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Love this story of all of the Key to Time season. Emilia Radford and Vivian Faye awesome characters played by some brilliant actresses. Romana play by Mary Tamm is awesome as usual and her clothing look so good on her❤.
K9 forgetting tennis might be my favourite joke in the entire show
Famously this was the 100th story and scene with a cake was planned/shot but not used 🎩
The 100th Doctor who story, a great milestone. Another great reaction here
Had a great time watching this. Thanks Sesska
I wish there was an Emilia Rumford, Amelia Ducat, Martha Tyler team up.
(and as those three contain the names Amelia, Martha and Tyler I'm guessing the new series writers liked them too…)
Great story! Emelia Rumford is a fabulously dotty character, very much in the style of Amelia Ducat, played by Sylvia Coleridge in the Seeds of Doom. The setting, atmosphere and the Ogri are genuinely creepy and who DOESN'T like a spooky manor house and weird stone circle?
Love how this is one of two Classic Who stories where the cliffhanger actually involves hanging from a cliff
This is my favourite Doctor Who story.
That's a nice meta touch about Earth being his favourite planet 😀
Apparently they were going to show the “fake” Doctor pushing Romana off the cliff but Tom Baker rightfully objected, not wanting the kids watching to be left for a week with the image of seeing him do that
I just knew you would enjoy this one! These 1st 2 parts have such charm and wit and enjoyable intrigue/mystery, and Ill always love Romana doing what so many companions never have… nipping back to the Tardis to change into a more practical outfit!
Damn I love the Key to Time, warts and all. Three (IMO) bangers in a row, with my favorite Doctor and my favorite companion. The back half is not quite as awesome, but I still love them anyway. This one always jostles with Ribos as my favorite of the bunch, just like you Jess I can't get enough Brit folk horror (which always seems to bring out great supporting characters). And the Ogrii have my vote for the best slow monsters in Who! Soooo glad you're vibing with this arc!
I liked the way Vivien Fay is revealed to be the main villain in the story.
Wouldn't it have been simple enough for De Vries and his wife to run upstairs to escape? Surely that big, lumbering stone can't climb stairs.
Poor old K-9 was always getting blown up or short-circuited or drained of power… it was because, behind-the-scenes, the prop was almost impossible to work with, so they had to keep finding ways to minimize his action.
About 4 years ago, or so, Jess was wearing her hair in a way that reminded me of Mary Tamm, and I knew then that she would love Amelia Rumford, and this story. 😂
Fun Fact: Stones of Blood is the 100th serial of classic Who and ended just one week before the show's 15th anniversary. Originally, the was a scene to commemorate both occasions in which Romana and K9 surprise the Doctor with a cake to celebrate his 751st birthday. However, this idea was rejected by producer Graham Williams who felt it was too self-indulgent.
David Fisher writes some great female characters. This was the first Who I saw in colour. We got a colour telly just as I turned 10
Loving your reaction to this season 🙂
My favorite who episodes
Alas the only decent story this season 😢
Wayhey-the Doctor Who story with it all…. a witty script, a brilliant guest cast (with some amazingly OTT performances), great Doctor Companion interaction, Some Scares, Some Sci Fi stuff, some great sets (and some wonderfully cheap ones). And to top it off-an impractical Monster that somehow works
And I adore Mary Tamm-and her outfits. She serves RuRauls Drag Race with her wardrobe at times-and I LOOOOOOVVEEEE it!
One of my absolute favorite Fourth Doctor stories.
Beatrix Lehmann who played Professor Rumford had a long career in British cinema. She was once called "The Bette Davis of British Cinema." This story was one of her last roles before she pass away.
Professor Emilia Rumford is played by the wonderful Beatrix Lehmann and, unfortunately, she passed away not too long after this was originally shown. She's in some good films like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Cat and the Canary, and a blink and you'll miss it appearance in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum, which also features Jon Pertwee (in an even smaller role). This is the 100th Doctor Who story, you're closing in on the 500th episode later in this season.
It's curious how this story starts out as kind of contemporary folk horror (in the manner shortly to be celebrated by something like 'Hammer House of Horror') and soon transitions into Doctor Who lunacy. That's not a criticism. The Outside Broadcast video cameras may not have the atmospheric texture of film, but they do make things look like they're happening more in the moment. And it's a lovely cast, with some interesting stories to tell…
The discussion about the 'Nine Travellers' is rather fun as the legend is that the real stones could never be counted accurately – a situation that (as Mat Irvine recounts) was exacerbated when a party of schoolchildren arrived during the shoot and started counting the fake stones added on location!
Visual Effects designer Mat Irvine had a few interesting things to say about this show in his mid-1980s tome 'Doctor Who: Special Effects'. One of the cutest stories regarded a break in location filming, during which Tom Baker would invariably sit and do the Times Crossword. Noticing the K-9 prop accompanying him was still radio-linked to John Leeson (sitting in the Outside Broadcast van with his mic and his own copy of said newspaper), he whispered to his co-star, asking for assistance. And so passers-by were treated to the spectacle of Dr Who and K-9 apparently deciphering crossword clues…
Stones of Blood fucking rocks, Key to Time season is underrated.
We're deep in the show's dive into gothic.. and cosmic horror. It's my personal favorite, and actually is in keeping with the trends of the times. This was deep in a period of public fascination with horror, and a lot of that was gothic horror, from Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen in (1976), often overlapping with cosmic horror, like Alien (1979). Even Scooby-Doo, very much a kid's show, was in its heyday during the '70s, and was centered around really gothic horror themes. And nobody convinces you anyone is capable of fighting back against any of it, even has the will to, like the Doctor does, and specifically Tom Baker as Four.
And the show's sets, and setpieces, and lighting and way it's shot, it's entire atmosphere and ambience, the villains, the people they meet along the way, all really built that feeling up well. Spooky abandoned or half-occupied old mansions and English country manor houses, rural cottages in "witch territory". Even on the alien planets, they spend a lotta time in dank medieval dungeons and catacombs, seemingly abandoned space stations.
This is another in a run if very good stories this season.. Decidedly creepy and atmospheric, with a nice dash of folk horror.
Beatrice Lehman is absolutely delightful as Amelia Rumford, and Mary Tamm looks wonderful as always. Her Romana has a very nice aristocratic, fashionable dash about her.
A great slice of late 70s Gothic Who . A Minor Classic .
It's not my favorite story from this season (coming soon), but it is the favorite for many fans! Amelia is definitely a fan favorite, there might even be some fanfic about her! I like that the druidy part isn't the main adversary, and the stones slide, not roll, LOL! As it proceeds, this story feels like it was the inspiration to a Whittaker story in her first season.
There are quite a few excellent mature female supporting characters in classic Dr Who. Amelia is one of the best. The actress who played her was an emminent stage actress, the Judy Dench of her time, and played the character beautifully. You can see the layers of personality Dame Beatrix brings to Amelia.
The Stones of Blood is one of my favourite Doctor Who adventures. And yes I have visited the Rollright Stones whilst driving back to London from Malvern. Accompanied by my then girlfriend who has a certain resemblance to the late Mary Tamm.
The Rollright Stones is a special place indeed.
Cults were big in the UK during the 70's – there was a whole Paganism movement based around establishing cults & made up interpretations of old (pre-Roman) religious practices, leylines, stone circles / standing stones, astrology, astronomy, Wicker & witchcraft – plus the hippy / free love angle similar to the US (main difference is in the UK Paganism managed to establish itself as a semi-legitimate religion and it feels more sinister than the US hippy movement due to animal sacrifice having a role).
It was a largely rural movement and was a rich mine of stories for Dr Who in this era (Pertwee & Baker) – often mixed up with other rural interest like archaeology, King Arthur, environmentalism, "getting back in touch with nature", "dropping out of the ratrace" and becoming self sufficient etc.
This is one of the last Dr Who stories to draw on all this as inspiration for a while (although the failed Sarah Jane spin off from around the same time used similar inspirations).
To my mind, Dr Who became lesser once it moved away from these kind of stories (similar to how I think it lost something when dropping the purely historical stories, making everything Sci-fi by default) – as it lost the "spooky isolated village, where outsiders are expected to keep their nose out of other people's business" as an easy to establish hostile environment / community for the Doctor to try and navigate / investigate / find allies amongst when using modern Britain as the setting. It allowed for a slightly different feel to those stories, which added variety.