Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-11-22T08:01:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Doctor Who legend Tom Baker’s best 7 moments as the Fourth Doctor ranked
items: Doctor Who's 5 most sought-after missing episodes – and how they could be found
items: Doctor Who needs to do the Rani justice by not forgetting her most important quality
items: Doctor Who's Lucky Day proves why the Doctor can't lose his dark side
items: Doctor Who will gain more than it loses by remastering The War Games - don't underestimate it
items: Doctor Who's Sutekh is the perfect classic villain return

Doctor Who legend Tom Baker’s best 7 moments as the Fourth Doctor ranked
type: item
date: 2025-11-22T08:00:23.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: BBC
description: A golden age of the show!
encoded: Tom Baker appeared in 172 episodes of Doctor Who, holding the role of the Doctor for seven consecutive years from 1974 to 1981. His Doctor’s iconic look has become as ingrained in popular culture as the Daleks and the TARDIS itself. Having recently collected his MBE, now is the perfect time to look back at some of the most significant moments from one of the most recognisable Time Lords. Without further ado, here are our picks for Tom Baker's best 7 moments as the Doctor! Did your favourite make the list? 7. A new wardrobe for a new Doctor (from Robot – 1974) View oEmbed on the source website "There's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes." Choosing a trademark outfit is something of a rite of passage for all new Doctors, and it was Tom Baker’s Doctor that took this process to new heights, parading a variety of eccentric looks for the approval of Harry Sullivan and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. First up was a Viking warrior, followed by the Jack straight from a deck of playing cards. The Doctor then presented himself as a Pierrot clown before finally settling on the hat and coat paired with the world-famous autumnal striped scarf. Costume designer James Acheson was inspired by the Toulouse-Lautrec poster Ambassadeur to design a bold new look for the new Doctor. He instructed Begonia Pope to knit a long flowing scarf in the style of the painting. Famously misunderstanding how much wool to use, she ended up using every ball she was given, resulting in the scarf’s impressive length. This scene put a much more jovial angle on the Doctor’s post-regeneration confusion. As ever, Doctor Who was going through a period of significant change at this time, moving away from the UNIT focused adventures of Jon Pertwee’s tenure. In Tom Baker’s debut episode, Robot, the stage was set for an altogether more unpredictable Doctor, a wide-eyed maverick with a twinkle in his eye. 6. The Doctor regenerates (from Logopolis – 1981) “It’s the end, but the moment has b…

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Doctor Who's 5 most sought-after missing episodes – and how they could be found
type: item
date: 2025-11-03T15:18:12.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: BBC
description: A global treasure hunt is under way.
encoded: It’s almost hard to imagine how something as culturally significant as an episode of Doctor Who could go missing. How could anybody hold a piece of television history in their hands and throw it in a skip? Well, it isn’t quite as straightforward as that – even though this dramatic “junking” may have been the fate of many episodes; in fact, there are 97 episodes still missing from both William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s years as the Doctor. How did this happen? To find out we have to understand a little about how the show was made and distributed. In the early years Doctor Who was recorded on 2-inch quadruplex videotape in-studio (on location it was recorded in 16mm film and model shots were sometimes recorded in 35mm film – these would then be recorded, or telecined, onto the 2-inch videotape). The BBC often looked to sell Doctor Who overseas, and as such it had to make a few copies to ship out to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Sierra Leone. But the countries and the number of copies made varied from story to story. The copies were created via a process called telerecording. Essentially, the videotape would be played back through a (CRT) monitor and a film camera would record the playback onto 16mm film. These copies would then be shipped around the world with a label attached showing the copyright expiry date, instructing them when the film should be destroyed, or returned to the BBC. Meanwhile, the 2-inch videotape itself would be stored for a short period of time before finally being wiped to be used again. The BBC changed its archiving policy in 1978, but before this, there was a lack of clarity between departments when it came to cataloguing programmes. It’s possible that some sections of the BBC might have believed that, via this process of telerecording, copies of Doctor Who were being kept for posterity somewhere in the BBC archive. However, there were other contributing factors at play, such as union agreements limiting repeat…

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Doctor Who needs to do the Rani justice by not forgetting her most important quality
type: item
date: 2025-05-21T12:30:21.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: BBC
subject: Comment
description: The show has a big job ahead.
encoded: With the sensational reveal that Doctor Who's Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is actually an age-old adversary of the Doctor comes a big question: how is the show going to do the character justice? After more than a year of speculation, it was finally confirmed at the end of The Interstellar Song Contest that Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is, in fact, the Rani, or rather “a Rani" - one half of the newly bi-generated duo. She emerged from this bi-generation immediately subservient to an apparently more dominant version of herself, who announced that she is the definitive article, the Rani (played by Archie Panjabi). Up until now, the Rani had appeared exclusively in classic Doctor Who. She made her debut in the 1985 Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) story, The Mark of the Rani and had only been portrayed on-screen by one actress, Dynasty legend, Kate O’Mara. The return of this character has been long awaited. Ever since the revival of Doctor Who in 2005, every time a mysterious female character appeared there was the inevitable chorus from fans of: ‘It’s the Rani!’ But now, as has been widely remarked, the Rani is just like a bus, you wait forever for one and then two of them turn up at once. So, we now have a brand-new pair of Ranis primed and ready to cause devastation in the big finale, announcing during last week’s tantalising mid-credits scene: “As for the Doctor... I will bring him absolute terror!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/05/520878-1550a15.jpg" width="4743" height="3162" alt="Archie Panjabi as the Rani in Doctor Who. She stands in a rustic wooden cabin, lit by shafts of moody natural light. Wearing a deep red Victorian-style dress under a dark cape, she stares intensely at the camera, flanked by hanging tools and animal pelts." title="Archie Panjabi as the Rani in Doctor Who" /> This is where the show faces a dilemma - because the Rani is not just another villain set on taking over the world. It’s important to keep in mind that s…

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Doctor Who's Lucky Day proves why the Doctor can't lose his dark side
type: item
date: 2025-05-08T12:00:32.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: BBC
subject: Comment
description: Ncuti Gatwa did his predecessors proud in Lucky Day.
encoded: The latest episode of Doctor Who, Lucky Day, gave us something that we rarely see – a brief glimpse into the dark side of the Doctor. It was in the low light of the TARDIS that Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor gave the Doctor super-fan turned social media super-villain Conrad Clark (played by Jonah Hauer-King) a dressing down with a level of towering malice that we’ve rarely witnessed throughout the entire history of Doctor Who. The Fifteenth Doctor was introduced as the fun-loving carefree Doctor – he came to us apparently healed from his millennia of emotional trauma. Yet here he went out of his way to make an extraordinary intervention, materialising the TARDIS around Conrad as he sat in his jail cell. We can only presume that the Doctor had been preparing for this meeting for some time: “You want spoilers?” he asks in a flame of fury. “I’ll tell you your future. You die in a prison cell, boiling in anger and poison until your heart packs in age 49.” The chilling change in the Doctor's demeanour reminded me of one iconic scene in classic Doctor Who - the Seventh Doctor’s famous speech to one last remaining Dalek outside of Coal Hill School in the iconic 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, where the Doctor calmly talks the creature into an act of self-extermination: “You’re trapped, a trillion miles and a thousand years from a disintegrated home. I have defeated you; you no longer serve any purpose.” Remembrance of the Daleks came off the back of a fairly light-hearted series of Doctor Who stories which had been produced following a period of uncertainty over the show’s future, and while Lucky Day doesn’t hit the heights of that iconic serial, it does for Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor what Remembrance of the Daleks did for Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh, in that it gives him, if not his defining moment as the Doctor, then certainly his big turning point. The Fifteenth Doctor’s final scene in Lucky Day wasn’t your standard Doctor Who speech, it was something much more…

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Doctor Who will gain more than it loses by remastering The War Games - don't underestimate it
type: item
date: 2024-11-28T19:00:39.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: BBC Four
subject: BBC iPlayer
subject: Comment
description: The epic serial is being colourised and cut to 90 minutes.
encoded: Doctor Who's The War Games is a stone-cold classic, a brutal final bow for Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor and his two companions, the ever-loyal Scot, Jamie McCrimmon, played by Frazer Hines, and the resourceful Zoe Herriot, Wendy Padbury’s 21st-century astrophysicist. It was the Doctor Who serial that broke new ground back in 1969 - it introduced the Time Lords, affirmed the concept of regeneration and cemented the Doctor's place in Time Lord society as a fugitive on the run from his own people. But perhaps most significantly of all, it revealed a level of darkness hitherto unseen of a show that was still loosely being dubbed a "children's programme". The 10-part epic sees the TARDIS materialise in no man's land. Wondering where on earth they've turned up, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe promptly find themselves apprehended and consequently separated from their TARDIS. At first, it appears that they've landed at some point during the First World War. However, things are far from how they appear - dark forces are operating from the sidelines. To stop them, the Doctor will be locked in a battle of wits against the mysterious War Lord (Philip Madoc). With emotional stakes at its heart, The War Games is a classy high-brow thriller of Shakespearean proportions. View oEmbed on the source website In short, it's perfect. There's just one thing that's holding it back: The War Games is long - really long. In fact, it's historically, infamously, notoriously long. It was initially broadcast from 19th April to 21st June, seasons changed, spring turned to summer, and still The War Games went on. Its full runtime clocks in at an impressive four hours and 10 minutes. But it was actually never really intended to be an epic of Lord of the Rings’ towering scale. A number of factors contributed to its length: several scripts for other serials either fell through or were scrapped altogether before the team essentially ran out of time and The War Games was hastily given the green light on …

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Doctor Who's Sutekh is the perfect classic villain return
type: item
date: 2024-06-20T18:00:06.000Z
creator: Rhianna Evans
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
subject: Comment
description: "He is hidden in the howling void. He is hidden within the tempest."
encoded: "The one who waits, waits no more." In this moment, Doctor Who became the scariest show on television once again. The last few minutes of The Legend of Ruby Sunday were filled with out-and-out horror. The image of the crumbling Susan Triad (played by Susan Twist), a character so heavily speculated over these past few months, omnipresent and then transformed in an instant into a mummified puppet by the almighty God of Death. That is his infinite power, Sutekh’s time is now. But, why is it now? Some are asking why not Omega? Or the Trickster? Or Fenric? Or a brand new big bad?! To find out why it had to be this adversary above all others, we go back, almost 50 years, to 1975. It was Doctor Who’s 13th season and Tom Baker’s second as the Doctor. With the iconic Sarah Jane Smith (played by the late, great Elisabeth Sladen) at his side, the Fourth Doctor (intending to travel to UNIT’s base) is thrown off course by a projection that has infiltrated the TARDIS itself. Sarah Jane sees the apparition of a Typhonian Beast, foreshadowing the arrival of an Egyptian god. Trapped beneath a pyramid and powerless to move, imprisoned by the ancient god Horus, Sutekh lies in wait. The Doctor and Sarah Jane find themselves pulled into a race against time to stop Sutekh from freeing himself from his prison and destroying the entire world. Sutekh, once the last of the Osirans and now part of the Pantheon of Discord (that includes Maestro and the Toymaker), lived in fear of any and all life forms that could challenge him, so he simply set out to destroy them. For his crimes, he was imprisoned in a tomb on Earth, one that was uncovered by the unfortunate archaeologist Marcus Scarman (Bernard Archard). Voiced by Gabriel Woolf (who now returns to the character aged 91), Sutekh’s timbre drips with malice and all are powerless to his sway. Despite the fact that many think of the famous "Do I Have the right?" speech from Genesis of the Daleks as Tom Baker’s defining moment as the Doctor, the F…

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