Sunday 3 October 2010

Beyond the Inside of the Edge of the Brink of Whatever

The title of this week's Doctor Who Omnibus is a bone of contention for many fans. Do you call it Inside The Spaceship? Or is it The Edge Of Destruction? Or even Beyond The Sun? I bet there's one person who even calls it TARDIS Cutaway. Well, I'm hedging my bets on this one, so I'm opting for my own title: Beyond the Inside of the Edge of the Brink of Destruction. Simples.



Although UK Gold started their first Doctor Who re-run off with the surviving stories from the Hartnell era in November 1992, they decided to miss out black and white stories completely when the second run began in early 1995. So, after the omnibus edition of The Keys Of Marinus aired one Sunday morning in February 1993, viewers would have to wait over five years for another Hartnell story to appear on the channel...

So, in 1998, UK Gold went back to the start and aired all of Hartnell and Troughton's existing stories, mostly on Saturday mornings between June and November 1998, following which they went back to the very first episode An Unearthly Child on Friday 4th December 1998. Beyond the Inside of the Edge of the Brink of Destruction aired two weeks later, on Friday 18th December 1998 between 12.35am-1.25am. The continuity announcer that evening was Peter Offer.


Those of you familiar with this two-parter will notice the final scene, leading into the (very sadly missing) story Marco Polo was not transmitted; this is very probably down to BBC Enterprises, who supplied UK Gold with edited library copies of their programmes.

That's it for this week - if looking back at these old clips has got you in the mood to watch the complete story, check out BBC Worldwide's YouTube page, where both The Edge Of Destruction (part one) and The Brink Of Disaster (part two) are waiting for you... no need for UK Gold any more, eh?

1 comment:

  1. Mike HickmanOctober 13, 2010

    This takes me right back - the 1998 broadcast was the first time I saw Edge of Whatever (love the suggested title above, though) and at a very formative time in my life too (I was training to be a teacher at the time and it was my one guilty pleasure in the week). Thanks for posting this. Loving the blog, as always.

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