More so than any other serial from the final two years of the programme, The Happiness Patrol can be held up as evidence by those who would either champion or deride Cartmel era Who.

On the prosecution bench we have Justin Richards and Verity Lambert who will tell you that The Happiness Patrol is so devoid of merit that fans are forced to assign political meaning to it as justification; it is evidence of Doctor Who straying too far into the realm of camp.

On the opposing bench are Cornell, Topping and Day who proclaim this to be a Doctor Who serial for and of its own generation; a joyful anarchistic satire that we should all take to our hearts.

Who's right? Well they both are really, as I'll try to illustrate.

In the case of the prosecution let me say this first and foremost, the design on this serial is a shambles. It is possible to say that the artificial sets, gaudy costumes and theatrical makeup are there to reinforce the serial's underlying message about the paucity of Helen A's ideology, but really... it's bollocks, isn't it? As a Doctor Who fan you get used to ignoring the programme's budgetary limitations, but here there's no reason for it. The Kandyman looks amazing - a pat on the back is due to Dorka Nieradzik - but for God's sake, if she can produce that costume within the design budget then why does everyone else fail so spectacularly.

Stand up John Asbridge. Doctor Who is NOT art house cinema, a genre even less popular with the general public than science fiction. There are not going to be a load of pipe smoking critics commenting on how 'Fritz Lang' the whole thing looks, or how the design ethic is sympathetic to the underlying message. Doctor Who is a piece of populist entertainment watched by a mostly passive television audience that is not going to take too kindly to a set design that wouldn't look out of place in the theatre, no matter how well intentioned it might be. I can believe that there were a LOT of people who switched on only to last as long as it took for Georgina Hale's mad be-wigged harridan to cock her red and yellow stripey gun.

Take a bow Richard Croft and poor Dorka. Before the dowdy painted backdrops of Terra Alpha stand the gaudy colours of the Happiness Patrol themselves. It's like lurching from one extreme to the other between each celluloid scene. Instead of complimenting the design they simply undermine it further, looking as they do extremely silly.

And last but not least a round of applause for Chris Clough. There's another one of those - probably - apocryphal tales about poor old Chris. Apparently he wanted to shoot it in black and white at weird angles but was vetoed by JNT. In all honesty, does anyone believe that this man has the ability to do any more than point and shoot in a by the numbers fashion? More likely, this approach would have made the final product even less watchable than what we do have.

When Verity Lambert, a woman who can justifiably speak with a lot of authority about television, stuck the knife into the McCoy era on 'The Story of Doctor Who' last Christmas, it was accompanied by a clip from The Happiness Patrol and my heart sank. It felt like an attack on Sylv and Sophie and theirs is a corner I will fight to my dying day. For the reasons outlined above, The Happiness is a very easy target - it looks silly; the people in it are dressed silly; oh look, there's Bertie Bassett, isn't he silly?

But if that's all you've got, then bring it on. Because Doctor Who fans know that deep down, 95% of the programme looks silly.

And so to the defence, or as Justin Richards might say, to read meaning into sh*te in the search for justification.

I'll leave the deep and meaningful discourse on cottaging and gay rights to far more informed commentators than myself. I'm sorry, chaps, but I was still a slip of a boy in 1988 and I have every reason to believe that any such allegory will have gone well over my head. Having read other reviews and insights I think that anything I have to add will seem trite at best so I'll concentrate on the frippery instead.

I am happy to argue that Happiness Patrol is more evidence of Doctor Who spreading its wings in a narrative sense and looking to tell more complex and involving stories, a move that is more successful the following season after this imperative filters down to the writers proper, but can be seen here, Remembrance and Greatest Show. Proof, if any were needed that the upward curve (despite a couple of blips) from the tail end of season 24 is continuing.

I call Sylvester McCoy to the stand. This was the last serial of season 25 to be recorded and it shows. 99% of the time he's on screen, he's excellent; seeking out trouble, wanting to speak to Helen A and the Kandyman almost as soon as he's identified them. It seems odd that the Doctor makes straight for the bad guys at the outset, having spent the 24 previous years seeking out the oppressed and giving them a leg up. It's more evidence of the seventh Doctor's increasingly proactive nature; next year his plan will have been set in motion before he leaves the TARDIS rather than the vague "rumours" and knockabout planning here.

And then there's the scene on the balcony with the snipers. It's the antithesis of the cafй scene in Remembrance; there it was the Doctor's decision to be made, here it's the snipers. Interestingly of course, we don't know the decision that the Doctor is agonising over in Remembrance - the destruction of Skaro - but he does go through with it, bringing the moral dilemma that troubled Tom Baker in Genesis to an end by wiping out his nemeses. But here he turns the tables; we have always seen the Doctor face down injustice and cruelty before, but never has he done it with such cold detachment. Sylvester is clearly furious here, and his anger proves to the snipers that they are better human beings than they thought they were. Of course, this Doctor did look Davros in the eye and end his life (or so he thought) but that's just part of this incarnation's moral ambiguity, and you know what - I like it.

As a side note, it's interesting to note that as Cartmel was realigning the Doctor's position on the psychological scale by asking what drives this character to seek out monsters and destroy them, Tim Burton was doing the same to Batman, but that's a discussion for another day.

I call Sophie Aldred. "I want to make them very, very unhappy!" Constrained by the pre watershed nature of the programme, Ace the character is incapable of expressing herself with the colourful Saxon metaphors that she needs to carry the necessary weight, but all credit to her - like Sylvester, I think this is her best performance of the season.

David John Pope, next to the stand, please. I've already covered the Kandyman from a design perspective so I'll avoid retreading the same argument here by singling out the actor behind the liquorice. The Kandyman wouldn't be half as much fun without Pope playing him like a cross between surly mass-murdering psychopath and surly teenager. Pope keeps it dead straight and is matched for every line by Harold Innocent as Gilbert M, their bickering hinting at a shared history that remains frustratingly unexplored on screen.

And finally, I call Sheila Hancock. Regardless of her thoughts on the role today, she puts in a great performance here. As much a victim of her ideology as her citizens, she's caught in an unfulfilling and loveless relationship with Harold C to the extent that the only creature she has feelings for is her pet, Fifi. The camera pan as she cries over Fifi's body is majestic and had the programme ended here it would be proof positive that the newfound maturity and confidence of season 25 were here to stay. That Doctor Who could end on an emotional climax rather than a narrative one would have realigned what the programme was capable of, but instead we get a typically trite coda. Oh, well. At least we can take heart that twelve months later, shorn of Clough's less than dynamic direction, Curse of Fenric can pull off what Happiness Patrol cannot.

So, in summing up, Happiness Patrol is a rather schizophrenic serial where the truly awful sits alongside the triumphant. Derided for being camp and tacky, what Happiness Patrol really demonstrates is that although the BBC design teams are still stuck in a inescapable nosedive, Cartmel is championing a script and narrative ethic that if not 100% successful, is still full of promise.

The learning curve continues.

It’s difficult to find anything good to say about this season twenty four opener, but here goes. The Rani’s bubble traps look quite good, and… err… You see, ‘Time and the Rani’ is perhaps the worst Doctor Who story the McCoy era produced and probably the worst ever. I say probably only because I’ve yet to see other clangers such as ‘Timelash’ or ‘The Twin Dilemma’. In my growing Doctor Who video and DVD collection it is perhaps equal only to ‘The Chase’ in its extreme crappiness. Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about ‘Time and the Rani’ is that there is very little to say about it.

The plot, concerning the Rani gathering together the greatest minds in the universe (for a purpose so tedious I won’t even begin to explain), is un-involving, one-dimensional and just plain rubbish. The performances, particularly by the lead actors, are either completely over the top or wooden, the Tetrap monsters are about as scary as a pet hamster, the dialogue is ridiculous… I could go on. To be fair to the writers, Pip and Jane Baker, apparently they wrote this serial without knowing who would be playing the Doctor, so had to be as generic in his characterisation as possible. Less forgivable is the completely over blown dialogue they write. Why they feel the need to do this is unclear. Perhaps they are trying to cover up deficiencies in the plot.

Sylvester McCoy gets off to a bad start as the Doctor. His performance throughout this serial has a certain pantomime quality to it, complete with spoon playing and over the top physical movements, and you never get the sense that he (or any of the other performers for that matter) really believe in any of it. Probably due to the poor script. The Doctor McCoy plays in this adventure is completely different to the mysterious and dark traveller we get in later McCoy stories such as ‘Ghost Light’, with his performances improving greatly from him playing the role much straighter. It goes without saying that Bonnie Langford as Mel is awful, and in my opinion the reason many fans have a big problem with season twenty-four is because of this one character. Thankfully this would be her last season with the show. The Rani is played by Kate O’Mara, and although she appears to be having a great deal of fun, she comes across as not especially villainous. This is the only Rani adventure I have seen – I’m still yet to see ‘The Mark of the Rani’ – and, assuming this is the same Rani we get in her debut adventure, it is difficult to see how this character could ever earn a second outing. The idea of a female Master is a nice one, but Pip and Jane Baker have written this character like a pantomime villain.

‘Time and the Rani’ was the first Doctor Who adventure I watched as a small boy of four years old. Unbelievably, it was also the story that got me hooked on Doctor Who and as a result good film and TV science fiction in general. Looking back on it now, however, it is perhaps fortunate I was so young when I first saw it, for I fear that if I was only three or four years older ‘Time and the Rani’ would have turned me off Doctor Who for life.

In summary, whereas I can usually find things to enjoy even in bad McCoy adventures, such as ‘Silver Nemesis’, which is so bad its good, ‘Time and the Rani’ is so bad its bad. Doctor Who had reached its lowest point, and after this awful McCoy debut adventure, things could only get better.

Through the wonders of the local council a copy of the "extended version no true Doctor Who fan would want to miss" of Battlefield fell into my sticky little grubby Doctor Who obsessed paddy paws. Well first off let me put that one straight: extended version? What extended version? Thirty seconds of the Doc and Ace climbing a spiral staircase covered in fairy lights (the staircase, not the actors)? Well whoops se do (but not in a good way).

Everyone says this story is total and utter...

And yes I began to believe the hype: Bad direction, too rushed, someone even complained that the countryside was too green and nice looking! But then I thought about it. Actually this story is rather clever. Concept wise: OK, so all the plot really consists of is a bunch of other dimensional knights poncing around an over green bit of English country side trying to recover a sword for some reason that is never actually explained, but at least they aren't your usual "oh, let's take over the Earth for the sheer hell of it" type aliens.

I think Aaronovitch had been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. The bad guys in Battlefield are a sort of cross between the Klingons and the "Knights of Ni" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (but without the shrubberies). On the one side there is the honour code stuff and on the other there is the cod awful overacting, complete with maniacal laughter.

However by giving them a pseudo medieval background this also gives them a bit of depth and grounds them in a culture that the viewer can relate to. The upshot of the idea that "it may be more exciting to actually think about your villain and perhaps create a bit of backstory about them rather than just write in some malevolent green slime that shimmies around the air conditioning ducts" is the wonderful scene with the head bad lady (who has the most impractical fingernails I have ever seen) and the Brigadier where they take some time out from the mindless slaughter of universe domination and universe saving to have a bit of a chat and honour Earth soldiers who have fallen in battle. And this, along with a lot of other stuff makes Battlefield INTERESTING. Not really scary I admit, but definitely interesting.

Are You Short?

I am. I am very short. Do you know how difficult it is to dominate when you can barely see over the table? This is probably why I will cut Sylvester some slack for Battlefield. Not only does he have to stop some alternately dimensional knights from unleashing bloody and unstoppable destruction on Earth, but he has to cope with being a shortass (and admittedly sort of weird looking) to boot. Perhaps six foot tall Sean Connery could have done it and still found time for a few rounds of golf, but Sylvester had to go the extra gurn just to get people to look at him.

So this is my theory. People criticize his performance in Battlefield all the time. But it is not the gurning, the question mark jumper or the hat. It is because he is short and silly looking. Well so was bloody Napoleon. And look what he did (not that I am saying starting wars and general conquering is a good thing mind you).

As a "vertically challenged individual" I know how tricky it is to make tall people take you seriously - "seven degrees, worked with Mother Teresa, ran the UN, and found the holy grail.. well that's nice dear, but you can't see over the top of the steering wheel without a cushion can you now?"

So what do you think Sylvester (a bloke who, until Doctor Who, was most famous for stuffing ferrets down his trousers and pretending to be a car) did when he was asked to stop a war?

He did everything he could.

And do you know sometimes it works. Short, silly looking and Scottish he may be, but sometimes his performance as the Doctor gives me the chills. Sometimes he totally freaks me out (god help his kids if they ever misbehave). It's the eyes. Sometimes, when Sylvester isn't wiggling around like a man with a ferret down his trousers he comes across all dead spooky and serious. Sylvester may be a clown, but he knew who the Doctor was. And he knew that the Doctor was scary.

Winifred and Ancelyn

Drawn together by a love of hitting people and gratuitous violence Brigadier Bambera and Knight Commander Ancelyn fall in love. They are like a very dangerous and violent version of the Moonlighting couple. He is a spunky blond-haired knight from another dimension (with a healthy respect for the fairer sex) and she is a spunky gun obsessed UNIT Brigadier (with a cute little beret). If you ask me this is a match made in heaven.

Very rarely do we have a love story on Doctor Who, and while I think this one was handled with about as much subtlety as Tom Baker after a late at night down the pub, it is sweet. And INTERESTING. Sometimes I get so sick of your generic scientist/soldier supporting characters who get no character at all and then usually snuff it horribly.

Here we have something different. Instead of putative dead people standing around going "Oh my god we are going to die/the Doctor is a spy and we must kill him" we actually to seem to have characters who aren't just waiting around in suspended animation for the entrance of the Doctor (Maybe the writer had been watching The City of Death?).

I have actually read later books/fiction of some kind where the two characters pop up and they have actually got married and settled down to have little psychopaths, er sorry - kids. And, call me an old softie, but I think that's lovely.

And just think of the sex? Phoaarrrr!

Just when you think the Colin Baker era has been put out of its misery, up turns Time and the Rani. I can only imagine that these season 23 scripts got stuck in heavy traffic on their way to Wood Lane because for the life of me I can't think how else this brave new start got commissioned. Time and the Rani sits bestride seasons 23 and 24 much the same way Robot does in seasons 11 and 12; a tale that is a comfortable reminder of the old regime whilst also pointing to the future. But this is 1987 rather than 1975 and the last thing that the audience needs is to be reminded of the previous era. Nor is this a hint of things to come; Pip and Jane's scripts represent the final throw of the dice for a storytelling style that's binned before Cartmel even has a chance to utter the word 'Masterplan.'

Time and the Rani needs Colin Baker, not because he would have improved this serial any but because the Sylvester McCoy era does not deserve to begin here. Rightly or wrongly, the tabloid press is a good barometer of public opinion and this one serial gives the whole era a silly, lightweight label that is unfair on both the series and its lead actor in particular. I would contest that Sylv is not a bad actor during Time and the Rani, but he is saddled with some horrendous Pip and Jane inspired dialogue that he does his level best to wrestle with. Importantly, Sylv is trying to make his Doctor likeable and he succeeds. Freed from the constraints of alien-ness that had blighted the character for over two years the seventh Doctor is a much-needed breath of fresh air. The bad bits come from script rather than actor and as for the costume change bit at the end of part one - it wasn't big and it wasn't clever back in Robot and it's not bigger nor cleverer here.

The bad bits don't end here though, oh no. The Rani's disguise as Mel is a truly awful idea in concept and execution, while part four descends into a typical mix of silly science and technobabble that is the trademark of a Pip and Jane script. Bonnie Langford remains startlingly miscast and never seems comfortable playing against this alien backdrop. Tellingly, aside from JNT's continuing presence in the producer's chair, Bonnie and Pip and Jane are the only survivors from the previous season and are the three worst things about Time and the Rani.

Despite all this Time and the Rani remains watchable. It has an energy and sense of fun long since sacrificed at the altar of Saward, and breezes along at a fair old pace. The effects work is as good as it got for the series, and unlike the previous season you can see where the money was spent - up on the screen where it counts. The Tetraps look good, a high standard of monster design that would remain in place right till the end of the series' life, while the bubble traps surely represent a more effective, but less spectacular use of the series' effects budget.

Like a football manager who's team is on a bad run of form, Time and the Rani is indicative of the mythical corner being turned, of lessons being learned and results slowly improving. Doctor Who had got as bad as it was going to get the year before; the fight back started here.

Doctor Who is dead! Long live Doctor Who!

Cartmel's influence can be felt here in a stylistic shift every bit as severe as the Robot/Ark in Space change 12 years before. Then, of course, Bob Holmes knew exactly the direction in which he wanted to take the programme, here Cartmel can do naught but betray his uncertainty. However, the inconsistent tone of Paradise Towers can perhaps be attributed to director rather than script editor. The criticism aimed at the cannibalism of The Two Doctors and Revelation coupled with the "more humour, less violence" directive picked up by Mallett from working on Mysterious Planet the year before leaves director and script at odds from which the serial never recovers.

The script itself is a blackly comic urban thriller, a template that would serve the programme well for its final three years. However, black comedy is a very fragile and complex genre; every time the script aims for this target it is undermined by Mallet's reliance on slapstick.

It's sometimes hard to believe that this is the same director who two years later would pull an excellent performance out of Nicholas Parsons; here every performance is slightly off-key and no one can claim to have put in a good shift. In ninety minutes of television, only two scenes play out as the script intended; Sylvester's escape from the Caretakers and Tilda and Tabby's capture of Mel at the close of part two.

In Sylv's escape from the Caretakers we see the first seeds being sewn of the seventh Doctor's character proper. Subconsciously or not, Sylvester has taken Terrance Dick's "never cruel nor cowardly" edict to heart; acid baths and cyanide traps are a million miles away from this incarnation. His subversion of the Rule Book is the first in a long line of character moments that will eventually encompass talking Kane to death, befuddling Light and refusing to fight the Master. And that's just three I can think of on the hoof.

Then at the close of part two, Mallett hits the perfect note despite himself. For the most part Bonnie Langford is just as uncomfortable here as she was in Time and the Rani, but surrounded by old ladies and scones and tea and knitting she momentarily finds something she can respond to. So when the whole scene takes a turn for the absurd, Bonnie's overplaying is exactly what the script demands.

These two scenes apart the rest of the serial veers wildly between average of absolutely awful. No review of Paradise Towers would be complete without reference to Richard Briers, the man solely responsible for changing the consensus opinion of the serial from "not very good" to "awful." Somebody make him stop. Please. Say what you want about Hale and Pace and Ken Dodd, Richard Briers is the only actor amongst this august quartet and his is the most buttock clenchingly awful performance of the season, nay the era. Like Kate O'Mara's impersonation of Mel just a few weeks before it overshadows the entire serial. It's no wonder that contemporary commentators were already penning the series' obituary.

Richard Briers apart, Paradise Towers does continue Cartmel's steep learning curve. Being the first serial since Vengeance on Varos not to feature any continuity references is ordinarily not cause to celebrate, but this is damning the serial with faint praise. The very ethos of the programme has changed from the turgid navel gazing of season 22; from Paradise Towers onwards Doctor Who is looking forward rather than gazing wistfully behind.

The ratings for your last season were a disaster - what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? Do you look at the pattern of the 1980s, where from a strictly ratings perspective your two 25 minute Saturday afternoon seasons (18 and 23) have proven to be the least successful of the of the decade? Do you reflect on the fact that the two episodes per week format has been the biggest ratings draw of the last six seasons?

Or do you stick with the weekly half hour serial format that has patently died a slow and lingering death?

By the mid-80s audiences had proved reluctant to stick with a serial for the three weeks it takes to reach the conclusion. The Davison seasons overcame this to an extent because part four was broadcast just over a week after part one, whilst during season 22 that deficit was reduced to a single week. Heaven knows what was going through JNT's mind when he agreed to a fourteen week serial...

What I'm getting at is this; having been forced to regress to a format that should have long since been abandoned, through accident or design Cartmel comes up with the best compromise he can, the three-parter. It would be unfair to saddle the three-parters with the generalisation that they were simply four parters with the crap episode taken out (that's part three, by the way), but they are certainly a natural step on the path to self-contained 45-minute episodes that would become genre television's stock and trade in the 90s.

In their most simple terms, Cartmel has reduced the formula thus: episode 1, exploration; episode 2, investigation; episode 3, resolution. The episode 3 exposition instalment that has bogged down Doctor Who plots since time began is removed and the resolution is now only 14 days away, rather than 14 weeks.

In short, I think three-parters were a good idea.

And so on to Delta itself. It's fab. I am totally unashamed to admit that I love it to bits. It feels like the first story to be made exclusively for my generation (by my generation, I mean people who weren't about in the 70s), which probably explains why anyone over a certain age hates it.

A group of rock and roll loving aliens go on a trip to Disneyland in a spaceship that looks like a bus, crash in to a satellite and find themselves in a holiday camp in Wales in 1959. There they meet Burton, who deadpans the line, "You are not the Happy Hearts Holiday Club from Bolton, but instead are spacemen in fear of an attack from some other spacemen?" in a way that Leslie Nielsen couldn't have bettered. Thereafter he wanders through the story like Captain Mainwaring on acid, facing the bad guys with an enthusiasm that seems almost improper for a tale about genocide.

You couldn't make it up, well... er... yes you could, evidently.

After eight weeks of toil Sylv is getting a grip on where he wants to take the character. He dances uncomfortably with Ray, confronts Gavrok, rides a motorcycle, hugs a stratocaster and talks about love in a way than none of his predecessors could have done. Then he hatches a plan to defeat the bad guys with honey; he's a joy. Bonnie is still as stilted as usual, but she seems on firmer footing back on earth with (regular?) human beings to interact with.

As for the guest cast, Ken Dodd is Ken Dodd and doesn't bring shame on his profession in the way Richard Briers did a week before; Don Henderson is Don Henderson - I've never seen Z Cars but from what I've seen of him in other things, here he plays the same gruff character he'd been playing for the previous thirty years. Stubby Kaye is Stubby Kaye; actually, can you see a pattern developing here? By the same token I can only assume that David Kinder and Belinda Mayne are as bland in real life as they are on screen.

But the two who really steal the show are Richard Davies and Hugh Lloyd. Davies I mentioned before, he's possibly my favourite character in the whole thing. There's only been two characters in the whole series that I wish had joined the TARDIS crew; the wonderful D84 is the other. Hugh Lloyd as Goronwy adds a wonderfully magical edge to every scene he's in, and provides all of the exposition. In fact, sometimes I wonder if 'Goronwy' is welsh for 'Basil.' For example, when he's talking about the Queen bee secreting hormones into food to create a mate, he's not really talking about bees... or perhaps I'm just reading too much into it.

Either way, I love this tale of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll to bits. Really. Oh, and if Malcolm's Mum could put the cheque in the post, that'd be great.