Planet 14 - Doctor Who

The opening story of season three - a season woefully under-represented in the BBC archives - Galaxy 4 sees the Doctor, Vicki and Steven encountering the beautiful Drahvins and the hideous Rills.

Well, that's the theory anyway. I have to confess that from what I've seen I've never considered the Drahvins particularly attractive at all, and the picture on the cover does them no favours whatsoever.

The plot of Galaxy 4 is pretty straightforward. The TARDIS crew land on a doomed planet in the vicinity of two crashed spaceships, belonging to the Drahvins and the Rills.

Initially it appears that the Drahvins are the peaceful ones and the Rills and their robots, which Vicki nicknames 'Chumblies' the bad guys. However, the moral of this story is that things aren't always what they appear.

The Drahvins are a pretty anonymous bunch, with only leader Maaga standing out. With her cloned troops, she is an early example of that well-known Who phenomena of a dominant leader in charge of a fairly faceless group of subordinates, a set-up well-used in later stories featuring the likes of the Daleks and the Cybermen.

And, for a story first broadcast in 1965, there is more than the usual primitive attempt at conveying at alien culture going on here - Maaga eats different food and has a different weapon from her test-tube cultivated drones, which are nice touches.

As usual the loss of video is regrettable, and I would have liked to have seen the cliffhanger to episode 2, Trap of Steel, where Vicki encounters the Rills. Of course, we do have some extant visual material, which was included in The Ice Warriors boxed set, so at least we have some idea of what the story looked like.

As with The Massacre CD, Peter Purves does the honours on the narration front, and he does an okay job here. The script, too, maintains the decent quality of recent audio releases, with none of the nonsense that Eric Saward came up with for the early tapes.

Unfortunately, the Purvemeister's character, Steven, comes off less well. The Drahvins' late change from male to female means that his character seems a bit of wuss and for an astronaut he seems to have absolutely no idea what an airlock is!

Overall though, an enjoyable if relatively undemanding story. The BBC have done a satisfactory job of recreating it for an audio release, but the score simply reflects the fact that Galaxy 4 wasn't that great a story to begin with. BACK TO THE TOP

GALAXY 4

Written by WILLIAM EMMS

Directed by DEREK MARTINUS

Starring WILLIAM HARTNELL,
MAUREEN O'BRIEN and PETER PURVES

Narrated by PETER PURVES

BBC RADIO COLLECTION

RATING: 6/10

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