Barock and the Time Vortex

The title sequence to Doctor Who in the 70s is one of the most terrifying things in the world, and probably the main reason I wasn’t allowed to watch it as a nipper. EVERYTHING about this thing is frightening: the music, which makes you feel like you’re falling (no, not falling... being pulled) into a terrifying black hole; obsidian bars that open up to reveal the swirling shrieking shapes of the time vortex - even the TARDIS looks wrong. And when the usually bohemian and avuncular (if oddly seedy) shape of the Fourth Doctor turns up... why, he’s just as horrible as the rest of it - his sombre face delineated in murky shades of cobalt and grey (until it goes all negative and my God, that’s even worse). And just when you think it can’t get any more appalling, the words GENESIS OF THE DALEKS or PYRAMIDS OF MARS or THE SEEDS OF DOOM appear in enormous white letters and before you know it you’re staring at an extreme close up of Davros, or Sutekh the Destroyer or whateverthehellthatispleasemakeitgoaway.



This was a TV show for *children*. The new sequence is very good (though it was better in season one, when it was accompanied by a "purer", less strident version of the Grainer/Derbyshire theme), but it will never, in a million years be as truly mesmerizing and awful as this thing. To the evil, chain-smoking bastards who worked at the BBC in the seventies - I salute you!

So, anyway - where better to send Barock, as he’s traversing the byways of time and space in pursuit of... something?


You’ll notice how I’ve replicated the existential terror of the time vortex by inserting shrieking, unheeded voices of warning and a few warped, howling faces. Ah, good times.

D