Ten worst stories of all!

Folks,
a departure from the marathon over this weekend - the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who. Tomorrow I bring you my top twenty stories of all time, today though let's head to the other end of the spectrum - the ten worst Doctor Who tales of all! Do you agree? Are you shocked? What do you think?

10. The Invasion of Time

A lot of stories vied for this position. Timelash. Fear Her. The Satan Pit. The Keeper of Traken and The Leisure Hive were all chances. But I can only fit ten stories in here, and number ten is season 15’s ‘The Invasion of Time’. My least favourite Tom Baker series  - equal least, with season 18, this story destroys Gallifrey as an idea well before the Time War. The Vardens are as rubbish an enemy as they ever used. The Sontarans look like idiots. But not as much as the Time Lords. The choice of a mental hospital to be the TARDIS interior was a shocking call. Cheap, nasty, bad. The perfect way to start the top ten worst Doctor Who stories of all time!

9. The Chase

Six episode plot line – the Daleks chase the Doctor and his companions. That’s it. Whole plan. Milk the Daleks for all their worth production team. You know you want to. Pure, uninteresting silliness. A ridiculous robot double for the Doctor. Saving grace – nice ending for Ian and Barbara, and Peter Purves of course. Dreadful jungle planet with a studio floor.

8. Daleks in Manhatten/Evolution of the Daleks

DREADFUL American accents. Dreadful acting by Diagarus. Stupid plot, the Daleks have converted humans to Daleks before, why do they want to create Dalek-humans now? That walk and talk. Hardly invincible like the casing the Daleks wear. Pig men? WHY? WHY? Helen Raynor, you SUCK.

7. Delta and the Bannermen

What a pointless waste of three episodes this was. Running around to Keff ‘I’ve got a drum machine on my synth’ McKulloch. That’s all it is. Green babies, green men. Eat the baby food, become a Chimeron! Awful acting from the woman playing Delta. Everyone in the bus dies. In a story which is supposed to be just fun. It’s ok, gloss over that. Looks cheap and nasty. McCoy horribly awkward in scenes with Ray. Makes light of death. Gavrock sitting there eating raw meat. No understanding of who the Chimerons, the Bannermen are (apart from incompetent). It’s actually a story about genocide, but it’s light and fluffy too. So much to dislike.

6.  Arc of Infinity

Mind-bogglingly stupid rubbish from Johnny Byrne, who wrote three stories and the BEST was ‘Warriors of the Deep’. Omega is lame. The Time Lords are lame. We’re in Amsterdam for no reason – should have had the ghost of Anne Frank, that would have been an interesting story. It’s so very 80s. Ian Collier does not look like Peter Davison. The ending is – The Doctor chases Omega around Amsterdam for a bit and shoots him. Gallifrey got worse with every story as the show progressed.

5. Victory of the Daleks

For being the biggest disappointment the new series has dished up. Plot starts brilliantly – what are the Daleks up to? Only the Doctor knows they are evil. No-one believes him. Then 30 minutes of utter shite from the pen of Mr Gatiss. Cheap looking interior for the Dalek space ship and dreadful looking new Daleks. The Doctor holds the Daleks at bay with a jam biscuit. Yet they destroyed Gallifrey? Give me a break. Tension built in first 12 minutes, destroyed in less than 12 second. This is crap.

4. Time and the Rani

A quarry instead of a jungle. Writers and script editor at logger-heads. Awful costumes. Awful monsters. Incomprehensible convoluted plot. Pip and Jane Baker dialogue with no help from Eric Saward. Equals total shite.

3. The Twin Dilemma

It’s cheap. It’s needlessly violent. The Doctor attacks his companion violently which should never have been conceived of. The police uniforms are the cheapest look they could possibly conceive. The monster is STUPID, looks ridiculous, should never have been attempted. The plot involves firing a planet into a sun to shoot thousands of eggs into the universe. Why does Mestor, who seems to have a cavalcade of powers, need a couple of boy geniuses who cannot act to calculate how to blow up a sun? Why couldn’t Azmael see it would happen? Why does Hugo’s gun look light a lighter-gun for a gas stove? So many whys.

2. Silver Nemesis

A three-episode runaround which is mind-bogglingly stupid, stealing most of the plot from the far superior ‘Rembrance of the Daleks’. We have Nazis in there for no good reason, a stupid old crone running around saying she knows the Doctor’s secrets, Cybermen at their most impotent ever, dreadful music by Keff McCulloch, it looks cheap as chips, the CSO is dreadful on the Cyber-ship, there’s no meat to the plot at all and it’s only saving grace is the couple of moments of comedy which are quite funny – the scene in the limo and the lamas. Dreadful rot.

1. Time-flight

Time-flight is without a doubt the antithesis of what makes a bad story in Doctor Who. It’s plot is extremely convoluted, the ultimate sign in my mind of a bad Doctor Who tale, it makes little sense and alienates the viewer very quickly after episode one which is ok. The Master is needlessly in disguise, but not only that, it’s about the worst disguise I have ever seen. The sets are shoddy and small, the Concorde is represented for the most part by a single wheel. They definitely ran out of money for this story. The Master’s brilliant plan to get to the hidden power behind the wall is to kidnap Concorde passengers to bash the wall down. It’s as close to unwatchable as any Doctor Who. I give you the ultimate in bad Doctor Who – ‘Time Flight’.

Delta and the Bannermen

Don Henderson as Gavrok

I am lost for words. Questions arise after ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ such as, is it worse than ‘Time and the Rani’? I mean honestly, this three episodes is best forgotten as one of the laziest Doctor Who productions ever. Perhaps it is not quite the depths of McCoy’s first tale, not quite, but after a decent first episode this story descends into farce, and not the entertaining kind. In fact it is pretty boring and bad, with background music worse than ‘Paradise Towers’, by the same guy, Keff McCulloch.

I don’t mind the use of rock and roll music, and the location was rather

Burton rallies the troops.

nice, but this is the most lightweight Doctor Who story ever made, with a couple of shocking deaths thrown in for what reason I am not sure, maybe the writer, Malcolm Kohll, hoped people would take the story seriously if he murdered a bus load of tourists and then moved on quickly after a brief Mel scream.

It’s not fair to Bonnie Langford to go on about her screaming. She didn’t direct the thing or write the thing after all. Mel has a good positive energy ruined by her screaming at the most insignificant things. Delta starts off with a guest appearance by Ken Dodd, who later gets shot in the back by Gavrock (Don Henderson) who spends his time spitting and eating raw meat.

There are some awful examples of dialogue in this story. Sylvester McCoy struggles over a number of lines, but that’s not his fault, the lines are purely to explain plot points and Kohll and Cartmel clearly spent no time going over them and considering that people had to say the lines.

Who is Gavrock and the Bannermen? Who is Delta and the Chimerons? Why do we care? Oh, we don’t! I like comedy in Doctor Who, honestly I do, but season 24’s comedy is not funny,

Sara Griffiths with Sylvester McCoy

quirky or endearing, but smacks of true desperation. Whereas I felt that the director and design rather than the author were responsible for ‘Paradise Towers’ turning out far poorer than it could have been, here the issues start with the scripting, the lack of detail, the lack of strong character  writing(with a couple of exceptions, Burton (Richard Burton) is wonderful for example) and pure laziness.

The Doctor runs up to Goronwy (Hugh Lloyd, a wonderful veteran actor by the way) and says we need this and that and this, he’s never met

the guy before, Goronwy replies with, ‘Ok, come this way. I’m Goronwy by the way.’ Or something to that effect and simplicity. Huh? I mean come on that’s purely amateur stuff from Kohll and Cartmel should have been all over it like a rash. Ok, this season was cobbled together very quickly and maybe there just wasn’t time, but this is what is left for Doctor Who fans to watch FOREVER. They rehearsed this stuff too, surely the actors could have taken a few liberties.

Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare make rather fine guest appearances, so that’s something, and I thought Ken Dodd was rather amusing too. The effects went from good to dreadful. The space ship landing on Earth looks like what it is – a cut out picture lowered to a spot on the picture. No doubt it was a shot that took little time and money to achieve, and I understand that these things were in short supply, but after seeing what was possible in the previous season, it is still very disappointing.

Stubby Kaye and Morgan Deare

We have a whole back story the writer and script editor decided was irrelevant. Why the ‘Bannermen’? Because they had a sort of banner on their back? Why would eating Chimeron food turn the very wooden Billy, involved in the second-least-convincing romance in Doctor Who history with Delta (also played in a very wooden way) into a Chimeron? It makes no sense at all. Clever ending by boosting the Chimeron Princess’s song to knock out the Bannermen, I liked that. And the last shot featuring Goronwy was good. Didn’t mind most of the first episode, although when the Doctor has to comfort Ray (Sara Griffiths) McCoy appears to have no idea what he should be doing.

It looks cheap at times, the story needed a lot of work on it, it’s lightweight fluff because they had 3 episodes to fill.

2/10