Oh, but you should have been there...

That's something no DVD extra can ever give you. What is was like to actually experience coming in from the cold on a Saturday evening in the 1970s, and grit your teeth while you waited for the interminable football results to end before the next thrilling episode of Doctor Who.

I was a very excited boy that Saturday, just after Christmas in 1972. Although I was enjoying running about in the snow with my friends at the local park, I couldn't wait for tea time to come around. My cheeks were burning and my nose felt numb from the cold when I finally walked into my Nan's house and took off my coat and gloves. It was almost THAT TIME.

I sat down in what I still thought of as my Grandpa's chair. This would be the first time I'd be watching Doctor Who without him and I was very aware of his absence. There was a gap in my reality that he used to occupy, and I was still trying to deal with it as best, and as bravely, as a boy who had only recently turned ten years old could.

My Grandpa would have loved The Three Doctors, not least because he had once speculated that it ought to be possible for a time traveller like the Doctor to meet himself. And here it was happening. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to see Patrick Troughton's Doctor back again, now in colour! You should have seen the Cheshire Cat smile that spread across my young face when the 2nd Doctor materialised in the TARDIS. No disrespect to Jon Pertwee, who I was also ridiculously fond of, but Patrick Troughton was MY Doctor - still is, in fact - and he was back for four whole wonderful weeks, hurrah! Believe you me, the gulf of time between the end of The War Games and The Three Doctors seemed incredibly long to me in 1972.

While the 2nd Doctor may not have been impressed by the TARDIS's new interior, I loved it. It's still my idea of what the inside of a TARDIS should look like, and that's the one that I would have replicated in my castle were I ever to win the lottery (unlikely, as I don't actually play it, but I can dream).

And then there was William Hartnell, whose Doctor was still a bit of a mystery to me in those pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-streaming days. My first encounter with his Doctor was a battered old annual belonging to a slightly older cousin of mine. But here he was in action - and by 'in action,' I mean talking out of a television screen hanging in the TAR...

Oh! My ten year old self has just materialised beside me with a very serious look on his face and he says I'm to call it the scanner screen. Sorry, little me... ah, he's gone again.

Well, anyway, there was William Hartnell being wonderfully crotchety on the TARDIS, erm, scanner screen, and I took to him immediately. Even in his all-too brief and sadly limited scenes, Mr Hartnell was every bit as magnificent as my Grandpa had said he was.

If there is one thing that I would try to impart to someone who wasn't there, back then, it would be the strangeness of seeing three incarnations of the Doctor together for the first time. Nowadays, multi-Doctor stories seem to take place every other week, especially at Big Finish (multi-Master stories too!). I know these events still feel special but I don't know if they feel strange any more. And I mean strange in a good way. it was a marvelous kind of strangeness watching Jon Pertwee and Pat Troughton both pop their heads out of the TARDIS door. The only other time I've felt that same sense of delightful strangeness was also in my childhood, when DC and Marvel got together to produce a Superman meets Spider-Man crossover. As a boy, I would hold that comic in my hands and spend ages just staring at the cover featuring the Man of Steel and Spidey TOGETHER! It was wrong and yet wonderfully right at the same time. Of course, since then, the two comic book companies have collaborated many times and such crossovers have become normalised; which means that example might not mean much to a younger person either.

Whenever I watch The Three Doctors, somehow, magically, invisibly, my ten year old self will materialize and he'll be watching along too. It's funny, but no matter how old I get, that kid is never too far away.

(Continuing my review of the Beyond War Games box set...)

In Wrath of the Ice Warriors, the TARDIS arrives in Scotland where the Doctor meets up with Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart, played brilliantly by Jon Culshaw. The story slots in nicely between The Web of Fear and Spearhead from Space, so the Brigadier is still relatively young. Now, entirely by coincidence, also for Christmas, I was gifted another Big Finish adventure set in Scotland and featuring Culshaw as the Brigadier, this time paired with Sylvester McCoy’s 7th Doctor. However, in The Grey Man of the Mountain, Lethbridge-Stewart is an older, wiser man at the end of his career post Battlefield. It was nice to contrast Culshaw’s portrayal of the same man at different times in his life. I’d never realised before, how much thought Culshaw puts into his vocal mimicry; it’s not just a party-trick he does with his voice, the man really is a genius. Listening to him talking (as himself) in the extras, it’s clear that Jon Culshaw feels a responsibility to get his performance right and honour Nicholas Courtney’s legacy. He succeeds in that admirably. Even though they are not designed that way, I’d recommend listening to Wrath of the Ice Warriors and The Grey Man of the Mountain back to back.

By the way, someone else who impressed me with their vocal dexterity in Wrath of the Ice Warriors was Katy Manning. I’d quite forgotten seeing her name on the box, and I actually listened to her performance in the story without realising it was her. Mind you, Katy’s impression of Omega in the talking book of The Three Doctors was nothing short of staggering, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.

At the beginning of Wrath of the Ice Warriors, when the 2nd Doctor realises that he’s in Scotland, he remarks that it’s a pity Jamie isn’t with him. I agreed. In fact, there was no reason at all why this story had to be a 6B adventure, it could just as easily have been set in the 2nd Doctor’s established continuity. Once again, I was left scratching my head wondering why Big Finish are going down the 6B route when not just Frazer Hines but also Wendy Padbury are still available for work. In fact, we already know that Jamie will be returning for these 6B adventures which, for me, makes the whole set up all the more pointless.

In a nutshell, Beyond War Games is deeply flawed but still enjoyable. It is the 2nd Doctor after all. Okay, Big Finish, I’m in. Let’s see where Bargain Bin Servalan (Raven) sends him next.

I’ve always said that, for me, the most traumatic regeneration in the history of Doctor Who was that of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor at the end of The War Games. Unlike other regenerations, we didn’t see one Doctor fall to the floor (or explode into a CGI firework display if you’re a younger viewer) only to sit up a moment later played by another actor. No, instead, my six year old self was left traumatised by the sight of a faceless Doctor spinning into the monochrome void. I then had to endure what, back then, seemed like a very long wait for the new Doctor to tumble out of the TARDIS the following year.

In the meantime, I kept up with the Doctor’s adventures in the pages of TV Comic, where, despite having been exiled to Earth in the 20th century, my hero still wore Patrick Troughton’s face. Well, that is until some scarecrows carted him off and gave him a Jon Pertwee makeover (don’t ask). Now, while I didn’t know about ‘canon’ in those days, I was sort of instinctively aware that the comic strips didn’t count (same with the stories in the annuals that I found under the Christmas tree each year). As far as I was concerned, the Time Lords had executed my Doctor and turned him into another fella. For me, there was no gap between Seasons 6 and 7. Some fans, however, didn’t feel the same way that I did, and Season 6B theory was born.

I was never attracted to the Season 6B theory as it seemed a lot of effort just to explain the fact that Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines looked older in The Two Doctors. Well, yes, of course they did – the actors WERE older! We, the audience, were meant to ignore that, surely? Not according to some Whovians, who decided that Troughton’s grey hair meant that the 2nd Doctor must have escaped his forced regeneration somehow and teamed up with Jamie again. I’m afraid that even when Terrance Dicks lent his support to the idea, I couldn’t take it seriously. So when Big Finish decided to fall down the Season 6B rabbit hole with Beyond War Games, I was initially resistant to follow them. While I normally snap up any 2nd Doctor adventure, Companion Chronicle or Short Trip that they produce, this time I decided to save my money. Okay, I’ll admit, I was curious, especially given that Michael Troughton would be stepping into his father’s shoes. If you’ve heard his narration of the Target novelisation of The Dominators, not to mention the audiobook of his own biography of his father, then you know that Michael does a spot on impression of his late dad (though, personally, I think David Troughton does a slightly better one). I tried to be strong, I really did, but then I received Beyond War Games as a Christmas present…and it would have been churlish of me not to give it a listen. (Please ignore any suggestions you might hear from my family that I was dropping hints left, right and centre that it would make a good gift.)

The box set contains two stories: ‘The Final Beginning’ and ‘Wrath of the Ice Warriors.’ In The Final Beginning, the 2nd Doctor materialises on a planet that is obviously not the Earth in the 20th century and is elated to find that his appearance hasn’t changed. At first he thinks it’s a Time Lord cock-up and he has escaped his sentence, however, he is haunted by strange snatches of dialogue that we, the audience, know comes from Pertwee’s first story, Spearhead in Space. I can’t tell you too much more about what follows because it would seriously spoil the story for anyone who wants to hear it. However, it is safe to say the story does follow the normal 6B speculation that it was the Celestial Intervention Agency that took a hand in pulling the 2nd Doctor from his own time stream and setting him up as a reluctant agent in their service. He’s also given a handler in the form of a particularly unpleasant Time Lady called Raven, to send him on his missions. Sad to say, rather than giving us someone interesting and mysterious in the mold of the Time Lords we saw in The War Games, Raven is a walking talking cliché of a character (think of her as a cut-price Servalan from Blake’s 7), and I quickly tired of her interventions. The story was…okay, but it suffered under the weight of trying to set up the framework for the 6B adventures.

What did I think of Wrath of the Ice Warriors then? To be continued...