“Sumer is icumen in. Loudly sing cuckoo.”

Seen: 19th & 20th January 1984

The essence of Doctor Who is in juxtapositions. Its first episode starts with the visual oddity of a police box in a junkyard. Halfway through the episode we enter that police box to find out it’s bigger on the inside than the outside. In the final shot we see that same police box even more incongruously perched on a blasted prehistoric landscape.

Almost every story asks us to consider that now familiar blue box shape in a new or surprising location. Not only that, but many of the series’ most memorable images, such as the Daleks on Westminster Bridge or the Cybermen outside St Paul’s cathedral, are examples of exactly the same thing. The exiled-to-earth format of the Pertwee era gets away with the absence of the TARDIS by relying on a surfeit of other wild juxtapositions (starting with famous shop window dummy massacre) and by giving the Doctor an equally incongruous form of earthbound transport in Bessie.