I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a TARDIS

Since its revival, Doctor Who has become as much of a part of Christmas broadcasting as the Morecambe and Wise Show, celebrity guests and all.

It was not always so. Discounting spin-offs (the wretched K-9 and Company saw K-9 singing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”), Doctor Who had just one Christmas episode in its original 26-year run. “The Feast of Steven” (named after one of the Doctor’s travelling companions at the time) was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965. Famously, it concluded with the Doctor turning to the camera, raising a glass, and saying, “Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.”



That same year, TV Comic also treated us to a Doctor Who Christmas story. I think that it is fair to say that anyone who was old enough to watch the TV show would have found this comic strip too juvenile. The TARDIS lands the Doctor and his grand-children, John and Gillian (fixtures of the comic strip until well into Patrick Troughton’s time), in a snow-covered land. These are non-consecutive panels.




Actually, the children all wanted Daleks, but TV21 had the rights to those, so TARDISes it is.

Fortunately, the Doctor has brought a magic box with him, which can magically replicate toys. Yes, a magic box. Well, two of them, luckily enough.


Because while Santa is replicating toy TARDISes, the Doctor and his grand-children run into the wicked Demon Magician of the Forest.


They have to use the magic box to shrink polar bears …


… enlarge squirrels …


… and melt killer snowmen.




Silly, isn’t it? I mean, even a five-year old is going to have difficulty accepting a story in which the Doctor carries round a single, unexplained tool which just happens to be able to do whatever the plot needs at any given moment.


Oh. Right.

Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.


Panels and pictures

Doctor Who “A Klytode Christmas” Part 1 by Trevor Baxendale (script), John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colours), Paul Vyse (letters), Doctor Who Adventures Issue 44, BBC Magazines, 6 December – 12 December 2007

Off-screen photographs from “The Feast of Steven” (BBC TV, 25 December 1965) taken from The Doctor Who Missing Episode Nexus

Doctor Who, art by Bill Mevin, TV Comic issues 732-735, 25 December 1965 to 15 January 1966, reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 15, 15 January 1994

Illustration by Mike Collins and David A Roach to Doctor Who “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years” by Paul Cornell, Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2007

Paper boy

In case you’re reading this in Britain on Saturday and the newsagents are still open, here are a couple of reasons to buy the daily papers.

The Daily Telegraph has a new Christmas Doctor Who short story by Paul Cornell (author of the TV episodes “Father’s Day” and “Human Nature/The Family of Blood”), called “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years”. It’s not comics, but it is illustrated by long-term Doctor Who comic strip artists Mike Collins and David Roach. You can also find the story online here, with one of the illustrations. But not this one. Note the pure Frank Bellamy shading on the sonic screwdriver!


The Guardian’s “Weekend” magazine section carries a two page strip by Simone Lia (author of Fluffy) about an aggressively virtuous woman and her (ahem) guardian angel.


Meanwhile, in the “Review” section, the regular feature “Writer’s Rooms” is given over to Posy Simmonds, who provides a half-page illustration and hand-written text. She reveals herself to be a fan of the brushwork of the late great political cartoonist David Low, and now that she mentions it I can see the influence on her own linework. (Click to make legible.)


I couldn’t find either of these on The Guardian website, though you’re welcome to have a search. But the “Comic” section is given over to a two-page Christmas puzzle picture by “Lorenzo” (possibly Lawrence Etherington), which can be found at the mostly empty DFC website.

Time’s Fool

Saturday’s Doctor Who story on BBC1 features an appearance by William Shakespeare. Rose met Dickens on her first trip to the past, Martha meets Shakespeare, so it’ll be Chaucer for the next travelling companion, I suppose.

Shakespeare was also a character in the last Doctor Who Magazine comic strip to feature the ninth (Ecclestone) Doctor. In keeping with the unusually close relationship between the TV show and its ancillary fiction, the same writer, Gareth Roberts, wrote both that comic strip and the TV episode.





If Roberts has maintained his characterisation of Shakespeare as a lecher, I wonder if we will learn tomorrow that Martha was the dark lady of the sonnets?


Panels from:
Doctor Who “A Groatsworth of Wit” Part 2, by Gareth Roberts (story), Mike Collins (pencil art), David A Roach (inks), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (letters), Clayton Hickman & Scott Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine issue 364, 4 January 2006