek Empire. The story title carries on the biblical theme.

Last time we saw him, Davros was apparently victim to the same Movellan virus which was attacking his Daleks (the Movellan war first being mentioned in Destiny of the Daleks). He has been antagonistic towards his creations ever since they turned on him in the Kaled bunker. In the previous two stories he hated the whole concept of a Dalek Supreme, believing that was his role. He had begun to turn some Daleks and humanoids against the Supreme by use of some sort of injection which made them susceptible to his will. He escaped death on the Supreme's spaceship by using an escape pod. This was picked up by a freighter on route to the frozen planet Necros (Greek for "Death"), which houses a vast funerary complex - Tranquil Repose. Davros has taken over, and set himself up as its head (quite literally, as we're initially led to believe that is all that remains of him) as it offers plenty of genetic material to create a whole new race of Daleks which will be totally loyal to him. What he doesn't need, he sells to local businesswoman Kara for processing into a cheap foodstuff - thus raising funds for his real work.

Two funeral attendants - Takis and Lilt - have shopped Davros to the Dalek Supreme as they're not happy with what he has done to Tranquil Repose. This sets up a potential Dalek civil war - just as we saw in The Evil of the Daleks.

The notion of a glass Dalek first appeared in the novelisation of The Daleks in 1964, where David Whitaker had the leader Dalek in a glass casing. Designer Ray Cusick had originally wanted the Daleks to have a transparent outer surface under which would be placed lights and circuitry, but this was too expensive for his budget.

If the catacomb sets look impressive, it's because they were built for an appearance by Culture Club on the Kenny Everett TV show.

The Doctor finding his own tombstone was an idea thrown in by JNT. The location shooting was determined by its proximity to Southampton, where Baker and Bryant were performing in JNT's pantomime. There was a great deal of unexpected snow, which put paid to a planned stunt where a Dalek prop was to be propelled through the air - allowing our first sight of a flying / hovering Dalek. An in-studio attempt at a hovering Dalek failed due to dodgy camera angles and editing.

The Doctor is about to say something beginning with "B" before he is cut off at the end by a freeze-frame. This word was to have been "Blackpool" - the location of the story then planned for the start of Season 23. By the time of broadcast, however, that season had already been put on hiatus.

Next time: the show's on trial, so the Doctor goes on trial...

Fury From The Deep DVD Update

The cover and release date for the DVD / Blu-ray of Fury From The Deep have now been issued.

It is released in the UK on September 14th. There will be both colour and B&W versions of the animation, plus all the surviving clips and film trims - most of which previously featured on the Lost In Time box set. You can also enjoy the story via telesnaps with narration from Frazer Hines.

Apart from a new making-of documentary, "The Cruel Sea", that's pretty much it. 

This was Deborah Watling's final story as Victoria, and is the first of her stories to get the animated treatment since The Ice Warriors' two missing episodes back in 2013.

It's available to pre-order now.

Story 226 - The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

In which the Doctor finds himself on an alien spaceship which is about to attack and destroy the Earth. He sabotages the vessel but gets cut off from the TARDIS. He is forced to don a protective impact suit and leap from the exploding ship into space. he plunges to the Earth below, where is is found by a woman named Madge Arwell, who agrees to give him a lift to where the TARDIS has materialised. This is England, in 1938. Madge drops him at a Police Call Box, never seeing what he looks like due to the suit's helmet being on backwards. After she has gone, the Doctor discovers that it is a real Police Box and not his ship. Madge returns home to her family, where husband Reg is worried about rumours of war in the newspapers.

Three years later, Madge has just received news that Reg is missing in action. He was a Lancaster bomber pilot. She decides not to tell her children - Lily and Cyril - as she wants them to have one last happy Christmas before learning the tragic news. They have arranged to stay away from London at Uncle Digby's sprawling country house. Digby is away at the moment, and they are greeted by the Doctor, who is posing as the caretaker. He has made some adaptations to the property, including lemonade on tap and filling the rooms with toys and games. In the main living room is an elaborate Christmas tree, under which is a large blue box, which must not be opened until Christmas Day.

Madge admits to the Doctor that her husband is dead, but she has not told the children yet. 

That night, the curious Cyril decides that he cannot wait to find out what the blue box contains. He sneaks downstairs and opens the package - and discovers that it contains a tunnel. He crawls through and finds himself in a snowbound forest, under bright moonlight. Lily realises that her brother has gone and goes to the living room, where she meets the Doctor. He realises that Cyril has gone into the box, so he and Lily must follow and find him. The box acts as a portal to another planet, in the 54th Century. There is a temporal difference to the tunnel, so Cyril will have been on the planet longer than the few minutes since he went into the box. Silver spheres grow on the trees, and the Doctor catches a glimpse of a wooden figure in one. One of these spheres has hatched out, and they see massive footprints in the snow, along with Cyril's. Madge has discovered that her children have disappeared from their room, and searching she also comes across the box. She crawls through and arrives in the forest. Exploring, she comes across a large machine which towers over the forest on giant legs. She is confronted by its three person crew - Droxil, Ven-Garr and Billis. 

They explain that they come from the planet Androzani Major and their job is to harvest these trees. Satellites above this planet are about to cover the surface with acid to melt the forest down. Madge takes control over the harvester vehicle, determined to find her children. The harvesters teleport up to their mothership, leaving Madge to attempt to drive the vehicle. The Doctor and Lily, meanwhile, have followed the footprints to a tall tower. They see what appears to be a huge carved wooden figure of a king seated within. They go up the stairs to a dome at the summit, where they find Cyril with another carved figure - this one resembling a queen. She holds a circlet which she places on Cyril's head as he sits on a central throne. The wooden king comes up the stairs to join them. It appears that they figures cannot get what they want from Cyril. The acid begins to rain down on the forest and the Doctor and Lily see millions of tiny lights emerge from the trees. The harvester then arrives, driven erratically by Madge. It crashes to the ground, and she hurries into the tower.

The Doctor realises that the trees contain lifeforms which have animated the king and queen, to find them a means of escaping the destruction of the forest. They require a pilot to fly the dome from the top of the tower. Madge discovers that she is the ideal candidate for this, as she is a mother. The tree lifeforms enter the dome as it takes off. Madge longs to return to Earth and so this is where the ship travels. En route, she thinks of her husband, and in his aircraft - lost over the Channel and about to run out of fuel - Reg sees the sphere ahead of him, giving him something to aim for. The strange ship arrives outside Uncle Digby's house on Christmas morning, and Madge is delighted to see that a Lancaster bomber has landed nearby. She is reunited with Reg. The tree lifeforms have departed to a new home. That night, Madge goes to the attic to see the Doctor, and finds he has the TARDIS there. She realises that he was the spaceman whom she had helped back in 1938. She encourages him not to be alone at Christmas, and to go and find his friends.

The TARDIS arrives outside Amy and Rory's house, where his one-time travelling companions reveal that they have always kept a place for him every Christmas since they last saw him, two years ago, in the hope that he will visit...

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 25th December, 2011. It is Moffat's second Christmas Special, and once again its inspiration is a literary one - this time C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950.

The clue is in the title, obviously, but Lewis' story also deals with children evacuated from London to avoid German bombing, going to stay at the home of their uncle Digory. A magical wardrobe contains a portal to the land of Narnia, where time moves at a different rate to that back at the house. This story has a blue box act as the passageway to a magical planet - clearly a metaphor for the TARDIS.

C.S. Lewis's death was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK, one the eve of Doctor Who's first broadcast, and many have seen his story as a major inspiration for the programme, where the TARDIS acts like his wardrobe.

As with his previous Christmas Special, the Doctor is given a one-off companion by Moffat - something which RTD usually did as companions departed at the end of the previous season. Amy and Rory have not left the series yet, but they have stopped travelling with him on a regular basis and now live in the house he set up for them at the end of The God Complex. As such, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill only appear in the coda, set in the present day.

The companion role is primarily filled by Madge Arwell, played by Claire Skinner. She is best known for her long-running role in the BBC sitcom Outnumbered. She is separated from the Doctor for much of the story, so the Doctor also has to interact with Lily Arwell as a surrogate companion. She's played by Holly Earl, who was fresh from a recurring role in Casualty. Maurice Cole plays her brother Cyril.

Portraying Reg is the other main guest artist Alexander Armstrong. He had been voicing Sarah Jane Smith's computer Mr Smith for the previous 5 years, in The Sarah Jane Adventures as well as The Stolen Earth / Journey's End.

Other guest artists, who are wasted in what are little more than cameo appearances, are Bill Bailey, Paul Bazely and Arabella Weir, as the trio of Androzani harvesters. Bailey is a well known stand-up comedian, as well as being an actor, who first came to prominence in the C4 sitcom Black Books. Bazely is best known for a recurring role in ITV comedy series Benidorm, whilst Weir once payed an alternative female Doctor on audio. They are there to provide some comic relief, but unfortunately just aren't remotely funny.

The Wooden King is played by Spencer Wilding, who had played the Minotaur in the previous series (and who was the new Darth Vader in Rogue One), whilst the Wooden Queen is Paul Kasey.

The Special did have a prequel, which is in many ways more entertaining than the episode itself. This featured the Doctor on the alien spaceship (the species never seen or named, though they must be humanoid judging by the impact suit which the Doctor later uses). He calls Amy and Rory in the TARDIS for help, before remembering that they are no longer with him.

Overall, the weakest Christmas Special we've been offered. There's just no real threat. It's one thing to use something as an inspiration, but another to lazily make it more of a wholesale steal. We've said before how stories which focus more on children just aren't very popular. The DWM 50th Anniversary poll had this in 229th place (out of 241). It is the lowest ranked Christmas Special, and the second lowest rated Matt Smith story overall.

Things you might like to know:

• This is the only episode which features Karen Gillan (discounting The Time of the Doctor where she cameos only) not to have her name in the opening titles. That credit goes to Skinner.
• The 2012 Christmas Special will have a character named Digby - one of Clara's young charges. There is a fan theory that he grows up to be the Uncle Digby referred to here.
• Originally Lily Arwell was going to be called Lucy, after one of the Pevensie children in the Narnia stories. Moffat changed his mind as he thought it would show the inspiration too much, despite the story overall being clearly inspired by Lewis.
• Claire Skinner is married to director Charles Palmer, who has directed a number of Doctor Who stories from Smith and Jones to The Eaters of Light. Her father-in-law, therefore, is Geoffrey Palmer, who made three appearances in Doctor Who.
• As well as playing a female version of the Doctor, Weir was once David Tennant's landlady, when he first moved to London for work. He is godfather to one of her children.
• Bill Bailey, a long-time fan of the show, once composed a jazz version of the Doctor Who theme, which he called 'Doctor Qui'.