Ninety-Eighth Entry in the Charles Daniels Unauthorized Programme Guide O' Today's My BIRTHDAY! Serial 4Y - Underwear - At the edge of the universe, where planets are born from cosmic debris, one entity has laid dormant - waiting. A twisted creation from the last remains of the tortured souls from the most brutal psychic war ever known, it has waited for it's day to lay waste to everything. Endless aeons passed, and still the creature waited, so long that mystic eternities were formed and crushed under entropy, and still unblinking it slept...waiting...waiting.... It would sadly have to continue to wait, the BBC simply doesn't have enough money for this sort of thing! The TARDIS lands instead on a tacky looking space ship that looks suspiciously like a wobbly candy dish. The aliens on board the vessel wanted to be called the Aztekka, but sadly that name was already taken by a popular disco, so they chose to call themselves the Minyans. To the Minyans the Time Lords are gods. This betrays the rather limited intelligence of the Minyans as it was the time lords who were responsible for the end of their civilization! Well, except for the fully operational candy dish star crusier. The entire supra-advanced industrial society the Minyans enjoyed was destroyed by internecine warfare. Minyos melted away into the blazing fusion blast, the towering glass skyscrapers of their once proud megacities warped into misshappened parodies of their former selves before imploding and showering the world with molten shrapnel of liquid death - for budgetary purposes this all happened completely off camera and even the onscreen descriptions were severely toned down from the original script which had been written on toilet paper as to fulfill two functions. As the Doctor joins this latest chapter in the entirely off screen epic of the dying Minyan race, it turns out that those on the candy dish star cruiser have founded Minyos 2: This Time It's Personal. Now with their new home secured, they are looking for a legendary lost space ship called the P7E, which carried all of their underwear. The Doctor helps the captain, Jackson, locate his own underwear, which is quite hilarious and embarrassing as Jackson was actually wearing it at the time. Even after this great discovery it is at last only one pair of underwear. The P7E must be found before it is too late. With an underwear detector made out of an elastic band, two pieces of string, and a magnet, the Doctor leads the crew to the whereabouts of the P7E. Once it is located they board the mysterious vessel which closely resembles a dirty ashtray. Once a board they discover the crew has forgotten their original purpose as 'The High And Mighty Guardians Of the Tightie-Whities'. The crew now serve the ship's computer, the Orac. We are informed by one of the crew that beastly and disgusting half-man half-machine creatures guard the mighty and powerful computer, however as again, the budget simply won't allow for this, the Doctor and friends stroll in, take the underwear, and run away as fast as possible! Book(s)/Other Related - Doctor Who The G-String Cowboy (Canada Only) Doctor Mysterio Undergarmenta Magnificento! '10101011111101111110 or I Am The Computer That Loves Underwear' Fluffs - Tom Baker seemed completely gormy for most of this story Fashion Victims - The Minyan space helmets are obviously metal pots Goofs - The artefacts have weird things written on them such as 'Made In Minyos', 'Killroy Was Here', 'SPAM' and 'Kill Those Bloody Belgian Bastards'. One or two of the scenes in this story must have cost the BBC SOME AMOUNT of money. Technobabble - "No wonder this space ship looks like a candy dish - It's got a Cadbury's Hyperstitial Drive!" Links and References - The Doctor cheerfully reminiscences about all the times he's landed on REALISTIC looking space ships - even though he references some examples directly, such as the Spiceminer in 'The Robots With Breasts', - we MUST assume he has a lot more liberal definition of 'realistic' than the fans! Untelevised Misadventures - For reasons unknown the Doctor is no longer welcomed in Aberdeen and has been barred from every pub in Blackpool. Dialogue Disasters - Jackson: The quest is the quest! Herrick: The quest is the quest! Orfe: The quest is the quest! Tala: The quest is the quest! Doctor: Oh excuse me, are we talking about The Quest again? Jackson: Whatever blows, sucks. Doctor: I wish my first wife thought that way. Dialogue Triumphs - Doctor: Don't ever play with strange weapons, Leela -- AIM THEM! Leela reveals much about the Doctor - Leela: Don't worry, he has fathered many. Doctor: They've never been able to prove it. Doctor: Have you ever heard of the Flying Dutchman? Leela: No. Doctor: Pity. He probably has big poofy underwear. Orac: There are no gods but me! Orac was not created! I made myself! Doctor: I'm sorry, are you trying to quote David Warner in Time Bandits? Orac: Lasers! 8 o'clock! Day one! Doctor: Just let me know when Ralph Richardson gets here. The classic final scene between the Doctor and Leela: Doctor: Another insane object, another self-aggrandising artefact! Leela: Oh Doctor, I can't believe they said that about you! Dialogue Oddities - (ORIGINAL SCRIPT) The Doctor: Wherever there is evil, there must be justice! One can't just sit idly by and partake in the spectacle of destruction! (ON SCREEN) Tom Baker: Ohh look - EVIL! Viewers' Quotes - "My first thought was that this was a fairly tasteless rip off of the work of the generations of Greek storytellers who created and refined the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. Then I realised that Mark Antony was the script editor! Hell, for all I know him and Homer were drinking buddies!" - Leonard Anderson (1990) "I wouldn't trust Antony for a Athenian Minute!" - Homer (800 BC) "There are some who say Underwear was a damn terrible story, and yes it was. The first episode was very tedious, and the plot in general seemed very weak. The sets were bad, the acting was bad, the script was bad. However, it is easy to over look the reliance on weapons. One of the annoying characteristics of the Doctor has always been that he never carries a gun and blows the fuck out of evil. Sure he uses his wits to get out of tricky situations, but where's the cold hard godly justice of a fully loaded .45?" - Father James O'Maley (1978) "There is far more to admire in Underwear than you would guess. I mean this is the story which...umm..I don't remember ANYTHING about this story!" - Kate Skipton (1986) "Okay season 15, this should be easy. There was Lighthouse Cutaway, The Indivisible Enemy, Image of the Ken Doll, The Fun Makers, and then..umm..ahh....what HELL came after the Fun Makers???" - Charles Daniels (2000) Psychotic Nostalgia - "I don't wear underwear. Never ask me about this again, please." Tom Baker Speaks! "Yes, this story was...I'm sorry, I have no clue what I'm looking at. I don't remember this at all. Are you sure this was one of mine? Oh, yes, there I am! Well, it looks like me. I guess it could be someone else, who just looks like me, quiet a bit I'd have to wager. Still, they are calling him Doctor, so it must be me. I say, I do look a lot taller in person don't I? He looks like a short jammy git, doesn't he? I MUST have been very drunk or something during this entire proceeding. Being a children's hero in the 70s was rather stressful, you know? Still, at least I look like I'm getting paid." Rumors & Facts - It has sometimes been suggested that Doctor Who is at its best when its ass is showing. Those who hold that view would no doubt find much to admire in Underwear. Marc Antony fully took over from Sherlock Holmes as Doctor Who's script editor after trailing Holmes and trying to gather damaging photographs for much of the year. It quickly became obvious that Antony would have his hands full for the planned finale for the season, The Killer Cats Of Molester Jones by David Weird. Consequently, for the penultimate serial he turned to the script writing genius that had made Invdivisible Enemy a rather cheap reality. Although Antony and producer Graham Williams were under pressure from their superiors to move away from stories which would be entertaining, costly, horrific, funny, science fictiony, dramatic, or even visual in nature, Antony intended to continue his predecessor's tradition of plagiarising liberally from any source that moved. He suggested the writers might look to Greek mythology which had always been popular in the Rome of Antony's time. They adapted the quest of Jason and the Argonauts to find the fabled Golden Fleece into a science fiction epic of a bunch of aliens looking for their misplaced underwear. This adventure was first entitled Undergarments and then later simplified into Underwear. The director assigned to Serial 4Y was Norman Stewart. Stewart had just gone entirely out of his mind after working at the BBC for a number of years. Stewart recently been promised by the BBC that he would be at the head of "a space epic beyond the wildest imaginings of Jules Verne and HG Wells". After writing a script requiring a budget of 15 Million Pounds, quite a hefty sum for 1977, he was maddened to discover the BBC was only willing to offer 3 shillings and an egg. This came as somewhat a double blow because not only were shillings no longer legal tender in the United Kingdom, but the egg was eaten by a hungry delivery man before it ever reached his office. This experience left Stewart a gibbering mad man, which led the BBC to believe he would be perfect on "a crap programme like Doctor Who". A challenge immediately confronted Stewart after Williams attended a preview screening of the motion picture Star Wars. Star Wars had already proven a hit in North America and would debut in the UK in early 1978, at the SAME time Underwear would be on television screens across the nation. Williams decided that Underwear should look ten times MORE impressive than Star Wars in order to save face. In an act of insanity, Williams invested the ENTIRE BUDGET on one effect in which the entire universe is imploded and then all the events in history play back through a warp effect which then forms the shape of the TARDIS and opens out into a thousand marching spider Dustbins ready to emerge as the new masters of time and space. While this was impressive - there was no more budget to do vital things like buy film and video tape. Things then went ENTIRELY TO HELL when Williams realised he hadn't sought proper permissions and Terry Nation refused the USE of the DUSTBINS! At this point, Williams elected to commit suicide slowly over a period of two weeks. Antony rushed to William's home in a panic and dragged him back to the BBC studios against his will. When they arrived, they discovered the entire place in complete disarray - BBC employees were walking through the building blow torching badly stacked film stock, conservative MPs were having illicit sexual affairs in the water closets, and someone had given Noel Edmunds a job on a popular children's show. Doctor Who was still under orders not to spend any money, as had often been the case under Pinchcliffe. However, inflation was skyrocketing in 1977, unemployment was at an all time high, there was an energy crisis in full swing, and the vending machines were entirely out of Crunchie bars. This series of events left Williams and Antony with two options: either completely lose the next serial or kill themselves. Williams was fairly exhausted from his last attempt so he suggested the former. Even while this story was driving the controlling forces to suicide the writers were already thinking that Underwear could be their little gold mine. They suggested that this story be used to spin off into their own science-fiction series, in which the Minyans travelled through space becoming involved in other mythology-inspired adventures. Not even the BBC was stupid enough to follow up this ridiculous idea, however. Meanwhile, the Doctor's other new companion, K-9, was finally unveiled to the public on October 6th. That day, it is reported, over 600 kids joyfully kicked the K-9 model into a thousand million pieces. Earning K-9 the right to be called "The Most Kickable Companion".