I’ve often talked about the role of Jodrell Bank in the regeneration of the Fourth Doctor in Logopolis. Tom Baker battles the Master on the gantry of the Pharos Project, a model designed to look like the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank (there’s a glimpse in this clip). He falls to the ground and is regenerated as Peter Davison. Dating from the era of Pertwee and Baker, that has always worried me.
The fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who got me wondering just how many times Jodrell Bank has been mentioned in the programme over those fifty years. The Wikipedia entry on Jodrell Bank mentions some, but searching through Chrissie’s Transcripts I found a few others. My list is below but I don’t know if this is complete.
- 1966 : Tenth Planet : 1st Doctor, William Hartnell (his last story before regeneration) : Jodrell Bank is asked to track a new planet
- 1967 : The Faceless Ones : 2nd Doctor, Patrick Troughton : Not sure exactly how Jodrell Bank appears but it seems to have failed to spot a strange satellite (foreshadowing its role in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
- 1981 : Logopolis : 4th Doctor, Tom Baker : A radio antenna modelled on the Lovell Telescope features as the Pharos Project on Earth and from which the Doctor falls at the end
- 1982 : Castrovalva : 5th Doctor, Peter Davison : He wakes up from his regeneration under the (model) Lovell Telescope featuring as Earth’s Pharos Project
- 1988 : Remembrance of the Daleks : 7th Doctor, Sylvester McCoy : The Doctor requests Jodrell, Fylingdales and the Royal Observatory to search for transmissions used to beam Daleks down to Earth
- 2008 : The Poison Sky : 10th Doctor, David Tennant : Jodrell detects a transmission from a Sontaran spacecraft in Earth orbit
- 2010 : The Eleventh Hour : 11th Doctor, Matt Smith (his first episode) : The Doctor hacks into a secure conference call between NASA, Jodrell Bank, Tokyo Space Centre, ESA, CSIRO and Patrick Moore discussing what has happened to the Sun