“The distant echo of far away voices boarding far away trains…”

Most old money Doctor Who stories come with a couple of anecdotes attached. Back in the days when information on Doctor Who was scarce and anecdotal, and the programme itself likewise, they formed a kind of bank of folk wisdom, one passed down through convention anecdote and fan conversation. It was a process that was absent a self-checking mechanism, given the inaccessibility of the programme once it had been transmitted - and through this process, bits of trivia together began to form a collective first draft of the programme’s history.

In The Web of Fear’s case one of its big headlines is its introduction of Nicholas Courtney as Colonel (later Brigadier) Lethbridge-Stewart¹ and how it thus paved the way for the “UNIT family” era of Doctor Who of the early 1970s. The other is that so realistic were its cobweb-infested, Yeti-occupied London Underground sets that tube bosses wrote to the BBC after transmission demanding to know how they filmed on the northern line without permission, demanding an apology and compensation. They each represent, up to a point, one of two separate sub genres of fan story. One is about continuity and the other about production history.² That’s two interrelated kinds of fannish engagement, which these days the kids (so I’m told) bundle together under the term “lore”.