“Spirits of ancient Egypt. Hung on the telly. Hung on the telly.”

I enjoy a good coincidence. There are times when I feel like coincidence is the operating system of the universe. So much of my life, of every life I’m aware of, really, hangs by threads of coincidence. There are children out there who only exist because I long ago encouraged someone to migrate across the country and come and work where I did, meaning they met their now partner and eventually reproduced. But I only knew that person because they were related by marriage to someone I met on my first day of senior school. Thus those children in some sense owe their existence not just to decisions I made when I was eleven years old, but also to exams I did when I was ten. Exams which, in those days, were used to sort children in various parts of Britain into different kinds of schools, based on their perceived academic ability when they were ten.

Now, when I was ten, my next door neighbour’s Dad had Pyramids of Mars on VHS, and once I’d finished with his copy of Revenge of the Cybermen, he remembered that he’d neglected to mention that there was, in fact, a second Doctor Who videotape in the house. So I borrowed that too and watched it, and like Revenge of the Cybermen I loved it, and so watched it on a loop until I could copy it and hand it back.

Pyramids of Mars begins, oddly enough, with a slightly fiddly coincidence; companion Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) seems to put on period appropriate clothing at a whim before the TARDIS arrives in 1911. This feels like an artefact of the rushed rewriting of the story by script editor Robert Holmes, whose reworking of a Lewis Griefer script seemingly set in a Museum is credited to the mysterious pseudonym “Stephen Harris”. There are other wrinkles throughout the script that would be counted against the story by fans if it were a lesser production, or perhaps had it been made in another decade.