G is for... Gorgon

Whilst trapped in the Land of Fiction, the Doctor and Zoe found themselves lost in a labyrinth where they were attacked by Medusa, the Gorgon. They saw the snake-haired statue come to life and advance towards them. The Doctor knew that the creature existed only as a myth, but Zoe felt compelled to look at her face. Recalling how the Greek hero Perseus had defeated the Gorgon using his polished shield, the Doctor pulled a mirror from his pocket and had Zoe look into that. The Gorgon then returned to stone.

Played by: Sue Pulford. Appearances: The Mind Robber (1968).

• In Greek myth there were three Gorgons - the sisters Medusa, Stheno and Euryale. They were the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Medusa appears in both versions of the film Clash of the Titans, in which Perseus is aided by the winged horse Pegasus. In the original Greek myths, however, Pegasus was only born after she was killed - springing from her dead body.

G is for... Gonds

A humanoid race encountered by the Second Doctor on an obscure alien planet. Generations ago, this world had been visited by another race called the Krotons. Their ship crashed and there were only two survivors - not enough to power the vessel, which required mental energy. The Gonds attacked the Krotons but were defeated, with a large area near the spaceship reduced to a wasteland where the Gonds were forbidden to go. The Krotons went into hibernation but their ship manipulated the Gonds' development so that they would provide the mental energy needed to replace the dead crew. Some science was denied them, in case it could be used against them. Each year, teaching machines would identify the two brightest students who would then be summoned into the Kroton ship. It was thought that they were transported away to the Kroton planet, but the Doctor and his companions had landed in the Forbidden Zone and they had seen that the students were killed after their mental energy had been drained. The Gonds were led by a man named Selris, but his position was under threat from a man named Eelek. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe rescued one of the students - Vana, whose boyfriend was Selris' headstrong son, Thara. The Doctor joined forces with Thara and a scientist named Beta to find a way to destroy the Krotons, who had been reanimated after Zoe had used the teaching machines. Beta and Jamie created an acid which would attack the Kroton spaceship, and Selris sacrificed himself to get a phial of the acid to the Doctor after he and Zoe had been forced by Eelek to hand themselves over to the Krotons and enter the vessel. The acid destroyed the Krotons and their ship, leaving the Gonds free to develop at their own pace.

Played by: James Copeland (Selris), Philip Madoc (Eelek), James Cairncross (Beta), Gilbert Wynne (Thara), and Madeleine Mills (Vana). Appearances: The Krotons (1968 / 69).

• This was Philip Madoc's first appearance in Doctor Who. Cairncross had previously played the character of Le Maitre / James Stirling in The Reign of Terror.

G is for... Golightly, Reverend

The Rev. Arnold Golightly was one of the guests at a weekend house party hosted by Lady Clemency Eddison. Guest of honour was the celebrated crime writer Agatha Christie. A series of brutal murders were carried out which mirrored plots from Christie's books, of which Lady Eddison was a huge fan. The Doctor and Donna Noble joined forces with Agatha to investigate, and discovered that the culprit appeared to be a giant wasp, which the Doctor identified as an alien Vespiform. It transpired that Lady Eddison, whilst a young woman, had lived in India where she met and fell in love with a man named Christopher. She became pregnant by him, but he was killed in a flood before the child was born. Christopher was really a Vespiform, come to Earth to study humans. He left her a beautiful jewel - the Firestone - which was really a telepathic recorder device. On her return to England, Lady Eddison had given the child up for adoption. The Doctor discovered that Golightly had been brought up in a children's home, and that he had recently managed to overpower a couple of thieves in his church. The Doctor deduced that this violent act had triggered his latent abilities. Lady Eddison's passion for crime mysteries had then been implanted into him through the Firestone. He was killing everyone who stood between him and a reunion with his mother. Agatha drove off with the jewel and Golightly gave chase in his wasp form. Donna threw the Firestone into a lake and Golightly dived in after it, drowning him.

Played by: Tom Goodman-Hill. Appearances: The Unicorn and the Wasp (2008).

G is for... Gold, Ed

Ed Gold was the second-in-command of Bowie Base One, the first human settlement on Mars. He was often criticised by the commander, Adelaide Brooke, even being blamed for things he wasn't responsible for. This was because he and Brooke had a past together. In 2059, when the base came under attack from the water-borne Flood infection, Ed was sent to prepare the rocket when Brooke ordered an evacuation. However, one of the infected crew - Maggie Cain - had got into the ship and she was able to pass on the infection to him. Ed then decided to sacrifice himself, blowing up the rocket on its launch pad.

Played by: Peter O'Brien. Appearances: The Waters of Mars (2009).

• O'Brien first came to prominence in the Australian daytime soap Neighbours. He appeared in Russell T Davies' second series of Queer As Folk, where his character was dumped by Doctor Who fan Vince when he couldn't name all the actors who had played the Doctor.

Inspirations - The Hand of Fear

We mentioned once before how the seasons of the classic era of Doctor Who did not conform to the pattern we see today, of significant events being saved for season finales or season openers. Other than the fact that the final story of each season between 1975 and 1979 was an extra two episodes in length, they simply didn't have season finales in the sense we know them. (It could be argued that the recent Series 11 didn't have a finale either, but that is more down to the last episode's relative weakness, rather than a lack of intent on the part of the production team).
William Hartnell handed over to Patrick Troughton at the end of the second story of Season 4, and all the companion departures / arrivals occurred mid-season throughout the 1960's. It was only when we got to the Pertwee era that companions bowed out at the end of a season - Barry Letts realising that the introduction of a new companion in the season opener was an audience draw.
When it came time for Lis Sladen to depart the programme, after a hugely successful three years, she elected to go part way through her fourth series - insisting she leave when her character of Sarah Jane Smith was still popular. It is believed the reason she did not go at the end of the previous season is that she still hoped that the proposed Doctor Who movie might still be made ("Doctor Who Meets Scratchman", which was co-authored by Tom Baker and Ian Marter, with input from its planned director James Hill).
So it is, then, that Sarah departs in only the second story of Season 14. The story is The Hand of Fear, and it is written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.
The story we got on screen was built on the remains of two rejected stories - both of which just happened to feature the demise of a regular cast member.

The Hand of Fear was originally going to be a six parter, designed to close Season 13. It would have been set in a London of the near future and was to have featured UNIT in a prominent role. The aliens were a race called the Omegans, who were a silicon-based lifeform. Society would have been seen to have collapsed, with UNIT fighting another military group loyal to the aliens. The story would also have seen the death of the Brigadier, as he flew a suicide mission to crash a 'plane into the Omegan mothership which was in orbit above the city.
Whilst Baker and Martin developed this storyline, director Douglas Camfield was trying to get his first writing commission on the series. He had earlier contributed a story set during World War II - provisionally entitled "Operation Werewolf". It didn't feature wolfmen, but was instead about a group of Nazis trying to invade Britain using a teleport device. Much earlier, Brian Hayles (creator of the Ice Warriors) had tried to get a WWII story commissioned, but the BBC of the time did not think stories set during the war were acceptable - the events of the conflict being too recent in the public's mind. (Jimmy Perry and David Croft had encountered the same opposition when they proposed a sitcom about the Home Guard in the late 1960's. They persevered, thankfully, and we got Dad's Army).
Obsessed by all things military, Camfield had a particular fascination with the Foreign Legion. He proposed a story set in a fort in the North African desert, to be called "The Legion of the Lost". Camfield had Sarah die heroically at the conclusion.
The one thing which Sladen did not want, however, was to be killed off. She did not think that this would be fair to the legions of young fans of her character.
Camfield's story never got beyond the storyline stage. He did not have any more to do with Doctor Who after this, moving on to other projects - one of which, appropriately enough, was a highly successful adaptation of Beau Geste for the BBC's Sunday evening classic serials slot, produced in 1982 by Barry Letts.

Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, meanwhile, were having serious reservations about the shape of the Baker and Martin script. Even the name of the aliens was a problem, as the same writers had already called the villain of their 10th Anniversary story (The Three Doctors) Omega.
The story was pushed back into the next season so that a virtual rewrite could be carried out, and the episode count was reduced to four. It was quite clear that the UNIT regulars had all moved on to other work by this point, so UNIT's involvement was dropped - even though the new version was still set in the present, and involved a situation in which the Doctor would normally have involved his old colleagues.
One of the only things left from the original story idea is that the aliens - now known as Kastrians - are silicon-based.
The new story sees the Doctor and Sarah arrive by TARDIS in a quarry-like landscape - only to discover it actually is a quarry this time. They get caught up in a rock blasting accident, and when Sarah is dug out of the rubble she is found to be clutching a fossilised hand - humanoid in form but many millions of years old. She is taken to hospital where Baker and Martin employ a joke where an intern thinks that Gallifrey must be a place in Ireland. They will use the exact same joke in another hospital scene in the next season. The stone hand is found to be living matter, rather than a bit of old statue, and it absorbs radiation to reconstitute itself. Sarah has held onto a blue crystal ring from the hand, and it exerts an hypnotic influence over her - compelling her to take the hand to a nearby nuclear power station. Baker and Martin had intended this to be the same power plant they had used in their very first story - The Claws of Axos - but the name was changed slightly from Nuton to Nunton.
Baker and Martin lived near Oldbury power station, and could see it from their homes. For research they contacted the station and were invited for a tour, and the authorities were more than happy for their story to be filmed there.
Episode One ends with the hand stirring to life.

This being the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, we can look to classic horror movies once again. "Evil" hands had featured in horror films since the silent era - usually versions of the story about a concert pianist losing his hands in an accident and having a pair transplanted from another man, who turns out to have been a murderer. The pianist then finds the hands taking over and he is compelled to go round strangling people. The Hands of Orlac is the best known example of this story. Conrad Veidt starred in a 1924 Austrian version, and it was remade by Hollywood as Mad Love in 1935, with Peter Lorre in the Veidt role. 1960 then saw an Anglo-French co-production with Mel Ferrer as Orlac. The source material is the novel Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard, published in 1920.
More relevant to this Doctor Who story are those tales of disembodied hands which go crawling around on their own. A well known example of this is The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), based on a 1919 short story by W F Harvey. It also features Peter Lorre. The plot revolves around the suspicious death of a reclusive millionaire, and the household of squabbling friends and relatives who want to get their hands on his fortune - one of whom may have murdered the old man. The classic scene is when everyone hears the dead man playing the piano in the middle of the night - but of course there is no-one to be seen when they go to look, and it is then found that someone has broken into the mausoleum and cut off the corpse's left hand. The hand is then seen crawling around the house by various parties.
In 1981 Oliver Stone directed The Hand, starring Michael Caine as a comics artist who loses his hand, only for it to take on a life of its own.
The ending to both these movies is left ambiguous, as the killer is found to be mentally unstable and so we don't know if the hand was real or just in his imagination.
However, the best known version of the crawling hand tale is probably that which belonged to Michael Gough, which sets out to get revenge on Christopher Lee in his segment of the classic Amicus portmanteau horror Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965). Peter Cushing is the tarot-reading stranger in a train compartment, who predicts dreadful things for his fellow passengers. Gough plays an artist whose work is trashed by critic Christopher Lee. Gough gets his own back by showing a group of works by another artist which Lee raves about - only to find they have been painted by a chimpanzee. His reputation belittled, Lee runs down Gough with his car, causing him to lose his hand. This then starts stalking Lee.
One final example worth mentioning is Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2, wherein Bruce Campbell is plagued by his own demon-possessed hand.

Back to The Hand of Fear, and the titular hand regenerates into the Kastrian Eldrad, who appears female but this is because of its connection to Sarah. Eldrad forces the Doctor to return her to Kastria. The planet is found to be a dead world. The Doctor and Sarah discover that Eldrad was actually a criminal, executed by her people millions of years ago, and she is responsible for the planet's devastation. Eldrad regenerates again into her original form - which turns out to be male. The Doctor and Sarah flee - leaving Eldrad to become king of a dead planet.
Sarah throws a bit of a tantrum and threatens to leave the TARDIS - and this coincides with the Doctor receiving a mental message from his home planet. He has to return to Gallifrey - and Sarah can't come with him. Baker and Martin did not write any of the closing TARDIS scene. It was written by Robert Holmes, but heavily reworked by Lis Sladen and Tom Baker themselves.
The Doctor drops Sarah off at her home in South Croydon - but she realises too late that he has brought her to the wrong place. Decades later, when Sarah returns in School Reunion, we will learn that she is actually in Aberdeen. The last we see of Sarah in this story is her walking off whistling Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me A Bow-Wow. This 1892 music hall song was written for Vesta Victoria. Like many seemingly innocent music hall songs it contains a lot of sexual innuendo - a bow-wow was a euphemism for a male member.
Sladen couldn't actually whistle, so it is director Lennie Mayne who you can hear. This was Mayne's last contribution to the series, as he died in a boating accident in May 1977. (His yacht hit a trawler in the English Channel in the dark. His body was never recovered). He uses actors he has employed in previous stories, also written by Baker and Martin - including Rex Robinson as Dr Carter, who had featured in both The Three Doctors and The Monster of Peladon, and his wife Frances Pidgeon, who had also appeared in The Monster of Peladon.
Next time: Gallifrey turns out to be a cross between Oxbridge and the Vatican, and the Doctor goes it alone against an assassin. Not just any assassin. A deadly assassin...

From Raxacoricofallapatorius With Love - SJA Comic Relief

In which Sarah Jane Smith and her young companions are working in the attic when an alarm sounds. They are visited by a small man dressed in business suit and bowler hat. He claims to have come from the Galactic Alliance to pass on thanks for all the help Sarah and her team have given to protect the Earth from alien threats. The man gives his name as Rhanius - or Rani for short. Rani Chandra points out that there are now two Rani's present...
He explains that he has just come from the golf course where he was playing Brucifax and Tarbulon, then presents them all with headwear which look suspiciously like deeley boppers. He pulls up a chair and begins to tell them a story about fork handles (one that would probably have been long and rambling, with many detours) but he is interrupted when they hear the sound of breaking wind. Rhanius claims that it must be the chair, but Sarah and her friends are not convinced.

Sure enough, Mr Smith identifies the newcomer as a Slitheen. The deeley boppers are activated and cause everyone to become frozen on the spot. K9 arrives, but Rhanius puts a wheelclamp on him.
Rhanius unmasks and reveals that he is going to steal K9. Clyde is able to turn on an energy reversal device attached to Mr Smith, and Rhanius finds that he is now immobilised and his captives are free. He is sent back to where he came from - presumably the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius...

From Raxacoricofallapatorius With Love was written by Clayton Hickman and Gareth Roberts, and was broadcast on the night of 13th March 2009 as part of the BBC's biannual Comic Relief telethon. (Hickman was editor of DWM between 2002 - 2007, and with Roberts has written a number of Doctor Who spin-off materials. He was also the DVD range cover designer until 2012).
It is a mini-episode (of 5m 10s duration) of The Sarah Jane Adventures, with comedy actor Ronnie Corbett as its guest star. The SJA team pretty much play it as they would a normal episode, whilst the script is littered with Two Ronnies references.
There is the two Rani's gag, and he was famous for his rambling anecdotes sitting in front of the audience. The "fork handles" sketch is without doubt the comedy duo's best known piece. Sarah says "And it's goodnight from him..." as Rhanius is teleported away - the line Ronnie Barker always closed their show on.
Corbett was also well-known for his pro-celebrity golfing appearances, where he would often be joined by  the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck.

Doctor Who has a history of association with Comic Relief going back to 1999, when a certain Steven Moffat wrote The Curse of Fatal Death, which starred Rowan Atkinson as the 9th Doctor - before he regenerated into Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Richard E Grant and Joanna Lumley.
Whilst the programme has always had links with the BBC's annual Children In Need charity event (going back to 1993's notorious Dimensions In Time), it would not provide another minisode for Comic Relief until 2011, when Moffat contributed the shorts Time and Space, although David Tennant had featured in a Doctor Who related Catherine Tate sketch for the 2007 event.
If any of the above references go over your head, just have a hunt around You Tube and you're sure to be enlightened.

DVD / Blu-Ray Musings

The Series 11 box-set in either DVD, Blu-Ray or Steelbook formats is already out in the UK. It has failed to dent the charts - coming straight in at No.80 in the official chart, before dropping down to No.90 this week. The set is due for release in the US in the next couple of days, and Amazon US has it listed at a discount price ($20 less than the list price).
I have to admit that I haven't bought it myself yet. I will wait and pick it up cheap later on - mainly because I am in no great rush to rewatch the series, and because I am currently rewatching the entirety of Doctor Who from the beginning and have so far only got to the mid-Troughton period - so I won't be reaching Series 11 for quite some time.
February 18th sees the New Year's Day Special, Resolution, released in the UK.

One week later we get the Season 18 Blu-Ray box-set. This I have already pre-ordered, as I have already bought the Seasons 12 and 19 sets.
Something else I will be buying as soon as it comes out is the animated The Macra Terror, due on 18th March. I will make do with the DVD version - don't see the point in buying animation in HD -  and I certainly don't want to watch a colour version of the story.
If you bought the DWM Yearbook recently you will have seen a feature on the Blu-Ray box-set releases. I was pleased to read that they will be releasing the first 6 seasons (the B&W / missing episodes era), as well as the colour ones - and they don't intend to leave them until the end.
My understanding is that the next two sets to be released after Tom Baker's final one will be the 10th, with Jon Pertwee's Doctor, covering The Three Doctors to The Green Death, and the 26th - Sylvester McCoy's final season (and indeed the final classic series season), comprising Battlefield to Survival.
The article got me thinking about what the Seasons 1 - 6 box-sets might look like. The two most complete seasons, as far as what's left in the archives is concerned, are William Hartnell's second season (Planet of Giants to The Time Meddler) which is only missing episodes 2 and 4 from The Crusade, and Patrick Troughton's final season (Season 6 - The Dominators to The War Games), which is missing 7 episodes.
Parts 2 and 4 of The Crusade exist as telesnaps, so could be released in that way alongside the off-air soundtrack, or they could be animated.
As for Season 6, the seven missing episodes comprise two from The Invasion (already animated for its DVD release) and five of the six parts of The Space Pirates. The latter poses a problem, as there are no telesnaps available for the missing five episodes and the story has very little in the way of photographic references - making animation nigh on impossible.
And what of Seasons 1, 3, 4 and 5? Well Season 1 is also very well represented in the archives. The only missing episodes are two from The Reign of Terror (already animated), and the 7 episodes which comprise Marco Polo. Six of the Marco Polo episodes exist as telesnaps, but the problem lies with the middle episode. It had a different director, who opted not to purchase these off screen images. However, unlike The Space Pirates, we have a wealth of photographic material from this story, so animation or representative images could be used to accompany the soundtrack.
Seasons 3 - 5 pose far greater problems, as this is where the bulk of the missing episodes are to be found, and fewer stories have telesnaps available.
Material currently available for Season 3 includes: Episode 3 of Galaxy Four (plus a 5 minute chunk of Episode One); Episodes 2, 5 and 10 of The Daleks' Masterplan; The Ark; Episode 4 of The Celestial Toymaker; The Gunfighters; and The War Machines. That's just three complete stories, plus 5 orphan episodes. As far as telesnaps are concerned, only The Savages has these.
From Season 4 we have: The Tenth Planet; Power of the Daleks (animated); Episodes 2 and 3 of The Underwater Menace; The Moonbase; The Macra Terror (animated); Episodes 1 and 3 of The Faceless Ones; and Episode 2 of Evil of the Daleks. That's four complete stories (thanks to animation in every case) plus 5 orphan episodes. Luckily, this time all the missing episodes / stories are covered by telesnaps.
And from Season 5 we have: Tomb of the Cybermen, Episode 2 of The Abominable Snowmen; The Ice Warriors; Enemy of the World; all but Episode 3 of The Web of Fear; and Episodes 3 and 6 of The Wheel in Space. That's 3 complete stories (4 if you count Web as being almost complete) plus 3 orphan episodes. Again, we have telesnaps for all the missing episodes / stories.
Enemy of the World got a Special Edition re-release, with extras, and I have been expecting The Web of Fear to get the same treatment, with the missing third episode animated.
I assume that more episodes will be getting animated - either complete stories such as they have done with The Macra Terror, or sets of episodes which will complete those stories which are partly covered in the archives. There is also that slim chance that other missing episodes are rediscovered.
It will be interesting to see just what the 1963 - 1969 Blu-Ray box-sets eventually look like.