Doctor Who: The War Machines (1966)

With my late father employed by the General Post Office (later British Telecom) all his working life, as a small child in the early 70s I had a fascination with the Post Office Tower in Central London.

Officially opened in 1965, the year before I was born, it symbolised "the future" and "technology" to a young Flea, with its sci-fi abundance of dishes and spikes.

I did a project on the tower when I was in primary school and obtained a giant poster from the GPO's marketing department, showing a cross-section of all the tower's workings.

So, when I discovered the Doctor Who adventure The War Machines was using the tower as the headquarters for its Big Bad, I got excited.

The First Doctor (William Hartnell) arrives in Swinging 60s London with his annoying companion Dodo (Jackie Lane) and immediately senses something odd about the newly completed Post Office Tower.

Investigating, he discovers a scientist preparing the supercomputer WOTAN (Will Operating Thought Analogue) to be become a hub for the world's fledgling computer networks.

Sadly, the story is rather a let down. Kit Pedlar's original idea of a super-computer achieving artificial intelligence and deciding to replace mankind because we are "broken" is solid enough; with its prophetic vision of the Internet to come - a system linking all the worlds computers.

But Ian Stuart Black's script is riddled with plot holes, stupid mistakes and characters' acting inconsistently, with the ultimate resolution of the story being rather heavy-handed and uninspiring.

The War Machines is only the Doctor Who story to date where the protagonist is actually referred to (by WOTAN and its cronies) as "Doctor Who".

There is plenty of fan-spawned justification for this 'slip', but for me it's just an easily overlooked sign that the show had yet to firm up its mythology. It's also suggested in passing that The Doctor is "human", but then it would be quite some time before we would hear of the planet Galifrey.

The War Machines themselves, which WOTAN's army of hypnotised slaves construct, wouldn't look out of place on Robot Wars and seem drawn to propel themselves through dustbins and packing crates like Starsky and Hutch driving their Gran Torino through every pile of cardboard boxes in Bay City.

Dodo, while she wouldn't be missed, gets the shoddiest of send-offs for a companion: she is hypnotised by WOTAN in episode one, then deprogrammed by the Doctor in episode two and shunted off to "rest for a few days" in the country. She isn't mentioned again until almost the final scene of episode four when the Doctor is told she has decided to stay in England.

And the less said about the War Machine that conveniently "runs out of programming" the better!

There are some flashes of genius in both the script and Michael Ferguson's direction; we are introduced to future companions Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben (Michael Craze); and The War Machines has its share of unintentionally funny lines (The Doctor looking for Dodo in a "happening nightclub" gets praised for his "fab gear" and compared to Jimmy Saville), but sadly William Hartnell stumbles his way through the dreadful technobabble-heavy dialogue, fluffing more lines than usual.

This was the last story of the Third Season of Classic Who and Patrick Troughton would be taking over the role in the second story of the next season.

On a positive note, this story marked a sea change in the show's story content, moving it away from historical stories towards those which focused on The Doctor and his companions defending modern day Earth.

Of course, in recent years, this has been carried to extremes by out-going showrunner Russell T Davies, who has only rarely allowed his Doctors to stray away from Earth!