Supposedly Doctor Who is the UK’s longest running science fiction programme, but in reality its forty-odd-year run can be split into two separate and nearly contradictory versions: the original 1963-89 series and the re-envisaged, watered-down version that has been a flagship show for the BBC since 2005. This original four part serial comes from the final days of the former, when the series was trying to emerge from the quagmire of its 1980s variant and break new ground, both in science fiction and in terms of what was possible on a national television channel.

Seemingly inspired by the strange occurrences surrounding the village of Shingle Street, Suffolk during WWII, this serial deals with an extraordinarily bleak and morally-ambiguous landscape where characters can’t easily be divided into good, bad, angelic or evil. The depth of symbolism and untold back story that the plot disperses on nearly every level seems – to viewers reared on today’s simplistic, commercial Doctor Who – dense and abstruse, almost unreadable on first viewing. It’s worlds away from the show that bears its name today, where heroes must be whiter than white and villains clearly signposted from the off. Resplendent with controlled, keen direction from hemler Mallet, the show debunks the claim, highly prevalent amongst TV producers, that ‘cinematic’ means ‘fast’ by investing its running time with somberly paced, atmospheric sequences that not only serve to underline the tensions apparent in the screenplay but pull them out into abstract, visual passages. (Interestingly the serial is available on DVD in a specially edited feature length format that reflects this debt to the cinema).

Although the show was in its final days, and soon to be axed in favour of less thoughtful programming, the serial both harks back to the multi-layered and socially-relevant stories of the 1970s, and looks forward to the exceptional work that writers of the show and fans-turned-authors were to build up during the wilderness years between both version of Doctor Who, when Virgin Publishing (and later BBC Books) published a long-running and expansive series of novels and short stories.

Unforgivably, this work was wiped away when the BBC revived Doctor Who in 2005 with Russel T. Davies in an executive producer role that broke the BBC’s own internal laws by allowing him to pen almost fifty percent of each season – hitherto script editors and producers had been forced to write stories for their own programmes under pseudonyms. Davies was a fringe character on the fan-inspired fiction circuit, but a growing player in the shallow and manipulative MAVM of the late 90s, and you can’t help but feel his distaste at the introverted and experimental novels of his former peers. Tellingly, only the most commercially minded of those authors (including Mark Gatiss – read what’s wrong with him here) were invited to write for the revamped series. Whatever his feelings about the past, Davies is responsible for the feeble-minded version of Doctor Who that currently graces our screens – one with child-like moral values and thin credulity in scenarios that see its ‘alien’ lead exhibit ‘human’ emotions and, most tellingly of all, fall in love with a teenage girl. His tenure as the show’s front-runner ends later this year amidst much pomp and circumstance, but it is doubtful that the next power-hungry, compassion-deficit incumbent will change anything in the face of mega-budgeted Saturday night TV. So latter day serials like The Curse of Fenric should be cherished as examples of what television, and shows like Doctor Who in particular, were capable of given time, love and intelligence, because we are unlikely to experience it soon on front line, prime-time television.

The Curse of Fenric at the IMDb