“You can’t change history, not one line!” So Doctor Who fans have known to be true since the days of the The Aztecs, and yet Doctor Who writers have insisted on continuing to do stories about this point, with The Fires of Pompeii and The Waters of Mars being rare examples of stories where something original is done with the premise. Except, of course, when you can not only change one line of history, but a good bloody many of them — the recent A Christmas Carol being a case in point.

Fairly often, the demarcation of this is the present day; obviously the Doctor can’t help the British resist the Norman Conquest of A.D. 1066, but he can help them resist the Dalek Conquest of Space Year 4000. Why is one okay and not the other? The answer to this question rests solely in the television series year of production, which is why when Lawrence Miles attempted to answer it in Interference, he failed to find an interesting answer. Doctor Who as a whole, I would argue, is better off glossing over this contradiction as best I can. (Or rationalising it better; as Russell T Davies did with “fixed points in time.”)

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the only Fourth Doctor story I can think of which is a pure historical - no sfnal elements at all apart from the Doctor and Leela, turning up in first-century Norfolk to encounter Boudica in the battle against the Romans. The story is a particularly good one for Leela, who becomes fascinated with the warrior queen (once it's been done, you realise that Boudica is the most obvious historical character for her to meet); and we get some twists on the "you can't rewrite history" theme. The first time I listened to it I was doing the family supermarket shoopping, and it seemed to me that the character development for Leela was too abrupt; listening to it again, while changing trains on a long journey through France (which I guess meant I was less distracted) it seemed to work much better. So a bit of a health warning that it depends on your frame of mind, but having read and listened to literally all the spinoff stories featuring Leela, I feel that this is one of the best ones for her in terms of character. ( )

3,5 ( )