The Long Way Round

“They're programmed to destroy us. She's gotta be strong to fight them. So she’s takin’ lots of vitamins.'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic if those evil robots win.”

As I mentioned when talking about Death to the Daleks recently, plenty of Doctor Who fans have anecdotes about finally getting to see an old Doctor Who story, and being disappointed by it. The reasons given usually include that its production, in terms of budget or scale, did not match up to what their imaginations had conjured up while reading the serial’s Target novelisation.

It is, as an anecdotal form, so commonplace as to perhaps be redundant; something that maybe need filing away with “It’s not as good as it used to be!” or “It’s gone all political!” in the box of “things that we’ve all said and heard so many times that maybe no one needs to read or say them again”.¹