Eps3 and 4 remain solid stuff, and Mrs Chuff and I continued to enjoy. The guns were a bit daft, and the cliffhanger to episode 2 is very strange. Presumably the episode under-ran and they shifted scenes around a bit?

If you can sell a role to the audience while wearing a cricket glove on your head, it's either laziness or principle that's keeping you from conquering the world. Garfield gives Noel Coleman a run for his money in the "Who's scariest?" stakes in The War Games, but is one of the scariest things on television EVER in his role as Davy Gordon in The Changes. I bought the DVD set of this last year, and still have to consciously nerve myself to watch the episodes in which he appears.

The cliffhanger to part three though, is an absolute cracker. One the series best ever I reckon. Shame about the cheap corridor action in the last two episodes, but the forest sets are fabulous and Baker is superb - Louise Jameson also really hits the ground running. However it's a mark of how strong this season is that Face Of Evil is one of the weaker stories.

That was one of the first Who stories I can ever remember watching


In close-ups I can't take him seriously because of the obvious piece of gauze over his right eye.

He was in that too was he! One of my early TV memories, scared the life out of me as a kid.

Note to self: Get The Changes on DVD in 2016.

Yikes! I've never noticed that! I must rewatch it. Still an excellent actor, though. I think part of his impact in TWG is down to his being an established character in more than one time zone.

As had I. What do you mean "none of this emotional nonsense"? Leela spent at least five seconds or so appearing to be somewhat distressed.

Louise was fabulous from the outset.

I'd forgotten how good this one was. I've vivid recollection of the first two episodes from original broadcast, but not so much the last. The reveal of the Doctor's face on the cliff was a real wow moment for me, for some reason. Fascinating. And I remember enjoying all the violence.

It's somewhat reminiscent of Zardoz.

Shame about the ratings.

Perhaps it would have been better to edit it into a single 90-minute slot?

I can't imagine this will lead to further repeats. Was there an official reason for this repeat? In the past, BBC4 have only repeated old stories because of the 50th anniversary and as a tribute to Liz Sladen.

Perhaps it was an experiment to see how repeats of old episodes might perform if they were used a palliative during the show's current hiatus?

What was the story where Katy Manning was running around holding some sort of detector device, its resemblance to male genitals surely being a private joke among the prop department ("Let's get Jo to point a big pair of bollocks at everybody")

EDIT: I think it was this thing, from The Time Monster:
https://houseofgeekery.files.wordpre...-monster-1.jpg

Yer i am pretty sure it is from the Time Monster

The ratings were decent considering it was on BBC Four.

I wouldn't describe getting 88K viewers in a slot that averages 268K as "decent".

Not that surprised about the ratings considering it was barely advertised and it's been out on DVD for years.

That's the one. It wasn't even the silliest thing about that story. :P

What ratings did you expect? 3 million?

268K would have been nice. But it's no surprise given both BBC3 repeats being axed, the failed attempt at a Sunday omnibus and unimpressive ratings for the last series.

As I say, I wonder if it was an experiment to find a substitute for having no Doctor Who this year. I'm not expecting any further classic episodes any time soon, any more than omnibuses or cinema screenings of series 10 episodes.

And just because it's been on DVD for years doesn't mean the other 99.9% of the population who don't buy Doctor Who DVDs wouldn't watch it for free on TV. BBC4 found out - They didn't!

Jekyll...and Beowulf would be delighted by 3m. Certainly in overnights anyway.

This is not at all relevant. Or is it?

Well, probably not...

ETA Or is it?

Scrap any more BBC4 repeats then, IB? That ratings chasing flipping channel. I don't know....

(or do I?)

ETA again: It might've been a one off, but would be nice to see more C20 Who on the BBC.

Dad's Army has been repeated hundreds of times and the whole series has been available on DVD for years, yet it still gets decent viewing figures on BBC2 every Saturday night...
Not quite sure what this proves, but anyway...

I agree, though I watched it on the iPlayer. I'd love them to go through the Pertwee and Baker years, but I really can't see it happening. And as I say, I wonder whether showing them as episodes was a mistake, rather than merging them into a 90-minute TV movie format.

I don't know if anyone noticed on broadcast but flicking from standard BBC Four to BBC Four HD the picture ratio went from full-screen (stretched) to original 4:9 ratio.

OAR would be 4:3. Widescreen is 16:9. Occasionally 14:9 is used for 4:3 as a kind of halfway house to reduce the black bars either side of a 4:3 image on a 16:9 display, at the expense of loosing a little off the top and bottom of a 4:3 image.

In HD, the 4:3 image should have been broadcast pillar boxed. Broadcasters sometimes get it wrong.

Were you watching with a Sky box? If so they don't pillarbox when upscaling SD channels transmitting 4:3 material as they should. They just send it as it is so 4:3 pictures are distorted. You can switch off the upscaling by selecting "automatic" in the output resolution setting in the setup menu, and the TV should then present it correctly.
On HD channels, the upscaling and pillarboxing is done at source so should always be correct, unless the broadcaster has got it wrong as GDK says. The BBC usually do get it right though.

Thinking about this a bit more, you don't say which version, SD or HD, was stretched.

If it was the SD version that was stretched you've probably got the wrong aspect ratio setting in your equipment somewhere, most likely in the TV set.

You only get control over the shape of the image on your TV for SD broadcasts so settings like "fullscreen" (4:3), "widescreen" (16:9), "zoom" (4:3 enlarged to fill the width of a 16:9 screen, but losing top and bottom of the original image) and "smart" (stretch a 4:3 image increasingly towards the edge to fill a 16:9 screen) only apply for SD signals.

If you have the aspect ratio correctly set, the SD image should switch correctly between 4:3 and 16:9 when broadcasters send the right signal.

If your set top box is auto-upscaling, the TV setting shouldn't come into it, as all HD is broadcast as 16:9, with the broadcasters setting the image shape and size within the 16:9 frame. If it's wrong then, the broadcasters have probably got it wrong.

My Sky box is set to not upscale SD broadcasts which means I can change the aspect ratio myself in the TV settings when the broadcasters get it wrong.

My preference is to always watch in OAR (Original Aspect Ratio) as anything else either distorts the image or too much image is cropped off the top and bottom edges. I find it annoying that many documentaries these days choose to zoom and crop historical 4:3 footage.

I assumed it was the SD version that was wrong. It's extremely unlikely that the HD version would be, as no setting at the viewer end can change it that wouldn't affect all HD pictures.
The HD version can only be wrong if the broadcaster actually transmits it wrongly, as we've said, and the BBC are pretty reliable at doing it correctly.

I only caught the one episode as it was broadcast live, the rest watching them on iPlayer. It was the standard BBC Four transmission that was stretched as I watched live, the HD version was broadcast in its original 4:3 ratio when I flicked over to that channel.
I no longer have a Skybox nor do I have a separate freeview receiver, I watched it via my in-built receiver within my Smart TV and I don't have the setting set to auto upscaling of standard definition.
I just thought it was odd that each channel broadcast the one that I watched live in different ratios.