Doctor Who - Vengeance on Varos (1985)

Vengeance on Varos has an unfounded reputation as being one of the most gratuitously violent Doctor Who stories, but viewed in the light of modern tastes it's actually quite tame - but still has the power to shock on occasion (the acid bath being particularly striking).

Philip Martin's script is actually a reasonably subtle satire on 'reality television', before there even really was such a phenomenon, with the 'captive audience' on Varos voting on various life-threatening situations and being entertained by round-the-clock torture and degradation programmes.

This is certainly a lot slyer than Christopher Eccleston's Doctor being dropped into a futuristic Big Brother house and Billie Piper being interrogated by a robotic Anne Robinson as we saw in the uncomfortably poor Bad Wolf episode at the end of the first year of the new Who.

The 1985 two-parter is also known for one of the most memorable, one-off alien creatures: namely the revolting Sil, the human-faced slug creature, a minor league Jabba The Hutt, who deserves a return appearance in the current incarnation of the show.

Unfortunately what lets Vengeance down is The Doctor himself. I never had the problems that others did with Colin Baker. He's a great actor and I find him an enjoyable and entertaining Doctor in the Big Finish audio dramas, but the material he is given here in his third outing in the role just seems plain wrong. The Doctor is a casual killer, setting laser beam traps without a second thought and hurling guards into an acid bath with a James Bondesque one-liner.

Luckily, he is partnered by the hypnotically-breasted Nicola Bryant, whose portrayal of Perpugilliam Brown (Peri) continues to weave a spell over me as it did when I was in my late teens. Although I was "drawn" to earlier female companions in retrospect (such as Louise Jameson's Leela and Lalla Ward's Romana), Peri was my first "pin-up" companion!

Ignoring the rickety props and dull effects (a lot of smoky corridors and projected images), Vengeance on Varos stands up well in the glare of modernity and may, somehow, have even been a better Doctor Who story without the character of The Doctor in it. The real acting chops go to old hand Martin Jarvis as the increasingly troubled governor of the former prison planet.