Doctor Who Poster Magazine (1975)

One of the most popular items bought at the Doctor Who Exhibitions at Blackpool (where I bought mine) and Longleat, from May 1975 onwards, would have been a glossy poster magazine. It was produced by Legend Publishing and cost 25p.

A rather crudely drawn artwork cover featured a dinosaur, Draconian, Cyberman, Axon Monster and Giant Maggot, against a generic outer space backdrop. Tom Baker stared out from the top left corner, in a publicity shot from Robot. The Cyberman had been copied from the cover of the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special.

None of the creatures on the cover had featured in any of Tom's stories, however, and within the situation was only marginally different.

The four incarnations of the Time Lord were introduced on one page - with another Tom photo from that Robot shoot, whilst the first three Doctors were covered by a BBC image of the three actors taken together at the time of The Three Doctors filming.

Other pages contained some B&W images. Another Robot publicity shot, of Tom and 'Bessie' accompanied a short message from the actor. Beneath was a photo of the First Doctor from The Celestial Toymaker, with the title character and clowns Joey and Clara.

Of the next two pages of B&W images of monsters, only one came from a Tom Baker story - Sarah with the K1 Robot. The other images were of a Yeti (The Web of Fear), a Silurian, Sea Devils, Aggedor and Alpha Centauri (Monster of Peladon version).

There were a couple of full page colour portraits which did come from Season 12, depicting Field-Major Styre's superior with his distinctive spiked collar from The Sontaran Experiment; and the Vogan leader Vorus from Revenge of the Cybermen.

The publishers hadn't done their homework properly, and gave him the title "Vogan - Leader of the Guardians". This was a shot from rehearsals, in which David Collings isn't wearing his full make-up - the moustache and beard have yet to be applied.

Also from Revenge of the Cybermen was a large blue-tinted image of the titular aliens in the caverns of Voga.

When you consider that there were only 9 feature pages to this publication, with the other 11 taken up by the cover and the posters, a complete page was pretty much wasted with two large adverts. One was for a Dalek T-shirt, and the other was for a new horror poster magazine from the same publishers. (This was devoted to Dracula, and included a comic strip version of the recent TV movie version of Bram Stoker's story starring Jack Palance as the Count).

Of the posters themselves there were two of the Fourth Doctor - one full length and the other a head and shoulders shot (taken during the making of Revenge of the Cybermen).

Between was a group of four B&W images from Genesis of the Daleks, surrounding another Robot portrait shot of Tom Baker.

Interestingly, there were no images of Daleks themselves in the magazine, even on the artwork cover - presumably because they cost more to reproduce thanks to Terry Nation and his agent.

The same circular photo made for another full page picture - this time a piece of monochrome artwork based upon it, dubbed the "Portrait Gallery" - though comprising only this single image. 

I remember buying two copies of this magazine, as the first one I had cut up for its photographs. I kept a Doctor Who scrapbook then - the primitive ancestor to this blog you could say...

Next time - the superior full colour 1976 poster magazine.