'Step away from the time machine Mr. Wells' Damn, doncha just hate the fact that you can type out a long spiel in this note area, just to lose it all because the website doesn't like the size of your thumbnail! I was going to give a nice account of the story of Doctor Who, Sydney Newman, Bug Eyed monsters and so on. Now that my majestic prose has been fried by some mindless bit of software I really don't know if I can be arsed. So here's the short version. Doctor Who was originally intended to be a science and history orientated Educational programme, with time travel as a helpful trope for getting the protagonists around the universe. Accompanying the Doctor on his travels were two school teachers whose job it was to make sure that everything stayed educational. Sydney Newman specifically banned Bug Eyed Monsters from the show which is why Terry Nation's original Dalek serial was initially rejected. However, as Verity Lambert later admitted, they had no other stories to go with at the time so they went with Terry Nation's Dalek story in the end. The result was an instant ratings boost for the show and the birth of a media phenomena. The BEM's, having established a toe-hold in the series were never to let go. The educational aspect of the original format lingered on in the shape of the so-called 'Historicals',where the TARDIS would deposit its crew conveniently close to a major historical happening. These included the crossing of Asia by Marco Polo, the fire of Rome in AD 64, the sacking of Troy, the Massacre of the Huguenots in 16th Century Paris amongst others. By the end of Patrick Troughton's first series as the Doctor we had seen the last of the historicals in the shape of The Highlanders. What took their place were historically set stories where the Doctor travels back in time to defeat a race of BEMs. The Evil of the Daleks saw the eponymous villians coercing a hapless pair of Victorian scientists into trapping the Doctor. They had been 'meddling' with time travel and static electricity and as a result had been invaded by pepparpots. HG Wells, who wrote the definitive time travel story, is often credited with actually being a 19th Century time traveller himself (See the 1979 film 'Time After Time' for an exemplar of this trope). Hence my picture,which features a suitably HG Wells like M4 along with Morpheus' excellent Time Machine and Laboratory-now with Daleks. HG Wells has also appeared in Doctor Who, in the not very good 1985 serial Timelash. Well, still not happy I lost my original draft, but this will have to do. See you on Friday when I intend to unveil Chapter 19 of The Survival of the Daleks. Steampunk Mad Scientist Matt pose for Wanted DOA by maki_82. Daleks by Samtherapy.