Having completed Edge of Destruction, I was thinking about which story to do for my Fiftieth Fan Edit. Tenth Planet was one of those under consideration and I had a look at it to see what could be done with the story. That turned into me actually editing the thing and it becoming Fan Edit #49.

The Moonbase is a better version of the same story, but aside from all the other claims to fame the story has, it`s arguably Doctor Who`s first BUS story – Base Under Seige. Only trouble is the Cybermen have to attack twice in order to pad the story out to four episodes! If I could I would have condensed both attacks into one but the latter has too many references to the rocket so I simply had to resort to cutting back the bits in between to the bare minimum.

Hartnell is absent for episode three – knowing actors as I do, I suspect that was probably due more to being in the huff at being replaced than being genuinely unwell – but here he just has a bit of a wobbly rather than getting packed off to one of the soldiers` bunk beds for a bit of a kip. And speaking of Soldiers, it`s a great pity that Sergeant from Brooklyn snuffs it so early on, I would have liked to have seen him make it to episode four. And maybe come back as part of the Cyb`s second attack, totally de-humanised and partially converted. Shiver!

And that`s the real shame about this story, quite aside from it`s notoriety for all the reasons we all know. The themes and motifs are there but the story doesn’t have nearly enough of the “You will be like Us” stuff that would make the Cybs such a memorable monster with Bill`s successor. It`s all so underplayed that you almost miss it and it`s a shame they emphasise the invasion fleet instead. And as for Mondas absorbing too much energy and melting and the Cybs being dependent on that energy in the first place, well that`s all a bit bollocks and easily on a par with the Daleks` plan for a Planet With A Bloody Big Engine In It.

Whilst you can`t do that much with the bonkers plot there are nevertheless several fixes in this Edit, including slowing down Mondas` speed of rotation, adding in the Tardis Landing sound effect, adding a sound effect for when the Cybermen knock out Cutler and having the Doctor hearing Ben & Polly knocking to get into the Tardis. There are also some additional music cues from the Tenth Planet music CD they put out a few years back to help move things along…

I`ve often wondered if  Tenth Planet would be half as interesting if all four episodes existed. It`s a pretty poor show, even by the B-Movie standards of the Fifties and regarding as the Doctor Who equivalent of Plan Nine From Outer Space is maybe a bit harsh. But not much. The regeneration [thank God for that 8mm footage!] has been tweaked slightly – watching the original it`s clear that Pat is a little bit further away from the camera than Bill, resulting in a noticeable mismatch which spoils the intended effect. So for this FE I`ve zoomed in on Pat a bit just to give a better match between the two faces.

I utilised as much of the 8mm footage from episode four as I could and tried where possible to improve on the original reconstruction of part 4 that they put out on the VHS release, which this footage is taken from. I`ve knocked up a few composites a la Loose Cannon that I think fit better with the telesnaps than  photos from An Unearthly Child! In other places I`ve taken footage from the other existing episodes and used that to plug the gaps, with various clips being slowed down or flipped where necessary. I`ve tried to use clips that match the soundtrack and sync as much as possible. Some work better than others but on the whole I think  it works and I`d rather that than just repeating the same telesnaps again and again.

Like Death to the Daleks, when they finally release this on DVD [with the animated episode four], I`ll go back and redo the whole thing again.

As for the Cybermen themselves, they`re a bit of a crap design – I much prefer the Moonbase versions. They never use that ruddy great lamp on top of their heads for a start and the sellotape holding their helmets together is really obvious even on VHS – gawd knows how bad it`ll be once this gets VidFire`d. But the worst thing about them is those bloody awful voices! Fixing them was the most satisfying part of the whole edit, involving chopping up each of the sound files to remove all those elongated vowels and stretching the resultant clip to lower the pitch of the voice. Like the rest of this Fan Edit, the result isn`t perfect but it`s still a damn sight better than the original!

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We all know the Dr Who version of the old lift gag – so you’re stuck in a lift with Mel and Adric and you’ve got a gun with only one bullet. Who do you shoot first? Answer – yourself!

The decision to replace the shagtastic Nicola Bryant with Bonnie Bloody Langford has to be filed under “WTF was JNT thinking?” – which is probably the thickest file in Andrew Pixley’s collection. She’s not the worst thing in the story but she comes bloody close. That dubious honour has to go to the script, which has some of the worst dialogue you’ve ever heard. And when that dialogue is spoken by an “actress” with a voice like nails down a blackboard whilst biting on silver paper, you know you’ve got a real Fan Edit Challenge on your hands!

The answer of course is to cut Mel out of the story as much as possible and only leave her with lines if there’s no way you can get rid of them. The story itself isn’t too bad and it`s got the late Yolanda Palfrey in it – second only to the aforementioned Nicola B in the shaggability stakes and with a nice bit of VPL on display too.

When it came to Part Two and on I decided to include the continuity recaps from the original TX of the story. I remember enjoying these at the time and wondering why they’d never been done before. Again, all the episodes came out quite short by the time all the cuts had been made, making this FE more akin to Mysterious Planet than Mindwarp. The 71 Edits of the four episodes – all the scenes on the ship, no scenes in the courtroom – were seven, seven, four and six minutes longer respectively than the downloadable 72 Edits. That`s quite a bit shorter by the time I’d cut out all the padding and as much Mel as I could, particularly from the first two eps…

With the release of this story, the fan edited Colin Baker Era is almost complete, with the singular exception of the Trial itself. I think it’ll be a while before I tackle that one!

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Okay, here are the results!

@ #1 - with 10 votes each it`s THE TENTH PLANET and INFERNO  

@ #2 – with 8 votes it`s LOGOPOLIS 

@ #3 – with 6 votes each we have THE INVASION, THE SEEDS OF DEATH, THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH, REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN, THE DEADLY ASSASSIN, MAWDRYN UNDEAD and  TIME AND THE RANI 

@ #4 – with 5 votes each  we’ve got  THE POWER OF THE DALEKS, THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS, CITY OF DEATH and CASTROVALVA

@ #5 – with 4 votes each it`s ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN and VENGEANCE ON VAROS

@ #6 – with 3 votes each it`s DAY OF THE DALEKS, INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS, THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN, ARC OF INFINITY and TIME AND THE RANI

@ #7 – with 2 votes each it`s PLANET OF THE DALEKS and THE AWAKENING

and bringing up the rear

@ #8 with only one vote each we’ve got THE SPACE PIRATES, COLONY IN SPACE, FRONTIER IN SPACE, THE SEEDS OF DOOM, THE ROBOTS OF DEATH, THE VISITATION, THE KING’S DEMONS and DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN

We will start uploading these, beginning with most popular ones first, starting next Friday, the 24th of February 2012 with The Tenth Planet!

Poor old Colin Baker – a potentially great Doctor sabotaged by a combination of circumstances and individuals who had neither his, nor the show`s best interests at heart. His performance in Twin is fantastic and as an actor, he gets to do some great scenes. Shame it`s all stuff that simply doesn`t fit the character of the Doctor.

Amongst John Nathan-Turner`s more bizarre decisions was placing Colin`s first story at the end of Season 21. Not only did that rob the show of the resultant publicity that comes from the build-up to a new Doctor, but putting it at the end of the run seems to fly in the face of budgetary logic – season end, no money left = cheap story. Not the best way to intoduce a new Doctor. Great shame and sadly, a taste of things to come.

Back in 2009 when I first did this Fan Edit, I wanted to achieve two things: first, reduce the amount of screen time the twins have to an absolute minimum. [another bizarre decision - ok they`re twins, but they don`t have to be identical or played by actual twins John!]

Second, to edit out all the nasty/cowardly/shouty/unstable bits that they had Colin do. Don`t get me wrong, great performance luv. It`s just in the wrong show.

This first version came out at just under 50 minutes and it was one of the earliest Fan Edits I ever did. In fact I think it was #3. And, looking back at it recently, it showed.

In a way the loss of Megaupload is a blessing in disguise. If it weren’t for the site going down the tubes I wouldn’t have had to re-upload all my stuff to Rapidshare which in turn means I wouldn’t have had the notion of re-watching some of my early work. Of course the danger is that you will see things you want to change – the old “I wouldn`t do it like that now” routine. As I watched it again, this story was full of moments like that.

I`ve learned a lot since doing the first edit of this three years ago and I wasn’t all that impressed with it when I saw it again. I knew I could do a much better job now and so I decided to go right back to the beginning and start all over again, using the original 2009 edit as a guide track.

The first major difference in the new version is that I`ve included a reprise of the regeneration from the previous story. It`s slightly different from the TX version and I won’t spoil it for you here but I think you’ll like what I’ve done with it. It`s now a great start to a New Doctor that makes you look forward to what comes next, something that sadly cannot be said about the original! To give you an idea of the work involved, and it how it all cut together, here`s a screengrab of the editing of this sequence -

I always thought it strange that Colin`s era started without the same sort of recap that Peter`s did so it`s here now. It also makes a bit more sense of Colin`s first TARDIS scene with Peri, which now comes straight after the credits. In the 2009 version the initial scene with Azmael arriving on the Freighter came first but with the regeneration at the top of the show now that no longer worked.

The other big difference is that I`ve used a lot more additional sound cues to help cover the joins between scenes. That was one of the major problems with the 2009 version, you could tell where a scene had been cut out as there was no music cue covering it. Twin is one of the few JNT stories with no Isolated Music Track on the DVD so for this updated version I`ve used cues from the next story Attack of the Cidermen, mainly because they`re by the same composer, Malcolm Clarke.

This was the first FE where I used the now familiar version of the Theme Music. I was really proud of it at the time as it`s a mix of the Howell & Derbyshire mk2 versions, meaning the former had to be pitch-shifted down to fit. I really liked it and I think this combination of the two works much better than the original Howell version.

Comparing the two versions, I`m as pleased with this one as I am embarassed by the old one. It just goes to show what an additional three years of experience can do. Okay so it was one of the earliest FE`s I did but can I please just ask, if you`re one of the 192 people who downloaded the old version, can you please bin it and download this lovely new version instead? Apart from anything else, it`s a full ten minutes shorter!

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The Time Meddler is an important story in the history of Classic Who, but one that often gets overlooked. At the time, for anyone who had followed the show since the beginning, the revelation that the Monk has a Tardis too must have been, in its own way, as big a shock as regeneration would be a year or so later. As the first pseudo-historical, it`s only other real selling point is little Peter Butterworth from the Carry On films as the Monk. Butters does a nice little turn as the “villain” of the title but old Monky lacks any real menace. But then again perhaps that`s the point – he`s a little kid playing soldiers, only these ones are flesh and blood, and he never considers the consequences of his actions. Or maybe he does but doesn`t care, making him a much bigger villain than he appears…

Either way, when it came to the Fan Edit, I had to resist the temptation to keep scenes in just because old Monky was in them. But if anything, when I watched back the 71 Edit I felt, like this Edit`s predecessor The Chase, that I`d cut the story back just a bit too much and had to re-instate things I had initially cut. But you can`t always tell that you really do need something you thought you didn`t until you view that whole project. Here`s just one example to illustrate what I mean;

when the Dr, Steven and Vicki get untied by Edith, she says they would never have worked out the Monk was a spy without the Dr`s help. Well, that line occurs slap bang in the middle of the scene, so there`s no way you can edit round it. In the 71 Edit I left out the scene she is referring back to for timing reasons. But watching it back, I realised that her line didn`t make sense, so I had to reinstate the scene. That`s one of the enjoyable things about Fan Editing, working out exactly what you do and don`t need to make sense of the story. And sometimes you catch yourself out and forget you`ve left in a reference to something you`ve cut, only to realise that you need it in after all.

The other thing to watch out for is not to get hung up on timing. Sometimes I have to remind myself that these Edits don`t all have to be between forty-five and fifty minutes; you have to let the story tell itself at its own pace and not get hung up on how long it`s taking.

When it came to the end credits, in the 71 Edit I didn`t use the spacey-facey ending of the TX version but on reflection, I decided to put it back in but with the order reversed so that Hartnell came up first. And, since this is the last complete story for quite a while, I thought it a nice touch to add in the Next Caption for Galaxy Four – they had announced the recovery of the third episode, Airlock, a few days before I finished this edit. The end sequence involved reversing and changing the timing on the Space Face shot and redoing the Tardis takeoff as the TX one is still a bit unstable. Completely unnecessary but it`s a nice little sequence and very staisfying to do.

And if you`re wondering, the music cues are from Track 25 of that Space Adventures CD they put out a while back…

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Edge of Destruction is a story that never quite lives up to its potential.

You have to wonder what on earth David Whitaker thought he was on about in the first episode in particular – none of that concussion/confusion stuff really works and it`s only really when we get to the melting clock face that part one gets remotely interesting. Which is a real shame because, as Nigel Robinson`s far superior novelisation proved, this is a story that could have been really creepy instead of really crappy.

Essentially it`s a “stuck in a lift” story but one where nobody talks to each other. If it were being done today there would be “character” moments in between the action, like there were in “Father`s Day”. But Whitaker completely misses that opportunity, leaving out the one thing you would have thought he would have taken advantage of with only the regular cast and the Tardis set to play with.

The other idea he could have played up more is that of the “ghost story”. The whole notion of something having got into the Tardis, playing on the characters` fear of that and them letting their imaginations run away with them, would have been a much better way to fill a two episode gap in production.

Shadowy corridors would have been very cheap to do, just requiring a recording break to move the Tardis wall flats around. But they missed that opportunity too. The whole story is something of an open goal that nobody seems quite able to score from, which is a shame. Yes, the hurtling back to destruction thing is a nice idea but due to a stuck switch? [Maybe that`s why this particular Type 40 was already an antique when the Doctor “borrowed” her.] And it was done better in “Castrovalva” anyway…

So as far as a Fan Edit of the story goes, what the hell can you do with it? Well you can cut out as much of the clunky dialogue as you can and some of the Doctor`s nastiness toward Ian and Barbara. This is the story where they stop mistrusting each other and all get on so it pays to try and emphasise that more. The whole thing is so involved, and of course there`s no subplot to cut away to, that it was simply a case of cutting lines wherever you could to move things along.

I`ve replaced all the pictures on the scanner as they were a bit naff even for 1963 and done what I could with the Tardis doors to disguise that, despite what Susan may say, beyond them is nothing more threatening than a 1960`s TV Studio. Either that or they`ve arrived in The Land of Fiction a few years too early and don`t realise it…

There`s a curious lack of atmosphere in what could and should have been a very atmospheric production so that was my cue for lots of atmospheric, creepy music [you will recognise the composer straight away]. If only they`d had tone meetings back in the old days, “creepy” would undoubtedly have been the word they should have chosen for what could so easily have been the Hartnell equivalent of “Midnight” with a bit of “The Doctor`s Wife” in there too…

Please bear in mind that Rapidshare delete files that haven’t been downloaded for thirty days, so if it`s not there that`s why!

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Next…

I`ve taken a few days out to think about where we go from here with Dr Who Fan Edits. They seem to be fairly popular judging from the amount of downloads they had and clearly some were more popular than others. But I think from now on things will certainly need to be much more low key.

As far as an alternate host to Megaupload goes, I’m thinking of Rapidshare. Unless anyone out there knows of a better alternative?

The last time I checked before Mega`s demise, An Unearthly Child was the most popular edit with 251 downloads, next came The Twin Dilemma with 192. The least popular edits had about 30 downloads apiece but there was quite a broad range and most Edits had somewhere between 50 to 75 downloads. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to let me know what they thought of them.

`Cos the thing is, of the 250 people who downloaded AUC, not one person bothered to post a comment on it. That’s a bit strange to me. And of the 90-odd who downloaded the final episode of The Five Doctors, nobody pointed out that I had let two errors slip into the final edit. Okay, I know most people grab stuff from the Net without saying thank you but I really do appreciate people’s comments and a bit more positive support wouldn’t irretrevably damage my ego! To those of you who have taken the time to post kind comments, thank you. You make it worth doing. And that’s the real point.

I do these Fan Edits for my own personal pleasure and I decided to share them with my fellow Fans in the hope that there might be others out there who shared my point of view. I realise it’s not everybody’s cup of tea and that Dame Levine in particular holds the entirely opposite view but in all the time prior to Mega`s termination I only ever had one nasty comment from some twat who didn’t like my edit of Revelation. Which was a complete waste of both his time and mine.

So I`m basically asking for your views on what I should do next.

Carry on as normal elsewhere? Probably.
Call it a day? Doubt it.
Share the files with a smaller list? Maybe.

Your views really do count and will help me make up my mind as to what I do next. See you back here in a week!

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With thanks to Combom for the heads up!

As fans, we long for every Doctor Who story to be a classic. The reality is that for every End of Time or Androzani you get the occasional Fear Her or Meglos. Good job then that we’ve got Fan Editing to try and make up the shortfall. Of course, you can’t turn a leaden script into TV gold, but you can do what you can to make each story as watchable as possible. Utimately, you`re trying to come up with a version that is actually enjoyable to watch and with this one, I think I might just have succeeded…

Meglos is a curious little clunker. Curious because it stands out like a sore thumb in Season 18 because it`s so very Season 17 and comes across as a script that was held over even though it wasn`t. Little because, apart from Part One, the rest of the episodes are really short, hovering around the 20 minute mark. And if you`ve ever seen it, the Clunker part needs no explanation! But a naff idea, a duff cast and a poor script pretty much sums it up.

In DWM`s The Mighty 200 it came in at 188 [one place above The Horny Nimon, which I`ve also FE`d] but I`ve already done the story which came bottom of that poll and that turned out ok so there`s hope for this one too!

It`s one of those stories that you really have to be in the mood for; one of those ones that you watch with a drink, or after several drinks. Back in the day, I needed a drink myself after all the changes JNT had introduced with the preceding story Leisure Hive. I was probably still too much in shock for the Stunt Casting of Jacqueline Hill to make much of an impression on me. And of course, it was after the TX of episode 4 that the news broke that Tom was offski.

Before I started I knew that all that Chronic Hysteria bollocks was the first thing that was going to be cut. That meant placing the emphasis in the story on Meglos instead of the Doctor. It`s always a good rule of thumb that the longer it takes the Doctor to get involved in the story, the worse that story will be. Well, much like Revelation of the Daleks, the Doctor doesn`t join the story until halfway through the second episode. So sticking with Meglos as much as possible made sense.

This approach at least let me keep most of the Gaztak sequences, which are at least honestly comedic as opposed to the Tigellans, who are cod trying to play straight. [but to be fair to the actors, their dialogue doesn`t really allow for any other approach...]. So we start with the Gaztaks arrival on Zolpha-Thura, only cutting away to the Tigellans when we have to. The arguing in the debating chamber scene sums up the entire Religion v Rationality conflict much better than any of the other scenes before it. I couldn`t not include Zastor`s “threads” comment as it`s the only memorable line in all four episodes.
The only other memorable bit of the story is that music cue where Meglos creeps about the Tigellan city. It was included on that “Dr Who – The Music” LP back in the early eighties [20th anniversary was it? 1983?] and was one of four LPs every Who Fan had to own – Genesis, Pescatons & Sound Effects being the others. As a result, if you`re of a certain age, you`ll know it off by heart. That means you`ll notice that I`ve cut it down slightly as I couldn`t leave it aout altogether but still wanted to tighten up that sequence to remove Tom`s rather naff reaction shots. It took me a while to work out how to reorder the footage to make it work.

Other places where footage has been moved about include the screen where the Chronic Hysterical Rectum plays out – I used a shorter loop – and the end where I radically reordered the material to improve things. I really wanted to avoid having to show a slimy bit of green carpet being pulled along on a string. But how else to convey the idea that Meglos is going back into his own body? The answer was to use a reverse of the initial sequence where Meglos takes over the Earthling so now the cactus re-inflates, giving the impression that Meglos has somehow transported himself back into his body.
Meglos will always be a clunker but this Fan Edit does improve things considerably. I`ve avoided all that Chronic Hysterectomy nonsense and a lot of the other padding in the story – which is why it comes out as our shortest Fan Edit yet at just over half an hour. Yes, exactly. There`s so little plot in these four episodes that you can cut the whole thing back to the equivalent of just one episode and lose nothing, not a bloody thing.

Flanagan & McCulloch never wrote for Doctor Who again. No surprise there. What is surprising is how the hell they managed it in the first place! I mean, I know they said they were desperate for scripts but what the hell was Bidmead thinking of? At least now it will only take you half an hour to watch Meglos and thanks to this Fan Edit it`s one episode that doesn`t take itself too seriously. Instead of four episodes that make you want to hide behind the sofa because they`re so bad!

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As ever, if there’s a story you’d really like to see that’s not listed here then let me know!

THIS POLL IS NOW CLOSED

RESULTS WILL BE POSTED SHORTLY

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO TOOK THE TIME TO VOTE!