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Just over 6 years after the original TV series ended, it was announced that a new TV movie was going to be made with Paul McGann as the new Doctor. After years of rumours, with names such as Sting and David Hasslehoff being mooted as the Doctor, this was welcome news. It suggested that the new production would be true to the principles of the original series and not a sell out to Hollywood. After all, if they were eschewing big name draws for, let's face it, a very good but little known British actor then the series producers had to be going in the right direction!

Fast forward to bank holiday Monday, May 1996. Ironically, the story was available on video beforehand so it was possible to see it before it was actually broadcast in the UK. I'm sure there were a lot of fans, like myself, who did buy the tape before the TV screening but waited until the actual broadcast and watched that with the intention of watching the video later. To say that it was a major disappointment would be to put it mildly. However, mindful of my previous experiences with a long anticipated Doctor Who story (Tomb of the Cybermen) I reserved final judgement until I had seen the TV movie a few more times.

Over the years I have watched the TV Movie a few times - it has become one of the select few that gets worse with every viewing. It stinks, pure and simple. Beginning with the emasculated smurfs which dispatch the Master, the story then moves on to an image ripped off from George Pal (his film version of The Time Machine), an image which has also been used by Back to the Future. Not content with reinforcing the idea of time travel via a multitude of clocks, we have the utterly unsubtle moment of the Doctor sitting reading a book by H.G.Wells. For those who haven't seen this adventure I dare you to guess which H.G.Wells novel it is - go on, have a guess.

Ever since Time After Time (a good film by the way) American TV and film has tended to arrive at the notion of British time travellers wearing decidely Victorian costume and in possession of a cast-iron,Vernesque look time machine. To say that it is utterly cliched would be to put it mildly, yet here it is. The Doctor's "death" and subsequent regeneration is terrible - it serves only one purpose - to make the regeneration scene in Time and the Rani look good! One letter writer, prior to the broadcast of the story, suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that the Doctor would be run over by a car while crossing the road (since the story was to be set in the US and the Doctor was used to traffic driving on the left). That might have been an improvement on what we did get.

The story is set in San Francisco but was filmed in Vancouver. I can easily imagine that if they had been able to film it in San Francisco the road chase sequence might just have been filmed on those famous streets. There was always a joke about the original series featuring a lot of running up and down corridors. Here the British cliche is replaced by an American one. Other Americanisations include the TARDIS chameleon circuit being renamed a cloak (gosh, the Americans must be really dumb if they can't grasp the idea about chameleons and big words like revoked (in reference to another film)!) Star Trek has its fair share of cloaking devices, oh and half-humans. So naturally, the only possible explanation for the Doctor's interest in Earth is that he is half-human.

While I can maybe accept that the Doctor understands the workings of the human mind enough to perceive Grace's innermost feelings, I cannot accept his almost omnipotent knowledge of other people ie telling Gareth which question to answer in his exams! There are other moments like this which show how poor the story really is. Although I did like the plot element where the Doctor walks through a window to demonstrate the destabilisation caused by the opening of the Eye of Harmony.

The final twenty minutes of this story are absolutely awful! The situation is this - the Master has opened the Eye of Harmony at the heart of the TARDIS. The forces being unleashed will result in the destruction of Earth (at midnight, PST, December 31st 1999 - oh my God no, no, a thousand times no, how I hate the obssession of lesser storytellers with millennial doom) - how can this destruction be averted? Is there a means by which the process can be reversed as the final seconds of 1999 tick away? Yes - Grace can take the TARDIS back in time to a point before the Eye was opened. The energy emanating from the Eye will be siphoned off by the TARDIS as it travels back in time and so everything is okay. I think it would have been better if the Doctor had suddenly woken up in his chair only to realise that it had all been a terrible dream. And what a terrible dream it was. I wish I could wake up and find that Paul McGann had been given a decent first story and that the actual TV movie was just some nightmare I had suffered.

I came across Regeneration (The Making of the TV Movie) in a bargain bookstore a couple of years ago and so I bought it. The book opened my eyes - Philip Segal should NEVER have been allowed near Doctor Who. It is quite clear that he enjoyed an odd story here or there but wasn't really a fan of the show. All he saw was a few good ideas and an under-utilised concept that could be vastly improved upon. The TV Movie is awful but it is so much better than some of the stuff that Segal was considering. I would gladly exchange the TV movie for any of the missing episodes of the original, superior series. If the rate of decline continues I can just imagine that this story will ultimately challenge Timelash as the worst story in the history of Doctor Who. Here's hoping that Russell T Davis will succeed where Segal failed - good stories that encapsulate Doctor Who 1963 to 1989.