The Why of Y

Some things just fall through the cracks, it must be admitted with a slight sense of shame.  Has it really been almost a year since our last foray into the (very, very) occasional series of posts examining the haphazard world of Doctor Who Production Coding?  Apparently so.

To re-cap the classic series used letter codes for each story which started with A (for An Unearthly Child) and ran to Ghost Light.  ‘I’ was never used, ‘O’ and ‘U’ sparingly, but as for the rest…

The Tour followed and even extended this into nu-Who all the way forward to Gatwa.  It’s also an incredibly handy way to sort stories.  Previous stops in this ramshackle series included stops at ‘B,’ ‘R,’ X,’ ‘L.’ ‘U” and ‘Q‘.

Y, being the penultimate letter of the regular alphabet, is all too easy to overlook, especially given its status as an emergency vowel, but that doesn’t mean the list of stories with Y in their Production Coding should likewise be overlooked,,,

Unless, of course, if you actually look at the list.  To our thinking there’s only one great story on the list, Kinda, but then there is also an oddball genre-stretcher in The Celestial Toymaker along with a ‘just-for-fun’ story in The Unicorn and the Wasp and a very-decent story in The Ghost Monument.

The rest however are, to be charitable, a really mixed bag.  There is no understating the overall importance that The Enemy Within holds in the overall history of Doctor Who as bridge between classic and nu-Who, but it was also an odd ad-mixture whose failure when, for the first and definitely not the last time, shows the peril of Doctor Who when it goes really big, as The Reality War also on this list, amply demonstrated earlier this year.

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Will the Tour continue to dawdle in our meandering Production Coding quest?  Why not?