When Doctor Who Weekly began publication in late 1979, I wasn't allowed to buy it. It had been enough of an uphill struggle to secure regular viewing of the television series itself when Season Seventeen rolled around, after a chance encounter with "Image of the Fendahl" reduced me to a terrified, blubbering wreck a few years before.
So I decided to drop the matter, and bide my time. My mother's stated reason for denying the purchase of DWW, incidentally, was that I apparently required "a comic that will make you laugh". And so I was provided with a subscription to The Beano, which I honestly didn't find all that funny, and which probably accounts for me still being extremely wary of anything that claims to generate mirth.
Of course, I nowadays find much private amusement in The Beano's mindset during the late 1970's, which seemed much more at ease with the world as it was in the post-war period of the 1940's and 1950's, but that's another story for another day.
Doctor Who Weekly morphed into Doctor Who Monthly, and suddenly it was deemed worthy of purchase by my mother. (Probably because it wasn't a comic anymore. Comics are meant to make you laugh, remember?).
As I've no doubt mentioned before and at considerable length, No.45 was my first issue, and its contents are to this day seared deep into my mind, continually running under the surface of my daily life until the day I take my last shuddering breath.
Yes, it was that good, and here's what was on the cover...
And in a rather Pertwee-heavy issue, there was a "Top Secret UNIT Special Report" (ie. prototype Archive Feature with a rather charming narrative take) on "The Ambassadors of Death", which goes some way to explain why Serial CCC has a particularly special place in my heart.
There are other reasons why I'm so fond of "Ambassadors", of course. Caroline John's excellent hat being merely one of them.
Although solely credited to David Whitaker, the script for Serial CCC ended up being famously hacked around by no less than three other writers (Malcolm Hulke, Terrance Dicks and Trevor Ray) in and attempt to "make it work", and this fact alone seems to have doomed the serial in the eyes of the usual idiots over the years.
On the other hand, history has hinted that Whitaker was perhaps given the runaround by a constantly changing production team with no concrete idea of what they actually wanted.
Rather than viewing the situation as a failure, I'm rather taken with the Whitaker/Hulke mashup. By the way, did you know that the astronaut helmets were originally made for Hammer's exquisite "Moon Zero Two"? You did? Oh, please yourselves...
Another more famous bit of cost-cutting was the sharing of the Recovery 7 interior set (not the prop, as most people seem to think) with the production team of "Doomwatch". (The "Re-Entry Forbidden" episode from the first season actually exists and was finally released on DVD a few years ago, so you've no excuse not to watch it. Unless you really don't like "Doomwatch", that is).
I don't know if the cash saved on sets and costumes helped boost the budget for location filming, but Michael Ferguson gets an amazing amount of quality footage for his money. Apart from the oft-mentioned warehouse raid and capsule hijack sequences, there are plenty of other stunning exterior sequences on offer. Weirs, (actual) quarries and what to this day I privately refer to as "Season Seven Industrial"; tanks, pipes, and oil-soaked walkways.
Oh, and because it's Season Seven, UNIT is still a joyously believable security organisation here, consisting of people who look, dress and behave like proper soldiers, instead of the long-haired layabouts of later seasons who couldn't hit a Yeti while it was sat on a loo in Tooting Bec...
Ah, and there's the comedy Pertwee car. That's one legacy of Season Seven that I never like to dwell on too much...
But Serial CCC shines in the studio as well. Ronald Allen in particular is superb, and Michael Wisher's role as television presenter Wakefield (doing a James Burke and commentating on the technical aspects of the unfolding space programme) adds a verisimilitude that I don't remember the series having up to that point.
Even the alleged villain of the piece is noteworthy, being more misguided than evil. (An unusual occurance in the normally black-and-white morality of the series by and large).
That shot above doesn't work so well in glorious greyscale, and I've never been convinced you actually see that image in the televised story itself. Which is a shame, because it's pretty iconic, and reminds me of the other thing about this series that I am head-over-heels enamoured with...
RADIATION! RADIATION! AND LOTS OF IT!
It was all over the bloody place when I was growing up. (Well, not literally, but you know what I mean). In Marvel comics alone, the spider that bit Peter Parker was contaminated with it, Bruce Banner got a whole explosive dose of it, and let's not forget the origins of Doctor Octopus, the Sandman and, erm... the Radioactive Man.
Invisible and lethal, radiation was the bogeyman of the post-war nuclear age. (Yet it never featured much in The Beano. Go figure). So it's always nice to see it appear in Doctor Who again.
"The Ambassadors of Death" was the last Pertwee story to be novelised in the Target range, the last Pertwee VHS release and nearly the last Pertwee DVD to hit the shelves. The latter two are due to the amount of restoration the story required to recolourise episodes 2 to 7, and while not perfect, the DVD release is probably as good as we are going to get without chucking ridiculous amounts of money at a story many sadly seem not to rate too highly.
But whatever you may think of the neglected gem of Season Seven, it took Doctor Who Monthly No.45 to teach an exciting new word to an impressionable eight-year-old. (See answer to question 5 below...).
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