Doctor Hasn't A Clue (Doctor Who humour).

[SirWacky]

These are hilarious and well built!

Well done and great job

[KurttKrueger]

These are awesome as ever Doctor S! They're almost comforting me in my grief at Doctor Who Season 5 having come to an end!

Keep up the good work.

[Doctor Sinister]

The 83rd Doctor's attempt to recreate the antics of his 11th incarnation and allow his companion to "fly" through space from the door of the TARDIS was a well-meaning gesture, albeit one doomed to failure when attempted in the midst of a flaming asteroid storm.

Fortunately Millicent's resulting skull fractures, brain damage and third-degree facial burns took only two months to fully heal in the TARDIS medical bay, albeit she was then lost within the bowels of the ship for a further year due to the internal architecture of the craft rearranging itself, apparently at random. This was the supposedly exciting premise of the 341st season episode "Burns Night" which saw the Doctor battling with an evil entity which had taken over his time machine.

So called "bottle shows" can be quite common in TV SF series. The name derives from the fact that they generally only take place on board the leading spacecraft associated with that program so they are cheap to make as they typically use standing sets and employ only the existing cast. The appearance of a "bottle show" usually means that the Producers are saving their money for more expensive episodes later in the season.

However such shows are rare in Doctor Who and unfortunately, Producer Geoff Cambridge-Smythe's attempt to make such a show was a dismal failure in artistic terms and on the basis of actual cost.

A whole two thirds of the episode was given over to the Doctor rushing through what was obviously the same TARDIS corridor over and over again opening doors in the search for Millicent. Said corridor was dressed to appear as if it were a different one each time, with occasionally only a change in lighting to give the impression that it was at a lower level of the ship. This might have been OK for a 1978 episode of Blake's 7, but the audiences of 2337 demanded a little more from their TV shows.

But the problem mainly lay with what was "behind" those doors... In a desperate attempt to avoid having to spend money on filming new sequences, the Doctor would fling open a TARDIS door, only to see some badly superimposed footage from old 1970's episodes of The Two Ronnies or 1980's BBC variety shows with cabaret dancers and crooning Irish singers reciting old folk songs in rocking chairs. The Doctor would of course spend a few minutes studying this archive material before closing the door and moving on to the next one. It was Cambridge-Smythe's ultimate dream for Doctor Who - the variety show he had always dreamed of!

This material was supposed to be long out of copyright and thus free to use. Alas for Cambridge-Smythe, this was not the case, on the basis that the satellite channel "Dave" had consistently repeated every single BBC show at least thirty-four times every year for the past three centuries and were still coining in royalties from each repeat having had the copyright automatically renewed on an annual basis.

The episode therefore became the most expensive single outing for Doctor Who in its entire history, and as a result, the BBC were forced to sell their expensive London headquarters to meet the fees and operate for the next ten years out of a small wooden shack on the south bank of the Thames.

Based of course on this scene from "The Beast Below":

And here is an exclusive behind the scenes shot in which you can see that the entire vignette is indeed self-supporting - no trickery involved!

Dr. S.

[Doctor Sinister]

Number 11...

During the 83rd Doctor's televised adventures, the recurring character of the Master, an evil Time Lord (one of the Doctor’s own race), was never consistently portrayed. Therefore he occasionally appeared as mildly slapstick, reckless and mischievous acquaintance of the Doctor, and sometimes he was depicted a supremely evil arch villain, depending on the requirements of the plot.

At times, reasoning that the show was originally aimed at children, the Master became akin to a modern-day version of the Child Catcher (see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and those particular plots would revolve around his insane schemes to imprison or enslave youngsters to found massive juvenile armies with which he could conquer the universe, or just annoy or kill kids, depending on his mood.

Thus, the Master’s TARDIS (which, unlike the Doctor's machine, had a fully operational chameleon circuit) would also change its appearance depending on the mood of the story. During various adventures, the machine appeared at times as a truncated stone obelisk, a Portaloo, a Punch & Judy cabinet, a postbox, a bridge, a sarcophagus and, in perhaps the Master’s most controversial story ever, a brightly-coloured ice-cream van.

The infamous ice-cream van incident occurred during the 342nd season adventure entitled “Desserts of Doom”. The story saw the Doctor hypnotised and brain-washed by the Master, who was able to reduce our hapless hero to a mere stooge.

Placed aboard the Master’s TARDIS, which was fully equipped with ice-cream making facilities including Cadbury’s Flakes, strawberry sauce and a “hundreds and thousands” (sprinkle) dispenser, the Doctor was forced to serve freshly made ice cream to the general public, desserts that also contained a fast-acting flesh-eating nerve agent that would swiftly kill anyone who consumed one of the delicious ices and dissolve their bodies into mush.

It was left to the Doctor’s companion Millicent to uncover the Master’s dastardly plot and to restore the Doctor to normal.

Unfortunately, this episode coincided with one of the Producer’s attempts to boost earnings from the show for the BBC with product placement throughout the story. In addition, a new Script Editor for the series, Harry Kershaw, had been hastily appointed only days before production commenced, the previous incumbent having been fired after a massive argument with Geoff Cambridge-Smythe over who had eaten the last biscuit in the production office.

Kershaw had come to the BBC straight from a Hollywood studio which he also partially owned, where he had spent the last five years making slasher movies for the “straight to ether” market, but as an ambitious man, he was too scared to admit that he didn’t know what Doctor Who was really about. Thus he set about modifying the script, which he saw as overly childish, into something that was more to his liking, but since he had limited time, not everything was able to be altered.

As a result, the production was somewhat schizophrenic in nature, half family show and half gruesome thriller. This, combined with the contractual product placement shots, led to utter disaster.

The transmitted program contained a great many exceedingly generous lingering shots on the logos of Walls (who supplied the ice cream for the show) and Cadburys (who provided the chocolate bars and the sprinkles) as the ice creams were made by the hypnotised Doctor. Alas, such shots were intermingled with exceedingly horrendous, terrifying and detailed images of screaming, bloodied children and their helpless parents dying in agony having ingested some of the deadly ice cream, the flesh burning from their skeletons and their brains dissolving into liquid whilst the Master stood and laughed at their plight.

Despite the negligible viewing figures for Doctor Who, the word got out, and overnight, the share prices of both Walls and Cadburys dropped to less than 5% of their previous values, with people now associating their products with a painful, horrific death.

Both Walls and Cadburys instigated almost immediate legal action against the BBC, Cambridge-Smythe, Derek Deadman (the 83rd Doctor) and Harry Kershaw himself for breach of contract and Corporate Defamation. The BBC fought the case for six months until it became clear that it hadn’t a hope of winning. Faced with Counsel’s opinion and yet another massive legal bill, the BBC lost no time in firing Kershaw and throwing him to the wolves, blaming him entirely for the debacle and setting him up to take the fall. Kershaw’s only hope to meet the bill was to sell his stake in the Hollywood studio to the BBC at a discount price, but he vanished shortly after the cash reached his bank account and before he could pay the legal fees he owed, and he remains a wanted man to this very day.

Doctor Who was now on the verge of cancellation, but in a last minute reprieve, it continued to be made by the BBC, now exclusively financed by the exceedingly healthy proceeds flowing to the BBC from their newly acquired “slasher” movie production outlet in LA.

The Master’s ice-cream van TARDIS:

My other design for the Master’s TARDIS, a truncated stone obelisk:

Oh, and I know what you’re asking – what the heck happened to episode 10 of this series? Well, I can’t reveal it…yet…it was commissioned as an exclusive for WorldCon by a friend of mine and thus it won’t appear publicly until early September.

Dr. S.

[lightningtiger]

Excellent vig's 'Doctor Sinister'......now I'll wait for K-9 to come back eh ?

Keep them comming and I'm a conformist! !

[Forresto]

Very clever! I also looove the Master's Tardis.

[Mr McGow]

Doctor Sinister, I am really enjoying your posts. You have combined clever vignettes with a comedy style that appeals to my warped sense of humour

Loved that one of Millicent being sick (a true technicoloured yawn!).

[Batbrick]

Still going great Dr.S, my favourite of the new bunch is the Beast Below (with asteroids!) scene. The bottle episode description had me laughing too, especially this line: "The episode therefore became the most expensive single outing for Doctor Who in its entire history" which just reeks of failure

Looking forward to 10!

Batbrick Away!

[Doctor Sinister]

Scholars of the Doctor Who television series will recall, if for no other reason than through my own enlightening articles on the era, that series 340-343 of the program were its most controversial. Regular readers of this series will also remember that season 343 saw a marked change in the series’ format, with the Doctor leaving the confines of the TARDIS and living in a Seattle apartment which he shared with a Dalek named Martin (and his raggedy old chair), a naughty Cybermat named Eddie, and Millicent, who became his housekeeper.

Despite the change in setting, the series retained a certain SF air to it, albeit with light entertainment Producer Geoff Cambridge-Smythe’s own unique bent. The series now had a laughter track, and plots would centre around the Doctor’s dating exploits with alien lifeforms, and Millicent’s dallying with the Master, who had become obsessed with her beauty and who would hang around the apartment for no apparent reason, even if the Doctor was out.

With most episodes from the era now wiped since the infamous and highly destructive “Fandom Wars” of 2340 which followed lead actor Derek Deadman’s assassination, many records from that period are sadly (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) lost. Luckily, some on-set stills remain, and we have here an exclusive shot from a season 343 episode entitled “Sleepwalking in Seattle” which saw the Dalek, Martin, revert to type and begin randomly exterminating visitors to the Doctor’s apartment, with amusing results!

Many people have of course criticised the blatant copying of the format of the TV sitcom Frasier (1993-2004 and revived between 2142-2185), but BBC Producers ploughed on with production of the series, regardless of all litigation thrown at them, on the basis that they had by now been sued by just about everybody in the world for just about every reason known to man, and had THE most experienced and fearless Lawyers on the planet.

This is the Frasier-style set used in Season 343 of the long-running TV series, which aired in 2339. It featured the panoramic window leading onto a balcony, the eclectic styling of the original show and even the crusty-old chair owned by Martin, the Dalek.

This is the Frasier-style Doctor Who logo used in Season 343 of the long-running TV series, which aired in 2339. Featuring the Seattle skyline, with the TARDIS taking the place of the Space Needle.

Oh, and this will teach me to write a one-line throwaway gag that kind of paints me into a corner and that I just HAVE to see through to conclusion!

Dr. S.

[Professor Flitwick]

Despite not being the biggest Who fan, I still find these very humorous.

But being a big fan of Frasier, I have to say, to copied Frasiers apartment beautifully! Great attention to Martins chair!

[Mr McGow]

Eddie the cybermat - classic . I was just thinking about them the other day (and their little neck sucking ways). Entertaining as always Doctor Sininster!

[Doctor Sinister]

During Doctor Who‘s history, there have been occasional celebratory or anniversary stories where our hero would accidentally meet a past incarnation of himself and/or old enemies from the show’s history. However aside from two cut scenes from the 3rd Doctor story Day of the Daleks, the Time Lord had skillfully managed to avoid ever bumping into his own present incarnation.

All that would change of course with the arrival of the 83rd Doctor, who, as we have previously seen, was utterly incompetent and incapable of avoiding trouble even if it was heavily signposted with flashing neon arrows.

Thus it was that, in 2337, having incorrectly calculated the date using a clapped out calculator, drunken BBC executives happily agreed that that the 341st season of Doctor Who could feature an extra special episode to celebrate the 375th anniversary of the show, a whole year ahead of the true 375th anniversary.

Not believing his luck, Producer Cambridge-Smythe immediately set about writing what he thought would be the “ultimate” Doctor Who story, featuring all the surviving Doctors and many of the alien races he had encountered through the centuries.

All that came to a grinding halt half-way through planning, with an urgent memo’ from the 6th floor. Having temporarily sobered up long enough to notice a big hole in the budget, someone in the BBC Executive Suite had spotted that the celebration of the show’s anniversary was a whole year ahead of schedule. And to make it worse, someone else had installed new batteries in the previously errant calculator and as a result, the episode’s budget was slashed to less than 5% of what it had been before.

Quick thinking was required, not to mention the firing of several hundred actors and actresses who had been lined up to start filming during the following week. A new script was commissioned and sets hastily built.

The resulting episode was wittily entitled The Half Doctor, and it opened with the TARDIS materialising on a tiny desert island on the planet Metraxis II, whereupon it immediately broke down, forcing the Doctor and his assistant Millicent to evacuate the craft and await rescue.

Although small and in danger of being swamped by the endless Metraxian sea, the island was home to some micro biotic indigenous forms of life. However after a desperate and unsuccessful attempt by the Doctor to remotely fix the time machine with his sonic hammer backfired, the TARDIS console was damaged, and dangerous energies from the time vortex began to spill outside the ship. This caused the previously benign creatures on the island to commence a process of vastly accelerated transmutation, evolving in a Darwinian cataclysm that threatened within days to overwhelm the Doctor and his companion as monstrous radioactive creatures began to emerge from the sands…

Things took a turn for the worse when, two weeks into their exile, the Doctor and Millicent were initially relieved to hear the wheezing, groaning arrival of another TARDIS…only to discover that in fact the new arrival was a future version of the 83rd Doctor, who, in his time stream, had successfully escaped the island after three years of being trapped, only to accidentally hit the fast return switch and arrive back on the island after five minutes and nearly three years in his own past. This Doctor had also witnessed the death of Millicent, two years before, and now his TARDIS was again non-functional.

Now trapped with two useless Doctors and two broken TARDISes, and determined to avoid her apparently pre-determined fate, Millicent was forced to find a solution to the problems that beset the three travelers, on the basis that the two Doctors either spent their time arguing amongst themselves about who’s fault this all was, or telling each other appalling jokes to which they already knew the punchlines.

Alas, the desperate cost-cutting measures employed in the making of this episode were more than evident on screen…with the show’s denouement making less than optimal use of a number of painfully obvious polystyrene rocks, plastic crabs and rubber snakes. The BBC couldn’t even afford proper water for the Metraxian sea, and had to make do with cellophane and blue card. In addition to this, Derek Deadman’s insistence on receiving twice his fee for the episode resulted in all pre-publicity for the show being scrapped due to lack of funds, resulting in an extremely low audience for the transmission, which may have been just as well.

The Half Doctor was a dismal failure, and meant no proper anniversary show in 2338 – but by that time, anyone taking the remotest interest in the show was generally back on the booze, including Cambridge-Smythe, Deadman, the cleaning lady and the entire BBC Executive on the 6th floor who hadn’t really given a toss about the show in the first place.

Dr. S.

PS: Yes, I’ve built a second LEGO TARDIS. One will have functioning lights, the other is a spare which won’t have.

Dr. S.

[Doctor Sinister]

The missing tenth instalment! This one was initially created as an exclusive for James Shields to include in a LEGO/SF related fanzine at the 2010 Worldcon. On the basis that the event has now finished, I can post it here.

Paying a visit to the famous floating rocks of Krebulon VI, the 83rd Doctor and Millicent found themselves in a spot of bother after the TARDIS materialised on one of the smaller rocks, and an absent-minded K-9 sent them tumbling over the edge.

In a slightly existential twist necessitated by budgetary constraints, our heroes were forced to spend the next 45 minutes contemplating the meaning of existence before being rescued by their robotic friend whom, it was revealed, in a highly unlikely twist, had rockets built into the sides of his body all the time that enabled him to fly. Still, if it was good enough for R2D2, then it was good enough for K-9, albeit 336 years later.

It is not without a certain amount of irony that this episode, aired in 2338, was entitled “Hanging On” – since by the middle of Season 342 of which it was a part, the series was in dire straits, having suffered the lowest ratings in the program’s history, and was close to cancellation.

Therefore, in a desperate attempt to boost the audience appreciation scores and to recreate the past glories of earlier, cannier Producers in 2006, 2145, 2157 and 2288 respectively, the robot dog character of K-9 was reintroduced to the series.

However, true to form on the part of current Producer Cambridge-Smythe, this revamped incarnation of the Doctor’s companion was played strictly for laughs and was portrayed as a bumbling, forgetful, accident-prone character that kept breaking down and bumping into things. This did not sit well with the half-dozen or so people still watching Doctor Who, but since this audience consisted for the main part of a group of quadriplegics on a particular hospital wing that suffered a faulty television that couldn’t be switched over to another channel, there was little they could do about it other than to tut loudly and flicker their eyelids a lot.

The addition of comedy bells and whistles whenever K-9 moved on screen was an additional miscalculation, as was the high-pitched camp voice dubbed in post-production.

To make matters worse, K-9′s complete inability to move in a straight line was not always the result of the scripts, and much like the original K-9 prop used between 1977 and 1981, the creation proved extremely difficult to control on set. Despite the 361 years of advances in technology, the machine spent more time being repaired than actually being used for filming.

One particularly nasty incident occurred on location for this very story – with K-9 hurrying to the rescue of the TARDIS crew, the polarity of the machine’s remote control receiver was reversed, causing an erroneous signal to be sent back to the control unit which promptly recalibrated itself to a default factory setting.

Unfortunately, this setting matched one being used at a nearby nuclear reactor for the control of a robotic arm to manipulate control rods, and within minutes, the reactor went critical and suffered a minor but catastrophic explosion, releasing tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere and irradiating half of the country.

The incident was hurriedly covered up by the BBC as they could not afford another scandal, having only recently been bailed out by the British Government for enormous debts, partly incurred by senior management in their massively expensive and excessive coverage of yet another Football World Cup fiasco, and in any event, since most of Britain in 2338 was full of retarded celebrity-obsessed dullards, the radiation appeared to cause no real additional ill-effects.

K9 model by Louise Dade.

Dr. S.

Most records from the Derek Deadman years as the 83rd Doctor are of course lost on the basis that the BBC wisely destroyed all recordings of this era of the show, and the subsequent Fandom Wars saw the destruction of many more off-screen archives. However we have recently uncovered some exclusive off-air stills of the opening title sequence that ran during seasons 340-342 (2338-2338).

Larger version here:

http://www.tabletownonline.com/blog/2010/09/08/found-the-lost-derek-deadman-doctor-who-title-sequence/

Dr. S.

[Doctor Sinister]

Episode 14...

The Season 341 adventure simply entitled “Stoned” was one of the more intelligent scripts of Derek Deadman’s tenure as the Doctor. Unfortunately this was one of the exceptions to the rule and even this story saw the Doctor completely fail to to prevent the villains of the piece achieve total victory in their plans.

Arriving on Earth for the 2022 Glastonbury Festival, the 83rd Doctor found himself victimised by a group of deranged Hippies who were drawing up plans to plunge the Earth into a global “love-in” which in turn would allow them to seize control and pass the balance of power to the trees.

Having had his drink spiked with illegal substances, the Doctor retreated to the TARDIS to recover and passed out, emerging the next day to tackle his monstrous foes.

Unfortunately he forgot to reset the TARDIS intertial drift compensator and unseen, the machine slipped backwards in time by some five billion years, where it became encased in lava and was effectively fossilised.

Realising his error and unable to defeat the Hippie menace without his time machine, the Doctor and Millicent spent some days calculating whereabouts on the planet the TARDIS had materialised all those millennia ago.

Stealing a taxi and driving halfway around the globe, our heroes were then forced to spend a week chipping away with the Sonic Hammer at a remote cliff face to uncover the fossilised TARDIS and revive their machine. This was one of the rare events that the Sonic Hammer actually proved useful.

Unfortunately by this time it was far too late to do anything about the new world government that had seized power, and our heroes had no choice but to leave quietly in case they woke up any slumbering plant life.

Here is my “stone” TARDIS:

Identical construction to the blue one, just made of light bley bricks.

I have another colour too…but that’s another story.

Dr. S.

[Doctor Sinister]

Episode 15...

By season 342 in the year 2338, Cambridge-Smythe’s new “showtime” direction for Doctor Who had led to a complete absence of tension, fear or peril in many episodes.

One story in particular saw the Doctor and Millicent star in a musical adventure with the Daleks in a largely nonsensical plot that nonetheless bore more than a passing resemblance to the Rodgers and Hammerstein story The Sound of Music.

The episode saw the Doctor and Millicent arrive in Salzburg, Austria, where they became embroiled in the lives of the von Trapp family who were being hounded by a squad of Daleks. The Dalek task force had, in turn, been sent back in time and disguised themselves as Nuns in order to persuade the family to come and sing for them on their home planet of Skaro.

Although suffering heavily from Venusian flu, the Doctor was able to discover that the Daleks’ evil plan was to stage a concert in the distant future featuring thousands of kidnapped musical acts from throughout time.

This once-in-a-lifetime “ultimate concert” was to be broadcast simultaneously by hyper-wave to every planet in the known universe, and whilst everyone was distractedly viewing their telemonitors in excitement, the Daleks would then stage an invasion and conquer all of space in an instant and without resistance.

Featuring such classic tunes as “So Long, Farewell, Exterminate”, “Hover Over Ev’ry Mountain” and “How do you exterminate a problem like Maria?”, many viewers wondered how the BBC were able to get away with such blatant plagiarism. However this was easily achieved by changing several of the lyrics to the songs, such as the opening lines of “Do-Re-Mi”:

“Dough – some cash, a lot of cash

Ray- a beam from a gun”

And so on…

The song “Edelweiss” was also altered significantly and renamed simply and inevitably to “Exterminate”:

“Exterminate, exterminate

Ev’ry morning they flee me

Small and white

Clean and bright

Humans don’t look happy to meet me

Explosions grow

Ash falls like snow

Bodies pile up forever

Exterminate, exterminate

Bless the Dalek race forever”

The episode concluded with the Doctor inadvertently assisting the von Trapps as they fled to Switzerland by infecting the Dalek squad with his Venusian flu and causing many of the mutant creatures to explode inside their casings.

Alas, the Daleks’ final plan was merely delayed, not thwarted by the Doctor, who had gone back to bed, and several thousand years in the future, the universe fell to Dalek oppression amidst the nasal tones of Bob Dylan.

Dr. S.

[Cheburashka]

Ha-ha! To be continued?

[Doctor Sinister]

Episode 16...

Yeah, it was lazy of me to just reuse LEGO set 5891 for this episode, but I thought it made for a funny picture, and it’s a lovely set. So sue me…

Apparently giving up on his travels in time to settle down in London, the Doctor decided to operate a Pizza Delivery service from the safety of his TARDIS. Operating under the promise of a “Guaranteed delivery half an hour BEFORE you place the order or your money back!”, our heroes received a nasty surprise at 32 Acacia Avenue to discover that a horde of Cybermen had taken up residence.

To make matters worse, the Cybermen’s order for six Double-Pepperoni Feasts had accidentally gotten mixed up with a separate order for two Vegetarian Specials by the Vervoids next door, and the normally stoic and unemotional Cybermen got very annoyed indeed.

The rest of the episode was a typically unimaginative runaround which saw the Doctor and Millicent pursued up and down the streets of London to the tune of an endlessly repeated Ralph McTell song until the Doctor was able to evade capture when he accidentally discovered that Cybermen were allergic to Cajun Sauce, whereupon he was able to escape in the TARDIS and resume his proper travels in time and space, forgetting of course to even consider what the Cybermen were doing on Earth in the first place and missing the perfect opportunity to foil their plans.

I love run-on sentences, don’t you?

As ever, brilliant Cyberhead design by JimmytheJ, used with permission.

Dr. S.

[Professor Flitwick]

I hope you didn't harm your bricks doing that! Just a question, what technique did you use to do that?

[Doctor Sinister]

I hope you didn't harm your bricks doing that! Just a question, what technique did you use to do that?

It's green "goo" which came free with the latest issue of Doctor Who Adventures. It comes off in one go, no residue.

Dr. S.

[lightningtiger]

'Doctor Sinister' your latest shots are excellent......slimed Lego - a first eh ?

The Tardis sells pizza's.......gee being a time lord doesn't pay any more he must deliver pizzas !

Excellent looking Cybermen too !

I'm a conformist! 'Doctor Sinister' I'm a conformist! !

[HouseofH]

Doctor Sinister, I commend you. These are really well made, extre4mely funny MOCs with brilliant back-story’s. I am a serious fan of Dr who, so double points. My favourite? The Fraiser clone. That show was awesome, and so was this.

[Vindicare]

I've never seen Doctor Who(UK show, yeah?), so I'm totally lost...but all those MOCs are great. I really like your techniques, even though you butchered some legos for those robot heads, they are awesome and clever. Well done.

[Lord Arjay]

I'm still following these, they never fail to amuse me. Being a fan of the series itself it's nice to see the iconic villians and machines portrayed (very well) in LEGO form.

you butchered some legos for those robot heads, they are awesome and clever.

Actually I thought they were stickers.

[Doctor Sinister]

even though you butchered some legos for those robot heads

Actually I thought they were stickers.

Yep, no butchering involved, cutoffs from LEGO stickers.

Dr. S.

[Doctor Sinister]

Episode 17.

Whilst attempting to evict the evil Master from the Matrix (the Time Lords’ repository of all knowledge in the universe) the 83rd Doctor and Millicent found themselves embroiled in an increasingly strange series of artificially generated cyberspace adventures as their nemesis tried to prevent them from thwarting his plans.

Having been boiled, shot, beheaded and dropped from a light aircraft into a volcano without a parachute, our heroes still somehow managed to survive their ordeals, clinging to the certain knowledge that everything around them was an illusion.

The episode culminated with the Doctor and Millicent ostensibly finding themselves on the set of Masterchef where the Master, predictably, was the chef and who proceeded to present to the Doctor a series of mouth-wateringly tempting recipes to distract him from his efforts.

This was in fact a cunning attempt by the Doctor Who Producer to increase ratings by tying in the show with other popular BBC light entertainment titles. The recipes presented were real enough, and indeed many people downloaded them from their TV sets to make in their own homes.

However, with the writers realising that the episode would have to come to some kind of conclusion, the story suddenly veered without warning back to the main plot to see that the Master’s main course was nothing other than “Millicent Casserole”.

The Doctor, in a desperate attempt to save his companion, tried to rescue her with the use of his trusty Sonic Hammer but slipped on a carelessly forgotten fried egg and awoke moments later in real life to see that the Master had escaped with all the secrets of the Matrix in his TARDIS, which was disguised as a fridge. Millicent, having been finally killed inside the Matrix, awoke moments later and required a substantial period of counselling, having been chopped into little tiny pieces in the virtual world.

Unfortunately, several members of the viewing audience failed to distinguish between the real recipes given earlier in the show and the aforementioned Millicent Casserole, causing local Police forces around the country some considerable headaches for quite a long a period of time due to the subsequent increase in cannibalism in the provinces.

Dr. S.