Doctor Who Listener Archive - 1970

Note: These are the articles, photos and other Doctor Who related items from issues of the New Zealand Listener. The full text of each item has been transcribed as it is often indistinct on the scanned cuttings. Spelling and grammar have not been corrected. We would like to hear from anyone who can provide better quality copies or scanned originals of any of these cuttings and also from anyone who can identify any additional Doctor Who items from the New Zealand Listener that have not been included here.

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Listener Clippings

[clipping: 1970-01-09]

9 January 1970
Vol 63 No 1577 (12-18 January 1970)
p23: Photo of the Controller and Macra, promoting The Macra Terror Episode 2 (CHTV-3, 12/1/70)

GRAHAM LEAMAN, as the Controller, and a crab-like creature called The Macra in Dr Who and the Macra Terror, screening from CHTV-3 this evening.

[clipping: 1970-01-12]

16 January 1970
Vol 63 No 1578 (19-25 January 1970)
p23: Photo of the Doctor and Polly on the moon, promoting The Moonbase Episode 3 (WNTV-1, 19/1/70)

NOT LIKE APOLLO - in Dr Who and the Moonbase, screening from WNTV-1 this evening, Dr Who and his companions find themselves having to cope with the reduced gravity on the moon.

[clipping: 1970-01-30]

30 January 1970
Vol 63 No 1580 (2-8 February 1970)
p24: Photo of the Macra, promoting The Macra Terror Episode 1 (WNTV-1, 2/2/70)

THE MACRA - in the latest Dr Who adventure screening from WNTV-1 this evening the scientist and his companions meet up with a hideous crab-like creature.

[clipping: 1970-06-15]

15 June 1970
Vol 64 No 1599 (15-21 Jun 1970)
p10: Article in 'Television Notebook' section, 'The Demon Daleks' with a photo of a Dalek, promoting The Evil of the Daleks Episode 1 (WNTV-1, 19/6/70)

The Demon Daleks
REMEMBER the daleks? Of all the enemies who have faced the intrepid Dr Who, they were the most sinister. The silurians were larger and the cybermen were a lot more human, but for sheer villainy the daleks took the cake. Whether issuing orders in metallic, utterly unemotional voices, or moving soundlessly through gleaming corridors, they always remained villains for the connoisseur. A shop in London even started selling a line of dalek replicas - they squatted in the living-room like malevolent dustbins, menacing visitors who dropped in for tea.
  Dr Who fans will be delighted to learn that their favourite series is to return to television. The bad guys this time are not giant crabs or one-eyed monoids, but genuine daleks. In a seven-part series entitled The Evil of the Daleks, the good Doctor has just as much trouble with the creatures as ever. The series starts when he and Jamie see their ship Tardis being driven away on the back of a lorry. They follow, and are lured to an antique shop owned by Edward Waterfield, a specialist in Victoriana. Soon they are back in 1867, in a manor-house owned by one Theodore Maxtible. There's a Turkish wrestler called Kemel, and some very unwelcome visitors - the daleks. It seems the enemy has decided that humans have some good points after all. They set up an experiment in which human factors are injected into three new daleks. The next stage of their plan is even more diabolical: they construct a machine to transform humans mentally into daleks. When the three humanoid daleks show undesirable qualities like playful friendliness, a sense of humour, initiative and general unreliability, the dalek emperor orders that his subjects pass through the machine and be dehumanised. Dr Who, however, manages to interfere with the process, and things start to go a little haywire.
  A professional child guidance expert once commented on the Dr Who series: "It releases a child's aggressive impulses, and is essen-tially moral, because right triumphs over might. When Dr Who defends the human race, he tends to do it by brains, not brawn." The series combines fantasy with fact, and the various terrors appeal to both adults and children: Monsters are produced by a skilled production team who work with everything from pots of glue to buckets of dry ice. Daleks are relatively simple to make; they have rigid bodies which don't take long to construct.
  Some of the other monsters, however, pose considerable techni-cal problems. Costume designer Christine Rawlins designs torsos and heads for the enemies of Dr Who. While she does all she can to minimise discomfort to the actors, some costumes are rather hot and stuffy nevertheless. One veteran monster who has played a cyber-man, a yeti and a silurian, had to stride about in a silurian outfit of heavy rubber during several hours of filming. "You lose weight pretty fast in some of these costumes," he said. "They are pretty wet and slicky but you do get used to it eventually ... all I wanted afterwards was a long soak in the bath!" Inside the cyberman suits the atmosphere is like a turkish bath. They consist of a diver's wet suit painted silver, with a fibreglass head that screws on from the back.
  Apart from monsters, the workshop produces rockets, explosions, computers, space helmets, control panels, weird foliage and many other pieces of space equipment. Jack Kine, the man in charge of producing bizarre villains, sums up what his team is attempting: "Our motto is 'anything that can be imagined can be made' - it has to be! This place may look like a schoolboy's dream, but it can be very hairy and hysterical."
  If you watch the opening titles of Dr Who you could never mistake the programme for anything else. There's the theme music for a start, which is totally unlike that of any other series. Then there are dissolving graphics that whirl about like eerie snowflakes to expose the credits. If the theme tune sounds inhuman, there's a good explanation - no human plays a note. It comes from Ron Grainer and the Radiophonic Workshop, and was constructed from basic electronic sources. If computers ever learn to compose symphonies, this is what they could sound like.

[clipping: 1970-06-29]

29 June 1970
Vol 67 No 1601 (29 Jun-5 Jul 1970)
p23: Photo of the Second Doctor, promoting The Evil of the Daleks Episode 3 (WNTV-1, 3/7/70)

Left: Dr Who (Patrick Troughton) makes another stop along the time continuum and meets old enemies in "The Evil of the Daleks". The first episode of a new seven part story in the science fiction series "Dr Who" will be seen on Friday evening.

Clippings for 1969 or Clippings for 1971.