Doctor Who: The Creature From The Pit (1979)

The Creature From The Pit has a lot stacked against it, from being the first complete story I've watched on my iPod Touch (it's one of a wave of stories released on iTunes this year, but not yet avilable on DVD) to some bizzare performances and a monter which is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

The Fouth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana (Lalla Ward) arrive on the jungle planet of Chloris and are immediately fascinated by what appears to be a giant broken egg near the TARDIS.

They are then drawn into the machinations of the local ruler Lady Adrasta (Myra Frances) who, when not fending off hairy, barbarian bandits, is throwing those who displease her down a pit to be fed upon by a mysterious "creature".

Not only was this Lalla Ward's first filmed story as Romana, so she hasn't quite got a handle on the character yet, but it's also David Brierley's first outing as the voice of K-9 and, for me, he doesn't nail it like the more familiar John Leeson version. I find Brierley's distinctly different voice and intonation gives K-9 a haughty persona I'm not so fond of.

Naturally, the Doctor ends up in the pit and confronts the Creature which, much of the time, for want of a better description, appears to be an enormous phosphorescent phallus attached to a ginormous glowing green ball sac. And the less said about The Doctor's more intimate moments of attempted communication the better.

David Fisher's script is rife with examples of dry, British humour, which also flag up Douglas Adams involvement as script editor, and I don't think it would be too far a stretch to make comparisons between Organon (Geoffrey Bayldon), the comedy astrologer the Doctor befriends, and Slartibartfast in Adams' own Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy from a year earlier.

While the story features more false endings than Return Of The King, it does lay out a precedent for the TARDIS towing Earth through the skies in Journey's End by attempting a similar stunt with a neutron star.

The revenge attack on Chloris by the Creature's "people" actually doesn't make much sense because it has just been stated that the Creature is so long-lived that the 15 years it spent in the pit was just "a blink of an eye", but by then the real story - which has shades of old school Star Trek about it - has already been neatly wrapped up.

And that's the thing I think a lot of people overlook, the core story of The Creature FromThe Pit (that is, the Creature's true identity and why Adastra is so keen to keep it down there) is very intelligent and engaging.

Unfortunately what would probably have made a terrific three-part story has been padded out to four parts with the pointless schemes of Adastra's number two and the comedy bandits, who are led by a man prone to lapsing into random Fagin impressions.

The Creature From The Pit is by no means a flagship story for the programme, but it's a lot better than many people give it credit for and cleverer even than some of the stories that get through the selection process for the modern Doctor Who. For instance, I'd rather sit through The Creature From The Pit again than repeat showings of Fear Her, Love & Monsters or Voyage Of The Damned.