The Ambassadors of Death (Pertwee)

[Mr Light]

Yeah I don't think I ever saw the endings of the these episodes. They would air on PBS at 11:30pm on Saturday and I would always fall asleep like 30 minutes into them

I just saw "The Sea Devils", which I thought was very good. So far in my Pertwee marathon I'd saw "Terror of the Autons" and "Sea Devils" were definitely the best, with "The Daemons" coming up third.

 

[Cutter John]

Yeah I don't think I ever saw the endings of the these episodes. They would air on PBS at 11:30pm on Saturday and I would always fall asleep like 30 minutes into them

I hear that girlfriend!

10 PM back in my day. Those 6-7 parters were tough going (especially the b&w ones). Especially since my family couldn't afford cable.

 

[Davros]

Aww c'mon, Alpha Centauri's so bad he's cool!

It's a he?

 

[Andrew_Kearley]

Ambassadors is easily my absolute favourite Doctor Who story ever. I'm just saying.

Is that a good or bad reaction? I don't know: The Ambassadors of Death - a complex, multi-layered plot about the real political and social implications of first contact. What's not to love?

 

[Cutter John]

Aww c'mon, Alpha Centauri's so bad he's cool!

It's a he?

'It', whatever.

 

[DWF]

Is that a good or bad reaction? I don't know: The Ambassadors of Death - a complex, multi-layered plot about the real political and social implications of first contact. What's not to love?

I thought The Tenth Planet did a better job with a first contact story than The Ambassadors of Death did.

 

[Andrew_Kearley]

Fair enough. I love the fact that the aliens aren't specifically hostile, and that the villains of the piece are all humans who want to use them for political ends, criminal exploitation or are simply driven by xenophobia. Layers of plot and conspiracy, and a superb ending where the Doctor doesn't wrap everything up neatly but leaves the humans and aliens to sort it out amongst themselves - it's a nice corollary to the messiness of the recent Silurian business.

 

[Marc]

Seems The Ambassadors of Death is being used as a Guinea Pig for a new method to convert old B&W footage to colour.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/01/play/time-travel-tv

Their method is a refined version of that trialled on the 2009 Planet of the Daleks rerelease; it is now being deployed on a seven-part 1970 Jon Pertwee adventure, The Ambassadors of Death. "It seemed almost impossible," says Steve Roberts, 35, the team's supervisor and a BBC senior engineer. "But when they made the black-and-white recordings, they didn't filter off the colour carrier [encoded as a 'chroma dot' pattern in each frame], which for the last few decades has been nothing more than an annoyance." Team member Richard Russell used the signal to reverse-engineer raw colour pictures that could be retouched frame by frame. "It's very, very labour intensive -- several hundred man hours' work every episode," says Roberts. Luckily, a new "quadrant editor" is helping them to produce better source material upfront, so they hope to deliver the Ambassadors episodes to the BBC within weeks.

 

[EJA]

Since when did caring about continuity become a bad thing?

When it causes people to claim that perfectly good stories "don't count" thanks to a couple throwaway lines.

Except that's what can (and does) happen. You'd be surprised how powerful a "couple throaway lines" can be sometimes.

As I said earlier, I think it's a real shame that Ambassadors isn't part of NuWho, as it sounds an interesting story.

 

[Stevil2001]

It is an interesting story. I fail to see what a couple lines in "The Christmas Invasion" have to do with that. My VHS copy seems to be perfectly intact.