Brought to You By the Letter ‘B’

As mentioned elsewhere in the Notz section, managing a collection this large is helped mightily by a consistent nomenclature.  Fortunately the BBC itself had a very useful tool in the nature of production codes for the stories of the classic series which ran from A (for An Unearthly Child) to 7Q (Ghost Light).  Not all letters were created equal however.  ‘I’ was never used, ‘O’ and ‘U’ only sparingly but the rest of the alphabet was fair game, downright game-y.

B	The Daleks
BB	The War Machines
BBB	The Silurians
4B	The Sontaran Experiment
5B	The Pirate Planet
6B	Earthshock
7B	Mindwarp
8B	The End of the World
9B	Doomsday
10B	Midnight
11B	The Impossible Astronaut
12B	The Crimson Horror
13B	The Zygon Inversion
14B	The Tsuranga Conundrum

The extension of this system into nu-Who is wholly a Tour construction, but one which helps the Tour make sense.  Then again, during this slack period between series one might as well have fun with it.  Let’s see what the letter ‘B’ has in store:

That’s a pretty impressive collection of stories with nary a bad’un in the bunch, with the possible exception of the last.  The Daleks kick-started the whole series, The War Machines was really the first modern story, The Silurians set the tone for the Pertwee era, The Pirate Planet was wildly imaginative, Earthshock is a classic, so is Midnight.

And while The Tsuranga Conundrum was not to the Tour’s collective taste, it stands to reason that story ’15B’ will be coming at the end of Series 13.

Yet another reason we can’t wait for Series 13.