Doctor Who sweeps board in SFX sci-fi poll
The Doctor has been voted 'Best Hero' in an SFX poll of its readers; with the Daleks voted Best Monster; and The Master voted Best Villain; with various other Whoniverse characters peppered around various other polls.
I'm biased, but it's tough to see how any other genre character can really compete with the Doctor – eleven faces and personalities; bigger-on-the-inside time machine; anywhere in time and space; mysterious background and abilities. Who could compare?
Blake's 7, Babylon 5 and Farscape, three other series I have big soft-spots for, get a few mentions in the poll too, which is mainly dominated by the Trek franchise and various tedious vampire stuff.
Elsewhere The Master was voted best villain. A right and just result considering the brilliance of Roger Delgado and the sheer evilness of Anthony Ainley. Simm had his moments too. In his less interesting stories, including some of the recent ones, The Master is just a generic pantomime villain.
But gven something more interesting to do, all the actors who played the part have brought something new to the role in the way that every Doctor does. Seven shades of evil. Again, who could compete?
As it goes, I don't really have much interest in the Daleks. Every new appearance since Remembrance of the Daleks - barring Dalek - has been an exercise in diminishing returns and I'm frankly rather bored of them now.
The Daleks, yesterday
Daleks have arguably been rebooted three or four times now, but beyond that original concept there's not a huge amount to them. Most of the best Dalek stories since the 60s have concerned how people react to their presence and existence as much as anything - Genesis, Revelation and Remembrance specifically - although Day of the Daleks is brilliant sci-fi fun.
RTD and Helen Raynor failed completely in doing anything of interest with them in my opinion, and while Victory of the Daleks had some nice moment, it was pretty incoherent stuff.
Nevertheless, Daleks are slightly beyond that now. They're such a massive icon it doesn't really matter any more.
And now, in an SFX poll, they've trumped something called Lorne from Angel, the Aliens, Gollum from Lord Of The Rings, Gizmo from Gremlins, and the thing from, er, The Thing.
I wonder what Ray Cusick, designer of the Daleks, makes of it all. Legend has it he got an ex gratia payment from the BBC that amounted to £50, while Terry Nation bought a massive house in the country and a fleet of sports cars.
Cusick may not be rich, but designing the best monster ever isn't a bad legacy.
Other Doctor Who-related results in the SFX poll include:
• K9 named fifth-best robot
• Cybermen named 13th-best monsters
• Davros voted fifth-best villain
• Captain Jack Harkness voted 11th-best hero
• Donna Noble, Rose Tyler and Sarah-Jane Smith are voted fourth, eighth and tenth as Best Heroine respectively
Anthony Ainley’s best bits from Destiny of the Doctors
Destiny of the Doctors is a fairly patchy RPG released in the mid-90s that features Anthony Ainley in his last performance as The Master.
The game itself is imaginative and respectful of the show, featuring vocal performances from all the living Doctors, but it didn't really hold up that well as a gaming experience.
It was pretty buggy, the interface was awkward and the gameplay repetitive, but in a world without any new Who, and the prospect of a revival seemingly remote, new products like this seems important at the time.
I always rated Ainley's Master when he wasn't made to pantomime it up, and found him a lot more frightening a character than Delgado.
While the original Master gave the impression that he was more interested in besting The Doctor at bridge, the Ainley Master was believably unhinged, and quite sadistic to boot.
He's often superb in stories like Logopolis, Castrovala and particularly Survival, but his last performance in Destiny of the Doctors is a more relaxed, humourous but still menacing rendition of the Master.
Ainley was, by all accounts, quite mad - in a joyously English actorly way - and there are plenty of tales about his pleasure in playing the Master and his habit of leaving voice messages and replying to fan mail in character.
It's quite hard to track the game down, so I've embedded a few of the videos that form the cut scenes in the game below.
Intro
Outro
A rescored selection of clips, which only goes to show that it's not just Keff McCulloch who can made to look stupid when his music's taken out of context