Patrick Troughton's Doctor gets involved in galactic intrigue and piracy in this exclusive recording of a 'lost' television adventure, with linking narration by Frazer Hines. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe become victims of piracy when they materialise on a space beacon, minutes before it is literally blown to pieces. So begins their quest to be reunited with the TARDIS, whilst treading perilously across the paths of the Interstella Space Corps and a gang of murderous bandits. The eccentric prospector Milo Clancey gives the travellers passage in his ageing spaceship, but the old man is himself the focus of Space Corps investigations. Could he possibly be behind the destruction and salvage of so many beacons in the sector? What is the position of Madeleine Issigri, who runs her father's mining corporation on the planet Ta and how might a locked room provide the answer to this mystery? Half the galaxy is spanned in a game of cat and mouse between the law enforcers led by no-nonsense General Hermack and his V-Ship crew and the pirates Caven and Dervish, who will apparently stop at nothing to continue their lucrative racket. This six-part adventure, brimming with visions of space travel in the 21st century, offers space opera on a grand scale and was the penultimate story of the second Doctor's TV era.
Author
Robert Holmes was script editor of Doctor Who from 1975 to 1977 and the author of more scripts for the 20th-century incarnation of the programme than any other writer (64 episodes in all). He created or reimagined many key elements of the programme's mythology. Holmes was, at the end of World War Two, the youngest serving officer in the British army. He became a police officer, graduating top of his class. He grew disillusioned with the job and became a journalist. By the 1960s he had branched out into writing screenplays for films and television series. In 1968 he received his first commission for Doctor Who. Over the next few years, he became one of the series' lead writers. When Terrance Dicks resigned as script editor in 1974, Holmes took over the position. He continued to write scripts. After leaving the post, he wrote a few more before taking an extended break from the series. In 1983, as one of the series' most celebrated writers, Holmes was the first person asked to write the twentieth anniversary special, The Five Doctors. He declined but expressed an interest in writing for the series again. Over the next three years Holmes contributed several scripts and was heavily involved in the planning of Season 23. However, he passed away before he completed the script for The Ultimate Foe and the planned ending of the story was altered. After his death, his estate licensed the Autons and the Sontarans for use in independent video spin-off productions by Reeltime Pictures and BBV Productions, most notably for the Auton Trilogy and Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans. Since 2005 the revived Doctor Who has featured the Autons in Rose, and the Sontarans in the two-parter The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky, A Good Man Goes To War and two two-part storylines in The Sarah Jane Adventures, The Last Sontaran and Enemy of the Bane. They both appeared in The Pandorica Opens. In 2009, Doctor Who Magazine conducted a reader's poll that named Holmes' The Caves of Androzani the best Doctor Who story of all time.
