Moving house is grim at the best of times.
When you’re a gaggle of student-aged young people without infinity pounds at your disposal, it’s almost understandable to see why the kids in the Doctor Who adventure ‘Knock Knock’ were willing to move into an actually decent house without stopping to check why it was so cheap.
Given the choice between squalor and creaky haunting feat. David Suchet, I’d be tempted to go with the latter too. Here are some other interesting things:
- Though the Time Lords themselves had made several appearances by this point in the show’s classic run, the now-iconic impractical Gallifreyan collar first made its appearance in the Fourth Doctor serial ‘The Deadly Assassin’.
- The Doctor, in actual fact, is a grandfather: not Bill’s, obviously, but the First Doctor’s very first companion was his granddaughter, Susan.
- The Doctor has encountered some pretty terrifying dolls indeed: a small plastic menace in ‘Terror of the Autons’ (why would anyone even consider attempting to market this thing; even if it didn’t murder people, it was terrifying) and some dangerous big, bad peg dolls in ‘Night Terrors’.
- The Doctor has also faced off against some formidable spiders; indeed, the Third Doctor met his end facing off against a race of diabolical arachnids in ‘Planet of the Spiders’ – an excellent story, though perhaps approached with caution by anyone who (like this intrepid journalist) already has a little fright every time they spot a spider in the house.
- The sonic screwdriver has a bad track record with wood, in the aforementioned ‘Night Terrors’, for instance, as well as ‘The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe’.
- A copy of David Bowie’s Heroes briefly makes an appearance: a variant cover of issue 3 of the Twelfth Doctor Year 2 comic features the Doctor in the same iconic pose.
- Guest star David Suchet is best known for his long-running role as the detective Hercule Poirot, based on the stories by Agatha Christie. Christie herself met the Tenth Doctor and Donna in ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’, in which life very much imitated art.
- Parental mix-ups can only ever lead to trouble: see also the whole mess the Ninth Doctor had to untangle in ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’ when a little boy was just looking for his mummy. And then there’s that time Danny Pink mistakes the Doctor for Clara’s dad – never mind that they’re clearly the same age.
If you find that treading over that squeaky floorboard in the hallway gives you a little fright for the next few days, we promise we won’t judge you.
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What was your favourite bit in ‘Knock Knock’? Let us know below…