This is a very lightly edited version of a piece I wrote 18 months ago, when Spearhead from Space was screen at the BFI as part of the “Film on Film” season. As the story is back at the same venue today, I’m taking the opportunity to send it out again as an additional, free piece. This is very much an edited repeat, won’t be on the website archive, and doesn’t count towards any paid subscriber’s total. New and free subscribers, if you like what you see, why not upgrade? Long time subscribers, think of this, if you like, as a mere a ‘Facsimile’.

“We are showroom dummies. We start to move and we break the glass."

It would be surprising for anyone with any interest in twentieth century Doctor Who not to have seen Spearhead from Space (1970). As the first colour serial, the first story of the 1970s and the debut of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, it’s both pivotal and, unlike a lot of Doctor Who, has almost always been accessible in some form.

Always complete in the BBC archives, it’s one of the earliest Doctor Who stories to be repeated (all the way back in the summer of 1971), and has been repeated twice more, being shown on three different BBC channels and in two different centuries.1 It has been commercially available more or less continuously since 1987 on, successively, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray twice each. It will probably end up being released on 4K disc. It was also the first new novelisation of the 1970s (as Doctor Who And The Auton Invasion) a book which is still available in paperback and as a narrated reading. It has benefited from over half a century of momentum.