View source for The Saturday "spot" has had a great deal to do with the success of BBC's Dr Who

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| publication = Tribune (London)
| file = 1975-05-23 Tribune.jpg
| px = 650
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| date = 1975-05-23
| author = Audrey Williamson
| pages = 5
| language = English 
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The Saturday "spot" has had a great deal to do with the success of BBC's Dr Who, although the dialogue is infantile, the Doctor a freak and the effects obviously done on a shoestring. Yet its scriptwriters received this year's annual Writers' Guild award — in spite of the fact that the 26-episode children's serial, Time Slip (ATV), was infinitely more imaginatively and intelligently scripted (by Bruce Stewart and Victor Pemberton), rivetting in suspense and splendidly acted by Denis Quilley and the two best child players I have ever seen on television, Spencer Banks and Cheryl Burfield. The challenge of the tricky theme of moving about in time has never, to my mind, been more successfully met.

There is only one explanation: Time Slip was shown art about 4.30 on weekday afternoons, and practically no critics or members of Writers' Guild (except myself), and hardly any members of the adult public, can have seen it.

Survivors (BBC), by Terry Nation (of Dr Who's Daleks), also has a helpful viewing time, at 8.10 on Wednesday evenings. It might be said to be John Wyndham at long-distance remove, excellently opening at the outbreak of a plague that decimates the population of the earth, and then, lacking the money and resources for Wyndham-style detail in adaptation, moving away from the city and its problems, arid deteriorating into a superficial study of scattered rural communities.

The idea still holds attention, so do the actors) but the situation has simply failed to develop. There is no depth of social comment in this study of civilisation following catastrophe, as there was, for instance, in Wyndam's great and under-rated novel, The Chrysalids.

Audrey Williamson

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