Back in 1990, I reviewed the entirety of Colin Baker’s run as the Doctor for issue 3 of The Tides of Time. I’ve uploaded it to this site and it can be read from the link here:
In a change to previous practice I’ve reset the article using rather than uploading a scan of the original published pages, but have attempted to be faithful to editor Louise Dennis’s original intent.
Looking back on this article, there are a number of judgements which reveal me to have been prey to fashion, such as my dismissal of Graham Williams’s production style as ‘bizarre’. Nowadays I’d emphasise the diminishing budget, the unavailability of directors sympathetic to the producer’s intentions, and the difficulty everyone involved by 1979 had in managing Tom Baker. As for the Colin Baker stories themselves, I managed to criticize The Two Doctors without mentioning its portrayal of the Sontarans, who appear here with their worst masks and with no effort to disguise the limitations of the costumes. Considering Vengeance on Varos, I’m struck that in 1990 I somehow thought that computer gaming was a past fad which had failed to take root.
I’ve left most of my grammatical errors untouched – ‘in retrospect’ seems to have been a favourite qualification of mine in 1990 – but have made a few punctuation changes and removed one gratuitous ‘at the time’.
The Tides of Time 