The Invasion (UK) is, perhaps, the greatest of the Cyberman stories – prefiguring the Pertwee years on earth, establishing UNIT as a regular feature and clearly influenced by Quatermass 2. It set the stage for the earthbound adventures of the Pertwee years (even as a kid it struck me as odd that aliens all seemed so intent on using S.E. England as their landing stage preparatory to the domination of Earth). Nicholas Courtney is great – finding his character, but not yet as trigger happy or irritated with the Doctor as he would become Its not been watched much in recent years, not least because two episodes were victims of the BBC’s recurrent vandalism, part of the criminal destruction of a good deal of its output in the fifties and sixties, even into the seventies. (They even managed to discard the 1972 remake of Dick Barton, which they’d had to remake because they’d thrown out every single episode of the original series; it was recovered only because some lunatic in Australia recorded it when it on broadcast). The Andromeda Anthology deals with lost/destroyed episodes by using stills and text on the screen to replace the missing bits. I found this a bit hard to take (still, worth it for the sake of seeing a classic, and Julie Christie really is great). The Invasion deals with it better

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