12. Window Dressing Is Dangerous
From Spearhead from Space, Episode 4: 24 January 1970 When The Doctor's being downright brilliant then it's satisfying. When disaster's averted at the eleventh hour then there's relief. But sometimes you just get the breathtakingly audacious. One particular moment like that comes in Spearhead from Space. Russell T. Davies reprises the occasion in the very first episode of nu-Who, but excellent as that was it still seemed like a cover version of a classic. You know you've seen the all time great version of something when you cannot help but compare the new version to the old every time you watch it. It'd be like Puff Daddy sampling the opening riff of 'Every Breath You Take' and expecting us not to remember how much more brilliant the original was, thus consigning his version to a backwater of your memory. It wouldn't help either if the original artist came along and sang it with him. It was shocking. It was even more shocking when you consider how desperately, abjectly jaded the 1970s were as a decade in time. There's a Hillman Imp parked in the road for goodness sake! In a dull suburban street in which tailors' dummies were clad dully in brown, anarchy reigned for several glorious seconds. One of its principal victims was a beat bobby, no doubt included to ram home the idea that this moment was a perilous knife-edge upon which sat all things good, clean, wholesome and righteous. Anyone who is anyone, when writing about the classic era these days has to mention wonky sets and the like if they are to be noticed, and this period was among the wonkiest in the show's history. It wouldn't have mattered how wobbly the set in this instance, because all we remember is the shock and satisfaction when something truly original came about.