Day 492: The Androids of Tara Part 1

So a new story starts today. I could write about the design work, the search for the Key to Time, the costumes, the acting or all manner of things. But this opportunity will only come around once in this entire voyage, and I need to talk about it. So today, we're going to look at the Taran Wood Beast.

The Taran Wood Beast only appears once in Doctor Who, in the opening section of The Androids of Tara. Its role in the story is small: menace the Doctor's assistant, Romana, and then be shooed off by the evil Count Grendel. So, for an appearance that small, why do I want to dedicate an entire entry to it?

The reason is simple: the design is one of the most unintentionally funny monster designs in the history of Doctor Who. It straddles the line between cute, and vaguely terrifying, whilst remaining somewhat unconvincing throughout. The fact that it only appears once in the story seems to reinforce the fact that the production staff realised that they had a bit of a failure on their hands and so they had to shoo it away as quickly as possible.

And yet I love it. It's something that makes me smile, mainly because it comes out of nowhere and fails to completely menace the audience, instead making them burst ought into unintentional laughter. It's for that reason that my twitter profile (@ComeOnAce) is an image of the beast, as is my iPad's wallpaper and various other bits and bobs. I even fondly remember waking up and realising that I'd had a nightmare about the Beast a couple of years ago, and smiling to myself that my subconscious chose one of the least frightening Doctor Who monsters to terrify me. And above all else, I'm fairly certain that it appears in the music video for Always by Erasure. Why not see for yourself?