Aug 22, 2025
Wendy Padbury, Frazer Hines, Jane Sherwin and Derrick Sherwin talking about the sporran pull on the DVD commentary for The War Games
Commentary transcript under cut:
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Wendy Padbury, Frazer Hines, Jane Sherwin and Derrick Sherwin talking about the sporran pull on the DVD commentary for The War Games
Commentary transcript under cut:
just finished watching all 10 parts of the war games for the first time and… oh my god. one of the boldest, most ambitious, epic, and tragic doctor who stories of all time. i’m STUNNED. i can’t believe it took me so long to watch it, easily a new favourite, and without a doubt my new favourite patrick troughton story 🙏
The Hidden Truth 1.1 Cause of Death (16th July 1964); written by Martin Woodhouse; dir. Lionel Harris. Featuring regulars Alexander Knox, James Maxwell, Elizabeth Weaver & George Moon, with guests Derrick Sherwin & Ellen McIntosh, Dyson Lovell, Hamilton Dyce, Brian Badcoe & Stanley Lloyd.
“Well, I’d really like to know what you think - were those wounds caused by glass or weren’t they?”
A tramp stumbles on the body of a lonely old man, found, with a lacerated neck, close to his crashed car. Inspector Hollin (Hamilton Dyce) investigates and suspicion falls on the man’s son-in-law Roger Maitland (Derrick Sherwin), an ambitious, career-minded young man, putting strain on his marriage to wife Jean (Ellen McIntosh). The pair are beneficiaries of the victim’s £27,000 life insurance policy - money they’re badly in need of. Dr Mossford (Brian Badcoe), concerned by the nature of the lacerations, asks Professor Lazard and Dr Fox for help in establishing the cause of death. It looks like a straightforward car crash, so Lazard sends Dr Fox to take a look - but there are several different possible explanations and it turns out to be “more of a whatdunnit than a whodunnit” with “no simple solution”.
Initially scheduled for Thursday 9th of July at 8pm, The Hidden Truth was one of many ITV shows hit by a technicians’ strike. It was especially unfortunate as the original publicity & schedule details confused critics (and no doubt viewers), robbing the show of its allotted space in some papers. (The Guardian‘s TV critic, duly tuning in on the 9th, found themselves watching Our Man at St Mark’s & shrugged and left it at that.)
It was re-scheduled for the 13th, (three days before the second episode “The Shape”), but wound up going out instead of “The Shape” on the 16th July & causing further confusion. (IMDB, even now, gives its broadcast date as the 9th & its episode summary as that of The Shape!)
In the Daily Herald (July 17th), Dennis Potter found it better than he had anticipated, although thought that might only be because he’d just had to sit through HMS Paradise “the worst comedy show I have ever seen,” but “Even so, this drama about pathologists did not begin to live up to its billing as “the most unusual series ever shown on T.V”. It was as “usual” as a wet bank holiday...
A close-up of blood cells under the microscope gave us a reassuring flash of authenticity... But a drama series has to drag in irritating little irrelevancies to get us interested in characters likely to pop up again in the next episode.
About the same standard as No Hiding Place, this new venture fills an hour of screen time without making it seem like two hours. And that, by current ITV standards, must pass as a sort of praise.“
The Stage, on the 23rd, was still confused: “THE first of this new series last Friday [sic] was, for some reason, not the advertised episode, but with the same principal characters. The Hidden Truth is there to be uncovered, I imagine, by the Department of Forensic Medicine which forms the background of the series.
This was, on the surface, a fairly run-of-the-mill whodunnit by Martin Woodhouse, but it turned out that it was really more of a whatdunnit ... Alexander Knox was authentic and efficient in the part of Professor Lazard and James Maxwell looked splendidly scientific and full of authority as the forensic expert, Dr. Fox. As the young man suspected of murder, Derrick Sherwin gave a strong, well-defined performance, but Ellen Macintosh as his wife seemed constricted and stilted almost until her last scene.
Elizabeth Weaver was given little scope as Dr. Coliton, but perhaps she will have more consideration in later scripts.
Generally well directed by Lionel Harris, it was quite a promising production. When shall we see The Shape I wonder.”
Meanwhile, the Crewe Chronicle (July 25th) felt “the first of Rediffusion’s dabbles in forensic science… looked fairly promising, although” [the recent switch to 50 minute episodes for drama series evidently being a bugbear] “stretching it out for sixty minutes is rather like putting lead weights round the feet of the cast and then expecting them to rumba. But view on regardless, bearing in mind that all thirteen stories are pure fiction though they are presented with the documentary-maker’s eye for minute detail.”
[Edited 16 Jan 2022 for additional info from surviving clips now shown on Talking Pictures! \o/ Plus edited again to add screencaps of the clips.]
Two New ‘The Doctors: Behind The Scenes’ DVDs To Be Released
Doctor Who fans! Two new ‘The Doctors: Behind The Scenes’ DVDs featuring Patrick Troughton & Jon Pertwee to be released 7th Feb & 4th April. Get all the info here #DoctorWho @BriggsNicholas @timetravel_tv
These sets offer the definitive interviews with the production team who brought Doctor Who to life and sent you “behind the sofa”! The Doctors: The Pat Troughton Years Behind The Scenes Vol. 1 brings together six in-depth documentaries with the team who brought the Pat Troughton era of the show to life: Shaun Sutton (Head of Drama), Victor Pemberton (Script Editor) and Derrick Sherwin (Script…
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TARDIS crews: The early years (1963-1971)*
I’ve been thinking about how nervous some new Who fans must be during this time of change, and how it compares to previous upheavals.
They’ve never gone through a transition this huge in modern Doctor Who. But there are precedents. There were season-long arcs that interrupted business as usual. The Season 27 hiatus was originally meant to make room for a movie that took years to get off the ground. The return of the show was an opportunity to throw out a lot of things and start over.
Most of all, almost nothing remained the same for the start of the 1970 season. A Doctor had gone, and all his companions’ actors decided to leave with him. How could the show survive? Then as now, the producer (Derrick Sherwin, in consultation with his predecessor) realised it was better to steer into a skid than lose control. So the Jon Pertwee era opened with a bang.
For the first time:
We knew for certain the Doctor wasn’t human
We had glimpsed the Time Lords and Gallifrey
He stopped traveling in time & space; the TARDIS was crippled
He was exiled to Earth and lived among humans almost 24/7
His adventures took place on present day Earth
The Doctor had one female “assistant” instead of a "family" of 2-3
But he gained UNIT, a team of regulars and redshirts to call on
The Doctor assumed the male companion’s Action Figure role
He joined a human military organisation and was answerable to it
He became the Doctor crossed with James Bond: an eccentric older scientist fighting spies monsters with gadgets, a cool car, and martial arts
The sonic screwdriver became a regular feature
The MASTER MADE HIS DEBUT and was in every Season 8 story
The Doctor acquired a personal nemesis/Moriarty
And oh yeah, the show was now in colour
Imagine how much screaming there would be nowadays if a showrunner had taken that many chances at once! But look what came of it:
The Master. Time Lords. The sonic screwdriver. UNIT. Gallifrey. The Doctor/female companion dynamic.
Not bad, eh?
I’m not saying that Chris Chibnall will be as brilliant as the Season 7-8 showrunners were when they shuffled the deck, tossed it aside and grabbed a chessboard. But Doctor Who has survived only by remaking itself from time to time.
New Who has been around for ten years. The danger of stagnation is real. The Doctor has been falling more and more into a toxic-relationship rut with his companions, with Clara and Bill particularly, but starting as far back as Martha and Rose. They keep burning one another. That’s a disturbing pattern to get locked into. [ETA: I meant to write Donna not Rose, but I suppose even Rose’s wings were a bit singed by coming too close to the Doctor’s sun.]
So I can see why Chibnall has seized this opportunity— the departure of all the regulars at once— to try some new spin on the classic Who TARDIS crew, updating the old 2-3 companion “family” or team for the 21st century.
Change, my dears. Perhaps not a moment too soon.
*Seasons in photoset simplified. Until Jamie and Zoe, companions had always overlapped the beginning of the next season and/or the end of the previous one.
ok so besides from being an absolutely fascinating villain in general… the war chief is TOTALLY the master, right?????
Lost #DoctorWho: Is The Prison in Space as Bad as Its Reputation?
