The Cambridge Experiment takes its title from the popular 1970s film The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a battleship from World War II gets thrown forward in time to the 1970s during experiments that create an accidental wormhole. One particularly disturbing feature of that story is that when the ship gets back to where it came from there are casualties aboard – men who have become embedded in the steel deck of the ship and other nastily fatal results. When I first saw that film, at an age when I probably shouldn’t, that left an indelible imprint on my mind about the dangers of unprotected time travel.

So, having set myself the task of writing these classic stories, it is the Third Doctor and Jo who feature this week. I started easy with a trip to Cambridge on Bessie, there to meet with another companion, Liz Shaw. Liz was one of the less successful companions, mainly because viewers didn’t get on with her being The Doctor’s intellectual equal. The preference has always been for an ordinary girl who asks all the right questions. But I decided she ought to be in this story about the mysterious disappearance of three buildings from a science department of Cambridge university.

Originally I wanted to use REAL Cambridge university buildings, but I don’t know enough about Cambridge’s science departments to make that work. So I invented the Bracewell Institute. Guess what, I wrote this story not long after the Victory of the Daleks episode! Bracewell, of course, is the android built by the Daleks and planted in Churchill’s war think tank. He sided with the humans and continued to work for the war effort, and the Institute is his legacy.

The Hypotenuse, owes its origins to a rather stupid aspect of my school life. There was a small square of grass between the two boarding houses. Fifty odd girls taking short cuts across it had worn a path in a perfect hypotenuse to the right angle of the proper path around the grass, and nobody thought anything of it until the headmistress appointed prefects to warn people to ‘stay off the hypotenuse’ while new grass took hold. It never worked. The hypotenuse would still be there today if the land hadn’t been sold off for a housing estate in the 1980s. But the one bit of geometry every single one of us grasped was that the line between the two side of a right angled triangle was longer than either of the two sides. The Hypotenuse, therefore, was the largest and most important of the three Bracewell buildings.

The idea of bringing Captain Magambo from the 21st century U.N.I.T back to meet The Brigadier and his 1972 crew was just irresistible. The Brig, bless him, is distinctly old school. He would never get around the idea that women in the military do more than just filing and tea making, and there are some other lovely differences between old and new U.N.I.T that just deserved to be examined.

The idea of The Doctor getting the solution to the problem from the future, through Captain Magambo, but in such an unusable form as a printed machine code struck me as the best way to contrast 1970 and 21st century technology. Machine code is probably the only thing that hasn’t changed. The safe return of the three buildings depends on accurate typing. Well, why not? It’s quirky and distinctly Doctor Who.

The Hypotenuse went to the future and came back with some casualties for the same reason the ship in the Philadelphia Experiment did. The other two buildings went to the past. I liked the idea of a pterodactyl coming back with one of them. The other gave me a spot of trouble, then I thought of panicking peasants in medieval times setting fire to the building thinking it was witchcraft. Neither storyline needed dwelling on, of course. This was just rounding things up.

The Third Doctor HAD to meet Dr Malcolm Taylor, of course. But I decided not to do it ‘live’ but as a story to tell when The Doctor and his companions returned to the 1970s. Some things are best left to the imagination.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_%28film%29

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Jo_Grant
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Liz_Shaw
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Brigadier_Lethbridge-Stewart
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Benton

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Bessie

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Erisa_Magambo
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Malcolm_Taylor_%28Planet_of_the_Dead%29

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Edwin_Bracewell