- 6/11/2025
Get ready for action, gadgets, and adventure with the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee! This video dives into the era when Doctor Who embraced a bold new direction—Earth-bound stories, UNIT operations, and high-octane drama. With his dashing style, Venusian Aikido, and love for fast cars, Pertwee’s Doctor brought charm, wit, and a touch of class to the role. From iconic foes like the Master to groundbreaking episodes like “Spearhead from Space,” discover how the Third Doctor helped redefine the series for a new generation.
Join us as we explore the legacy of Jon Pertwee’s time-traveling hero in velvet and ruffles!
Join us as we explore the legacy of Jon Pertwee’s time-traveling hero in velvet and ruffles!
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00:00What you get with the third Doctor is this rather imposing figure.
00:19The third Doctor arrived on Earth with a bang.
00:23He was trapped by his own people in the 1970s.
00:26But for the first time, Doctor Who was in colour.
00:30And John Pertwee's Doctor took full advantage of this, dressing the part of a debonair adventurer.
00:36It's interesting when you talk about John Pertwee as the third Doctor because one's memory of him is flamboyant.
00:44He's got that crazy costume, but also I think it's a sense of attitude as well.
00:48There's something about his energy which feels as if it's very much of its time.
00:55He was very debonair. He was in this beautiful ruffled shirt and the handkerchief sleeves that came out.
01:00He was so handsome, I thought.
01:03You could almost touch the velvet that he was wearing and the roost shirts.
01:07It was Tom Jones in drama. It was extraordinary.
01:10From that moment of first seeing him, I thought, wow, who's he?
01:16Who's he with the gorgeous hair and the kind of foppy clothes?
01:21And he just looks stunning.
01:23Doctor No.3, for me, is the sort of real action hero version of the Doctor.
01:41I think he's still quizzical and he's still completely eccentric, but he's got that real sort of athletic feel, I think.
01:47You get no sense that there's anything outlandish about his clothing.
01:57It just sort of suits the sort of powerful man that he is.
02:01Beneath the outlandish capes, this was a very serious time lord indeed.
02:06From pollution to the ozone layer, this Doctor wasn't afraid to roll up his frilly sleeves and tackle issues in an adult manner.
02:13He's probably the most stripped-back Doctor we see.
02:16He's quite real, very serious, quite grim at times.
02:21He's just one of the most serious Doctors.
02:23This centre is now in the hands of the Silurians.
02:26They need the use of the generator.
02:30Now, if you follow carefully the instructions I shall give you, your lives may be spared.
02:34His Doctor was rather patrician, rather authoritarian, actually.
02:40Probably the most authoritarian Doctor there's been.
02:41He said he never asked you to like it.
02:44He was difficult, he was pompous, very bad-tempered, and an assumption of superiority that would infuriate anyone.
02:51Doctor, what do you think you're doing?
02:53Trying to save your lives.
02:54Now keep out of the way and keep quiet.
02:56You will now connect this device to the nuclear generator.
03:01The power source is over here.
03:04But John Perley has such innate charm and watchability that not only do you forgive him for it,
03:08you'll really think he's rather cool for it.
03:10Imprisoned here by the Time Lords, the Doctor was suddenly an unwilling part of modern Earth.
03:16Whereas saving the world was previously a hobby, it now became a career, for even the Doctor had to get a job.
03:23The extraordinary thing when the third Doctor takes over is the backstory for the main character changes.
03:28We suddenly know that he's a Time Lord.
03:30The entire cast changes.
03:32Not one person is there who was in the previous episode.
03:35And the format changes.
03:37The third Doctor is exiled to Earth by the Time Lords we've only just met, and set to work for UNIT.
03:42Just take a look at those readings.
03:44The Doctor's theme.
03:45What?
03:46The Doctor's the manual.
03:47He finds himself working as the scientific advisor for UNIT, which is the United Nations Intelligence Task Force.
03:54Which is quite extraordinary for this character, who's been so anti-authoritarian.
03:57Well, it's travelling faster than light.
03:59Yes.
03:59And it can't, can it?
04:01Hmm.
04:01He's stuck on Earth with human beings whom he sort of regards as reasonably competent pets, and he's quite insufferable.
04:11Doctor, is there anything I can do?
04:13Yes, pass me a silicon rod, will you?
04:23Yes, what I meant was, is there anything that UNIT can do about this space lightning business?
04:27It wasn't about somebody travelling, it was about somebody who couldn't travel, who was stuck in one place, and the threats travelled to him.
04:35John Pertwee's Doctor wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty.
04:39This was the only Doctor who saved the world with fast cars and fistfights.
04:44For the first time, we get a sort of James Bondi's Doctor.
04:48Suddenly, he's rather fashionable, he's dressed in a slightly cool way, okay for the 70s, and he actually hits people.
04:55Well, I do remember that John Pertwee's reign was the introduction of the Karate Kid, if you like, the Action Doctor, which hadn't been there before, certainly in my memory, and that was very exciting.
05:13Well, well, well, a bit of a lot to play games, aren't we?
05:16I'm quite spry for my age, actually.
05:20Oh, you can have a go. Terrific.
05:22I think John Pertwee's much more straightforwardly heroic approach is reflected in what the Third Doctor ended up doing, so he suddenly becomes an expert in Venetian Aikido, which seems to involve him surging high at people and throwing them over his shoulder a lot.
05:41Hype! Hype!
06:01Venetian Aikido, gentlemen. I do hope I haven't hurt you.
06:04He's much more hands-on action man than we've seen before. You can see the influence of James Bond or the Avengers.
06:14I remember his kickboxing and action sequences. Never seen someone do sort of forward rolls and punches in a roost shirt, but he carried it off.
06:22This Doctor was more than a match for James Bond in terms of gadgets. Denied the use of a TARDIS, he still travelled in style, in everything from hovercraft to helicopters.
06:37John Pertwee was really obsessed with motorbikes or hovercraft or anything he could get his hands on.
06:48He is the Doctor who actually owns a car.
06:53Your immediate assumption that the Doctor had a car would be that it would be like a space car, but no, he goes, of course, for a souped-up vintage car, and we're only introduced to Bessie, the sprightly yellow roadster.
07:03Come here, Doctor.
07:04Well done, Sergeant. Take me to the airstrip or spot him from the air.
07:07Anything that he could get his hands on to play with this version of the Doctor, he absolutely would. He's the Doctor for toys and technology.
07:13Get after him, let's be sure, I'll contact you by RT.
07:20He has so many vehicles and they're all completely Doctor-ish and they're all completely bonkers.
07:27You know, it's just a relentless chase through cars and hovercrafts and kind of the most forward-thinking things that he can find.
07:34He gets into action-adventures plotlines. He loves driving cars and has chases. And again, it's a huge proof of the flexibility of the show that you can do that with a hero who a moment ago was a rather sweet-natured Charlie Chaplin, small man who was running away from any form of physical danger.
07:55And suddenly, suddenly he's big John Pertwee and he's got a home-mobile and he's got a car and he likes gadgets.
08:04Liz Shaw was sort of the Doctor's equal. She was very bright, very skilled and she was UNIT's scientific advisor, Joe Grant. She's more of a traditional sort of girl in a short skirt.
08:14I'm your new assistant. Oh no.
08:20So the Doctor now finds himself in the centre of UNIT and that means that you've got some returning characters.
08:27The Doctor worked for UNIT, an intelligence task force saving the world from aliens, with soldiers, spies, scientists and bazookas.
08:36In charge of it all was the Brigadier, a man who would become one of the Doctor's best friends, eventually.
08:42Suddenly, suddenly you've got an ensemble of characters who are there every week.
08:47There was the Brigadier, the Sergeant and the Captain. I was the Captain.
08:52The way that they've kind of recruited Pertwee's Doctor into being their magical assistant is very apt for those Earthbound stories.
09:01It kind of, it allows a real outlet for him to get into the, um, into the alien world.
09:07UNIT, of course, was the territory of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
09:10and he, for me, was this great authority figure who was sort of keeping the Doctor in his place.
09:15But you knew that the subversion and the drive of the Doctor would somehow, um, always come through in the end.
09:22In lesser hands than Nicholas Courtney's, uh, the Brigadier would have been such a boring character.
09:28He really is a sort of military blimp.
09:31But instead, they cast a man who cannot play a line without twinkling.
09:35He just can't. He twinkles all the way through that pot and makes you love him.
09:39From what we can gather, you arrived last night in the middle of a shower of meteorites.
09:44Did I really? How terribly exciting.
09:46Well, objects from space, at any rate.
09:48Do I gather you're going to help us, Doctor?
09:50If I do, will you give me the key to the TARDIS?
09:53Possibly.
09:54Then go away and let Miss Shaw and I get on with our work, Mr. Confederate.
09:57Look, I really have to call you Miss Shaw.
09:59No, Liz, just Liz.
10:00Liz, that's much better.
10:02UNIT's original scientific advisor was Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.
10:08A thoroughly modern Cambridge don, she was surprised to find herself suddenly replaced by an eccentric alien.
10:15Liz Shaw was sort of conceived, I think, as the Doctor's equal in a way.
10:19She was a contemporary human, but she was very bright, very skilled.
10:23And she was UNIT's scientific advisor.
10:28And then the Doctor appears and sort of trumps her, so they end up working together.
10:31Are you getting a reading?
10:33No.
10:35Well, that's it.
10:37I can't think of anything else we can try.
10:39Well, I don't want him a dare. We've done our best.
10:41I can't understand it.
10:44We've tried a dozen different methods of analysis and haven't identified a single element.
10:49Though she's effectively his sidekick because he, you know, has access to more technology than she could dream of.
10:57What results can you expect with this primitive equipment?
10:59Primitive?
11:01We've got lasers, spectrographs, micron probes.
11:04Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know all that.
11:06But what we really need is a lateral molecular rectifier.
11:10Well, don't ask that.
11:12Not on Earth, unfortunately.
11:14But I think I have one in the TARDIS.
11:16However clever the scientist you put with the Doctor is, Liz Shaw will always be outdistanced by the Doctor.
11:23But within that context, I think Caroline Jones is a rather terrific companion, much less known.
11:29And makes it, for that one year, a very grown-up show, because she seems like a very grown-up woman to be hanging around the Doctor.
11:38Somehow he normally attracts slightly more irresponsible people.
11:42Liz Shaw left, telling the Brigadier, the Doctor, just needed someone to pass him his test tubes and tell him how brilliant he was.
11:50That part was admirably filled by Josephine Grant.
11:53Joe Grant, played by Katie Manning.
11:56She's more of the kind of traditional sort of naive, wide-eyed girl in a short skirt.
12:04Well, I think that it's probably one of the most reluctant meetings of a Doctor and New Assistant.
12:09It sort of feels as if he doesn't really even recognise that she's there and then suddenly here we are and we've got a major character in the room.
12:16Oh, no!
12:25Oh, no!
12:26It's alright, I've dealt with it.
12:28You've dealt with it? You've ruined it!
12:30With a quite stern and quite serious Doctor, you need to shake something up here.
12:34So they introduced the wonderful Katie Manning as Joe Grant, who is the worst choice to be a scientist's assistant and the worst choice to be a secret agent combined.
12:43Three months of delicate work and now look at it, your ham-fisted bun vendor.
12:48But this whole place might have gone up in flames.
12:50My dear young lady, steady-state micro-welding always creates more smoke than fire.
12:55Steady-state micro-welding?
12:56Yes. An advanced engineering technique pioneered by the Lamedines.
13:00A markedly gifted race to have nine opposable digits.
13:03Nine what?
13:04Nine opposable digits.
13:06Yes, well, never mind.
13:07She's so adorable and so sweet, so pretty and so sexy that you put her with John Perp and you think, yes, that's exactly who the mad old Doctor would think would be a good idea to hang out with because essentially he's mad and he likes mad people.
13:21Look, I said I don't want any tea today, thank you.
13:23I'm not the tea lady.
13:25Then what the places you're doing in here?
13:26I...
13:27Don't you know this area is strictly out of bounds to everybody except the tea lady and the brigadier's personal staff?
13:32I'm your new assistant.
13:34Oh, no.
13:36She was gorgeous and feisty and fearless and she got to be with John Pertwee, so one can but a dream.
13:46There's really one good reason to bring in the master to Doctor Who and that one good reason is Roger Delgado.
13:51Roger Delgado just oozed this kind of deathly charm.
13:56You see, Doctor, you're my intellectual equal.
13:58Almost.
14:00I have so few worthy opponents and they've gone, I always miss them.
14:07The Autons are one of the best ideas in Doctor Who.
14:11In the 1970s, plastic was everywhere, from dummies to daffodils.
14:15For the first time, Doctor Who brought terror into the home and the high street with the Autons, an alien race of living plastic.
14:24I think the Autons are one of those classically terrifying Doctor Who monsters because what they do is they take something that you're almost familiar with and turn it into something which is just so unbelievably menacing.
14:38It's a genius idea. Conquering the world with shop dummies for no particular reason other than it's really scary.
14:53What was the plan exactly? We're going to conquer Earth by planting shop dummies in windows.
15:02I suppose it's just a very clever idea that the modern world has plastic everywhere and that if that plastic could somehow be sentient, if that plastic could somehow fight back when we try and make it into chairs and little dolls and shop window dummies.
15:19If that somehow could rebel against human masters then that would be a very chilling prospect.
15:40When I was a young boy of seven, six, seven, eight years old and I saw the Autons and I'd have to hide in my mother's coat to be walked past a front of a shop window with dummies in them because I was so frightened.
15:56That's right. I was absolutely terrified of shop dummies long before they were in Doctor Who. I was absolutely freaked out by them. I would not go near them in shops. Terrifying idea and brilliant.
16:11I think Doctor Who has often kind of thrived when it takes the mundane and makes it horrific.
16:16Introduced to the series for the first time in Terror of the Autons, the third Doctor's greatest adversary was the very opposite of mundane, the master.
16:25The master is just such a genius Doctor Who villain.
16:30The master was a renegade Time Lord, just like the Doctor. But whereas the Doctor saved worlds, the master destroyed them.
16:37And the world the master had his sights set on was the planet Earth. A ruthless opponent, a charming adversary, the master was always out to win.
16:46The master would show up regularly through the third Doctor's time. He was a wonderful sort of brooding presence and a real nice counterpoint.
16:55To John Pertwee's rather stern, rather bluff Doctor, you've got this wonderfully kind of smooth, oleaginous master. Roger Delgado just oozed this kind of deathly charm.
17:08There's really one good reason to bring in the master to Doctor Who, and that one good reason is Roger Delgado. He's simply brilliant.
17:17I hope I'm not interrupting anything important. No, no, indeed not. You've come here to kill me, of course. But not without considerable regret.
17:26It's a masterpiece. He's endlessly charming on that screen. You can't take your eyes off him. When the two of them are combating, which doesn't happen quite enough, they're such a good double act.
17:37You see, Doctor, you're my intellectual equal. Almost. I have so few worthy opponents. When they've gone, I always miss them.
17:46He's just somebody who always loses, like most of the Doctor's enemies, and who seems to have plans of wildly varying size and sanity.
17:58I see you've been working on the Nestein Autojet. My own small contribution to their invasion plan.
18:05Vicious, complicated and inefficient. Typical of your way of thinking.
18:09Now come, come Doctor. Death is always more frightening when it strikes invisibly.
18:14So the master does tend to team up with the monster of the week, usually with disastrous consequences.
18:21Tell me, how do you intend to activate these flowers?
18:26By radio impulse, which the Nesteins will send. I shall open the channel for them.
18:30We've distributed 450,000 of these daffodils. So when 450,000 people fall dead, the country will be disrupted.
18:39And in the confusion, the Nesteins will land their invasion force.
18:42Exactly. It's a shame that you can't be here to enjoy the chaos and destruction with me. Goodbye, Doctor.
18:49He's always the most devious and cleverest person in the episode, and I think that, you know, and the most memorable, really.
18:59I am usually referred to as the master.
19:02Oh, is that so?
19:04Universally.
19:06Well, I am Luigi Rossini, internationally, and conjurers I don't need, okay?
19:12Unfortunately, I need you, Lew Russell.
19:15What do you call me?
19:16Lew Russell. It happens to be your real name.
19:19Now, listen, mister. Get off my pitch while you're still safe.
19:23Are you insolent primitive?
19:25Oh, so you want it the hard way, do you? Right.
19:27The master did do a bit of kind of hypnotic stuff. There would be a lot of sort of staring eyes and people would fall under his thrall.
19:36He was so believable, actually. He just seemed, he just oozed Maleficent charm. It was wonderful.
19:51Is there anything that I can do for you, child?
19:54There is one thing.
19:56Please come in now and then to have a chat.
20:00Oh, Trenchard's a very nice man, but his conversation is somewhat limited.
20:05Goodbye.
20:07Goodbye, Miss Grant. Goodbye, Doctor.
20:09I sincerely hope we meet again very soon.
20:15Goodbye.
20:19Got used to, with John Pertwee, a very comforting version of Doctor Who, especially as he mellowed into the bar.
20:24The beginning was quite spiky and quite difficult, but towards the end he was reassuring.
20:30John Pertwee was enormously popular and hugely loved.
20:35I think the show got sort of higher viewing figures than it had ever had up to that point during his time,
20:40which for a show that by then was, you're getting over ten years old, you know, that's quite unlikely.
20:46He really helped to reinvent it.
20:49He managed to take it in a very unexpected direction and the viewing public responded to that hugely.
20:59I'm Christopher Hardwick and I'm here to talk to you about a serious issue affecting people you may already know and love.
21:04These people don't live in fear of the Daleks.
21:07They know nothing of the Pandorica.
21:09They couldn't tell you whether Ood was singular or plural.
21:12It's both.
21:14But it's not too late.
21:15By tweeting your new to Who stories with the hashtag NewToWho, we can bring our companions to the Doctor and get them the help they desperately deserve.
21:24Because in this life, there are no regenerations.
21:26But here is a pleasure.
21:28enjoy your returning work introducing less memories to the team.
21:29Bear to have you benecapitated The Home кораб FAQ Helicopter existence.
21:33Have come with this!
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