"Going Underground."

Here at Psychic Paper, we like Doctor Who and we also like the London Underground. It’s handy for getting to the BFI’s Doctor Who screenings for a start. Given that Doctor Who has, if we’re honest, been rather disproportionately set in London over the years, you’d expect there to be quite a lot of crossover between the two, right? So what could be nicer than practical instructions for a trip round London via a list of tube stations that have significantly featured in the programme? You could even do it as a pub crawl if you wanted. Although I haven’t, and I really wouldn’t advise it. 

We’ll start at Marylebone, which is seen in Doctor Who And The Silurians (1970), in scenes that depict the outbreak of a deadly plague. Something the story being shot there demonstrates is that the cheerful Victoriana of the twenty-first century Marylebone is entirely artificial. When these sequences were shot in November 1969, the inside of the station was very much a grimy post war box. Although at least you could walk out of the main doors to the taxi rank without going through an M&S Simply Food. So there are swings and roundabouts. These scenes are also relatively notable in terms of Doctor Who, because most of the rail passengers falling victim to the Silurians’ plague are members of the Doctor Who production team. Don’t worry though, they were – like a lot of TV staff of the era – mostly former actors, some still in Equity, so there were no demarcation issues.

We’ve begun here because, let’s face it, Marylebone is not the most convenient station to get to, and isn’t really on the way anywhere. This makes it better as a starting point than as a stopover. But something we can do from here is take the Bakerloo line towards the river and get off at Charing Cross. This is where things are going to start to get a little bit complicated. 

In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor arrives in a London which has been evacuated due to… go on.. guess. The prehistoric beasties have, through no fault of their own, been transported through time. As part of the plot the Doctor discovers dinosaur transporting conspirators in a secret bunker hidden under a tube station. The studio sets for this station, although not the exterior model, indicate that it’s called Trafalgar Square.