“Toymaker, Toymaker, how do you know / Where all the pieces in your jigsaw puzzle go?”

This is an amended, edited and shortened version of a much longer essay sent to paid subscribers early this year. One which I’ve produced in response to some of the discourse related to the return of the Toymaker to television Doctor Who. It’s free to read for all1, so if you’ve received this by any means at all, and you like it, please do feel free to share it using the button at the end.

The mostly missing The Celestial Toymaker has prompted a variety of fan responses since its single UK television airing in 1966. It is, for example, one of the 1960s Doctor Who serials less well represented by off air audio copies recorded by fans on transmission. Because at least one of those fans didn’t like it enough to want to listen to it again, and so recorded over it to avoid wasting expensive tape. Yet in the 1970s members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society were so keen on it they named their house magazine in honour of its opening episode (The Celestial Toyroom). In 1984 producer John Nathan-Turner planned to bring back the story’s titular villain, played again by the same actor (Michael Gough), for The Nightmare Fair, in part because fans were so keen on the serial.

Said sequel didn’t happen due to the abandoning of almost all plans for the 1986 series following a confrontation with BBC management in early 1985. It subsequently became one of Doctor Who’s most mythologised unmade stories. Yet in 1991 the announcement, again by Nathan-Turner, that the sole existing episode of The Celestial Toymaker (The Final Test) would be released on VHS as part of the documentary The Hartnell Years literally brought boos from a convention audience, who seemingly would have preferred to see almost anything else. Fast forward another 33 years and said titular villain is due to reappear in the television series again, a full 57 years after their original appearance, as part of Doctor Who’s diamond jubilee celebrations.

That’s almost as much of a rollercoaster ride as Space Invader at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which would have been a key feature of The Nightmare Fair had it been made.2 And it’s a ride that’s inevitably going to get a bit more bumpy, as Doctor Who fans on the internet, and perhaps even the series’ production team grapple with increased public exposure for the notion that the original serial is obviously or overtly racist in tone. This is an idea that’s become so common in Doctor Who fandom in recent years that the second google autocomplete for “celestial toymaker” is “celestial toymaker racist”. (After “celestial toymaker doctor who”. )