Who Back When | A Doctor Who Podcast

We’re thrilled to learn that Doc herself listens to Doctor Who podcasts! * * * Abby McPhail, Cleo Proctor, and Shawna Thompson with excellent discernment have embarked upon that most noble of endeavours: a Doctor Who podcast, or increasingly Docpast, as Abby’s carefully curated collection of files on the Doctor begins first to corrupt and then to disappear. These aren’t the only lacunae opening in...

Join us for an evening of discussing, debating and flat-out fawning over the utterly sensational Eighth Doctor * * * The Eighth Doctor may only have had one movie, but he has undeniably carved out a niche in the time vortex all his own with myriad audio adventures , the odd appearance in NewWho ( The Night of The Doctor , The Power of The Doctor ), even popping up in The Five(ish) Doctor Reboot ,...

Doctor Who regenerates into a one-off on the little big screen and heads across the pond in our very last Classic Who review * * * Seven has dispensed with his companions to catch up on some light time travel-themed reading at Home Alone, but little does he know that a Phantom Menace is lurking in his old frenemy The Master’s funeral casket holding a Secret of the Ooze. Forced to make an emergency...

Countless plot holes, and two wasted historicals land this not-so-Special somewhere in the bottom-two of the Whittaker era * * * It was a dark and stormy night in the middle of the day on the road to Mandalay, when Shih Yang rocked up beachside with a writ for mayhem and unleashed an ancient ocean demon, all because keeper of the secret order’s secret secret Ying Wai had a chip off the old blockhe...

Having reviewed all the the Classic TV serials, we sit down with cocktails and a guest expert for a look back on the tragically brief Seeeeventh Doctor Era. * * * Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor only appeared in 12 Classic Doctor Who serials, but boy oh boy did he leave an indelible mark on the show. Having now reviewed this fabulous dozen, we are joined by perhaps the foremost expert in this par...

Happy New Year, Whittaker era! And how better to celebrate than with beefy beans and countless countdowns? * * * It’s New Year’s Eve 2021, and for the third year running Jeff’s done a bunk, leaving Sarah to pick up the pieces as the family always expects her to because she still hasn’t found a nice man to settle down with, and the odds of him being the guy standing across the counter from her hold...

The Master channels Salem to recruit a Rex Kwon Do class as human catnip. Dear God, Ace, get some actual friends! * * * In the very last serial of Classic Doctor Who, The Seventh Doctor and Ace finally return to Perivale only to find the town in a dismal state: stray cats maraud the back gardens; the local youth centre has been turned into a fight club; and most of Ace’s old friends have vanished...

Sweet Buttery Kablammos, we've been DocPasting for a decade!!! * * * Sweet Buttery Kablammos, we've been DocPasting for a decade!!! Thank you for lending us your ears, dearest Podcastland. We never would have made it this far without your friendship and support. Our journey down this temporal road is very nearly over, and we'll no doubt release a proper celebratory banter session to de...

Three Doctors, Time personified, and the undoing of pretty much every single character arc this season * * * Doc ducks where Tecteun stuck and tries her luck in triplicate, torn between being tormented by Smarm and Assured, reuniting with the TARDIS under Kate Stewart’s protection in Williamson’s tunnels, and with no possible justification also part-materialising on Karvanista’s ship, which she pr...

Zompires, Nicholas Parsons, and the most awkward seduction in Classic Doctor Who * * * Alan Turing really should have made a mad dash for the patent office, because World War 2 is coming to an end and some dude named Judson has ripped off the Enigma with his Ultima machine and is using it to not only decode enemy cyphers, but translate ancient norse inscriptions. The chap in charge, Commander Mill...

The Mummy Returns, The Serpent is the Plain Foe, and Indiyaza Jones and the Candle of Tomb * * * Three years have passed since Yaz, Dan and Jericho were Angeled back to the past, and she’s been Indiana Jonesing around the world with her new fam, trying desperately to hamfist a dotted red line composited onto a map into this episode’s b-plot. Bla bla bla something about the end of the world and tun...

An evolution-crazed diorama fan with a Neanderthal butler plots to take over the British Empire from his haunted mansion. And, wait, Ace was an arsonist?! * * * Perivale, Greater London, houses some dark secrets, many of them in one particular house that Ace had the misfortune of encountering in 1983. But that’s all in the past, well the future, as Doc’s current focus is most definitely on said ho...

Inter-dimensional Arthurian warfare, helicopter ear sanitation and a demon's wet mouth * * * Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart (Bagels to his friends) has been many things: a soldier; a hero; a skeptic; a teacher; and, as seen in this very serial, the world’s champion. But his greatest accomplishment is perhaps being the cutest (but dimmest) husband in the galaxy. He might have the...

Not wholly sensical, but probably the best use of Weeping Angels since Blink! * * * In the, it must be said, fate-tempting second iteration of the village of Medderton, November 1967 sees Professor Eustacius Jericho planning on helping out his percipient object of study Claire Brown just as soon as he’s gathered enough data to explain some fascinating psychic anomalies. Outside, young Peggy has go...

Doc and Ace appear on Ragnarok’s Got Talent and allegedly it's an allegory of Doctor Who itself * * * I’m reading this intro and I’d like to say… nope, the rapping stops right now! Ahem. The circus is in town and anyone who’s anyone is paying it a visit. Well, if you think a Vandal with a Batwing helmet or the World’s Most Annoying Fan are anyone that is. Of course Doc and Ace will be popping...

A temporal clip show that leaves a good few questions unanswered * * * Quicker than your run-of-the-mill multicoloured crystalline space nemesis can snap his fingers, Doc has leapt into the fray and undone last week’s cliffhanger. Her plan of action: to drag her new fam into a time storm, whatever that is. Suddenly everything goes out the window. Temporal cohesion, recall reliability, the kind of...

Les Visiteurs meets The Boys in Brazil with Cybermen and archery * * * We’re in South America in November 1988 and there are some nazis. That’s all we need to say about them, so let’s move on to Windsor in 1638. Lady Peinforte is having a whale of a time shooting some pigeons while she waits for a Mr Magoo-a-like to work out when some fancy shmancy comet is coming to Earth. This is no ordinary com...

A pluri-temporal tater invasion splinters the fam across history while the baddies provide time stream tech support * * * The TARDIS and its occupants are miraculously, some might say arbitrarily, thrown by the Flux into the midst of the Crimean War. You incorrigible cynic, obviously the Sontarans’ obsession with Japanese food caused some tempura residue to hurl Fam 2.0 to where the potatoes’ pilo...

Margaret Thatcher’s husband runs away with the baker’s apprentice and the indigenous species receives zero reparations * * * For reasons irrelevant to the story, the Seventh Doctor and Ace go to Terra Alpha, a human colony where the prevailing government decree is “don’t worry, be happy”, or else! The pink-wigged, laser-cannon-wielding ladies of the Happiness Patrol enforce this law, treating glum...

All in all, yeah, a pretty promising thrill-ride season opener * * * Since we last saw the Fam finally sloughing off its redundant half, Doc and Yaz have been whirling around the universe taking in amazing places, circus workshops, and Meanwhile , in Liverpool in 1820 Joseph Williamson is compelling the multifarious unfortunates of the northwest to come on inside his tunnels to nowhere, because Me...

Doc Fluxes Skaro in the final Dalek story of Classic Who * * * Doc brings Ace back to 1960s London to see famous Whovian sights like Coal Hill School and Foreman’s yard, and to pick up the stellar manipulator he happened to have left lying around by mistake. He’s not the only one after it, though. Far from it! Two Dalek factions are at war and one of them has decided that having a stellar manipula...

After Captain Jack breaks Doc out of not-Shada, they team up with the Scoobies for one last adventure as a fam * * * After the events of Resolution (of the Dalek) , as the Fam obliviously indulged in 007-themed shenanigans, the corrupt half of the two people working at GCHQ handed the remains of the Reconnaissance Dalek to Mr Big of Spiders in Sheffield fame. Similar to GCHQ, captain of industry J...

The 3,000-year-old supervisor of a shopping mall uses a hypnosis doubloon to recruit henchmen in a serial that channels iconic moments from 80s cinema. * * * Oh, you lucky, lucky people. You’re about to learn of the time when Doc and Mel bumped into Sabalom Glitz on a space trading colony. Well, it was more like a freezer warehouse with a cafe. The fact it has a cafe is strangely important because...

Doctor Who is Redacted and we're told Doc was The Chosen One all along * * * Transported through the boundary gateway to a post-apocalyptic Gallifrey, The Master imprisons The Doctor inside the Matrix, where he sets about rewriting six decades of lore, carefully crafted by generations of BBC writers, by way of a retconning drinking game. Regeneration, we learn, was spliced into Gallifreyan gen...

A monarch fleeing genocide hides among alien tourists at a Welsh Butlin's where no one reacts to her green baby * * * Landing on a super interesting space station, the Seventh Doctor and Mel B win a free trip to 1959’s Disneyland which elicits in said companion an inordinate level of exuberance. Thus, with a legitimate reason to adhere to budget cuts this week, off they plop to our part of the...