Speaking of Ian Levine as we were in the last post, I am put in mind of his distinction in being the first ever private individual to actually purchase episodes of Proper Doctor Who from the BBC.
Now, I can take the piss out of Ian Levine as much as the next fan, but despite his many legendary and well-publicised quirks (and his admittedly amusing tendency towards mad paranoid ranting), Levine remains a colossus in the arena of recovery of archival material.
Some might say that many episodes held within the hallowed halls of the BBC would eventually have been catalogued anyway, and that Levine has exaggerated the impending destruction of much of what he claims to have saved from junking. But the fact remains that due to his sheer enthusiasm, connections and bloody-minded persistence, many Doctor Who episodes that we take for granted today may never have been winkled out of the hands of private collectors.
Whatever his personal faults, Levine should be a bit of a hero to anyone who has been arsed to read this far.
There, that's on the record. Now we can go back to taking the piss out of him...
In 1977, Ian Levine was indeed the first individual to actually buy episodes of Doctor Who direct from the BBC. So what precisely did he get for his £3,000?
U-matic copies of all six episodes of "Frontier In Space", that's what.
Now, there are many things to like about Serial QQQ, but I'm afraid it would never have been very high on my personal shopping list if I was given the run of the archive. But being fair to Levine, he was probably quite restricted in his choice. BBC Enterprises guidelines apparently forbade him from purchasing anything older than seven years, so that ruled out anything genuinely monochrome. And the state of the Pertwee holdings were probably pretty patchy by then as well.
But the actual mathematics of the deal make for pretty scary reading.
Doctor Who fans are well familiar with the economic concept of inflation and how it has been used to excuse many of the least-regarded aspects of Graham Williams' tenure as Producer. Nevertheless, it's a sobering thought to consider that adjusted for inflation. £3,000 in 1977 equates to £19,510.07 in today's money.
That's effectively £3,251.68 Levine paid per episode. (I've spent all of about 10 minutes online trying to determine the average budget per episode of Doctor Who in 1972, but soon got distracted. Drop me a line if any of you at home find anything interesting).
Today on amazon.co.uk, a new DVD of "Frontier In Space" will set you back a princely £12.99 excluding postage. (And you get a free copy of "Planet of the Daleks" into the bargain!).
Ian really should have hung on for a few years...
It's honestly not my intention to make Ian Levine look stupid here. (It's tempting, but I'm being very good and trying to resist). I'm just constantly amazed that technologies have advanced to such an extent that today you can probably download from the ether an entire six episode Doctor Who story in minutes and for very little money, or easily buy a real-life honest-to-goodness physical artefact to play whenever you damn well feel like.
To quote "Timelash", it's science... fiction!
Anyway, "Frontier In Space" is probably the classic example of the oft-used dismissive epithet "dull but worthy".
It's very worthy and very good, but even my most sympathetic reading has to admit that it has a tendency to drag somewhat, with the Doctor and Jo getting locked up, escaping, getting locked up again, being rescued, getting locked up and escaping again.
Or something like that.
Katy Manning there, behind bars while Roger Delgado looks on.
And Pertwee gets banished to the moon before he either escapes, is rescued, or gets captured by somebody else.
I forget which.
At this stage, I really wish there had been photos of the Ogron-Eating Monster in common circulation back in the day, so I could talk about that.
But there weren't, so I can't.
The Draconians are quite rightly recognised as being both a damn good costume and a realistic attempt at portraying a generally non-genocidal alien race that has an innate nobility but which can retaliate in kind when treated with suspicion or contempt. (Not the Japanese at all, then. No siree).
Pertwee famously loved their design, and quite rightly so. Their embassy is pretty bloody cool, too.
But Vera Fusek aside, probably the coolest thing about "Frontier In Space" is the Ogron Invasion of the Hayward Gallery. Nothing quite like some South Bank Brutalism to enliven a flagging six-parter, that's what I say.
Pertwee, Ogrons and concrete?
Surely worth £19,510.07 of anybody's money...
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