Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (14 page)

T:
And two episodes in, we finally meet the serial’s main guest star. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Peter Glaze! At the time, I suspect that this was a casting coup equivalent to getting the Chuckle Brothers to play Nazis in the new series. I just can imagine, though, Glaze being pleased to hear his agent say that he’s going to be playing the lead villain – and then being rather nonplussed to discover he’s credited under the illustrious name of “Third”! Especially as he’s always referred to as the City Administrator in the script. It seems a rather sloppy way of going about things; Arthur Newall’s character is called “Engineer”, but is credited as “Fourth”. This will get even more confusing later in, when the First and Second Sensorites disappear, and so top Sensorite billing goes, oddly, to the Third! Was it too much of a stretch of the writer’s imagination to give these characters names?

In the same vein, the caste system of the Sensorites feels like a vague attempt to give them a discernibly different culture, but it’s all a bit lazy. The Sensorite warriors fight... what, exactly? Each other? They must do, as the Sensorites are a peaceful race who have no contact with anyone else. The Fourth Sensorite asks the Third if humans’ hearts are “in the centre, like ours”, which is a bit like me saying to you, “Fish breathe with gills, not with lungs – you know, like we humans have in our chests.”

Am I straying from this book’s brief and being overly critical, you might ask? No, because The Sensorites is showing me that Doctor Who could have been written like this every week! We’re being given unsophisticated, two-dimensional aliens who don’t have individual names, and live in a simplistically sketched societal hierarchy. Clues to each mystery are set out in such proximity to one another, it seems intended to make the children watching at home think they’ve been very clever when they work them out. Not that there’s anything wrong with this approach per se – it’s just that when one considers the programme’s timeslot and central premise, we probably wouldn’t be writing about it 40-odd years later had the production team not opted for more sophistication from subsequent scripts.

Oh, and I promise not to use a Doctor Who book to make too many cheap political gags. Otherwise, I’d point out that the actor playing the creepy, xenophobic, self-interested, dishonest Fourth Sensorite quit acting after this and became a Tory Councillor for Enfield.

A Race Against Death (The Sensorites episode four)

R:
To be fair, it’s not so much a “race” against death as a gentle trot. There’s a very funny montage sequence of the Doctor testing various samples of water for poison – alongside the First Elder painstakingly writing “negative” against each one and shaking his head sadly at Susan – only at last for a positive result to come up, and the Doctor to confirm what he’d already worked out five minutes beforehand. Meanwhile, William Russell plays someone dying from contamination the way a man plays having a head cold and phoning up his boss to get off work for the day – he makes his voice a bit weak and raspy.

There’s a much-mocked scene in which Carol suggests to the Administrator that were he to change his clothing, his physical similarity to all the other Sensorites means that no-one could recognise him. “I’d never thought of that!” says our evil egg in the Sensorite regime, as if he’s a seventeenth century man just hearing Newton’s take on gravity. But, really, why
should
he have thought of it? If you’re part of a culture where everyone is identical, and your badges of your office identify you, it takes a radical mind to make the leap to question that and see it from an outsider’s perspective. You can see this being a really witty idea – say, if a sudden genius grunt in the ranks of the cloned Sontaran realises that he could be commander if he only put on a different helmet. It only falls down here because the Sensorites manifestly
aren’t
identical – Peter Glaze in particular looks nothing like any of the others. And since they’re all facially dissimilar, the little differences between the Sensorites would be all the more obvious. All of this smacks a little bit like an Englishman who believes that all the Chinese look the same, and actually
expects
that the Chinese can’t tell each other apart either.

T:
Yes, in the days when I’d read about The Sensorites but not actually seen it, I was thrilled to read that different masks had been designed to give each Sensorite a unique character. It’s cheaper to lift every visage from the same mould, which explains why Doctor Who monsters tend to all look exactly the same, even though this isn’t altogether believable. So it’s typical of this daft series that I adore, that the only two species who are cited in the scripts as being identical – the Sensorites and the Sontarans – resolutely aren’t!

And while the Doctor’s laborious gathering of evidence wouldn’t have detained Sherlock Holmes for even a minute, I like the cross-cutting and fading from the stricken Ian, to the Doctor, to the test tubes. When director Graeme Harper does this in 20 years’ time, we’ll be lauding him. There are a couple of fluffs, though – the First Elder says, “Give my Doctor the compliments,” whilst the Doctor talks of “the First Elder... err, Scientist.” But to be fair, Peter R Newman (or the Fourth Writer, as he shall be known from now on) hasn’t exactly made it easy for everyone.

And did you notice, with regards the way the Doctor is more and more becoming the series’ central character, that the First Elder refers to him as the “commander” of the TARDIS crew? Perhaps he’s just reciprocating a bit of courtesy – the Doctor here is far more respectful of court ritual and authority than he was whilst hooting like a maniac in front of Kublai Khan.

Finally, let me point out that when John says “evil”, we get another socking great musical sting, just as we did with Ian’s declaration of “dead” in episode one. Subtlety has taken a holiday, alongside the absent and much-missed Jacqueline Hill.

January 18th

Kidnap (The Sensorites episode five)

R:
Well, the “kidnap” of the title takes place – ooh, I’d say, five whole seconds before the end of this week’s instalment. Things are coming to a pretty pass when the selling point of the episode is only at the cliffhanger. It’s strange, watching this, how all that wonderful tension evoked in Strangers in Space has now ebbed away. There’s the odd attempt at it – I love how Hartnell has mastered the act of “silent acting whilst the credits play over your face”, getting suspicion and fear into a single and slightly affected hand movement to the chest. (Peter Purves once said in an interview that Hartnell’s film experience taught him to keep his hands in shot during close-ups because they’re so expressive – it’s mannered and unnatural, but it really does work well.) And Norman Kay is working overtime with his musical stings, trying to make the action here more melodramatic than it really is.

But to be honest, Kidnap is rather on the dry side; when Ian tells Susan that he wishes they were all in the TARDIS and away from the Sense-Sphere, he says it just a little
too
feelingly. And it’s peculiar that the cast are so much looking forward to Jacqueline Hill being back from her holiday next week, they mention it on no less than four separate occasions – you can always tell there’s a problem with the pacing of a story when it keeps on stopping so all the characters can anticipate the thrills they can expect
next
week.

It’s a funny affair, this episode. The best scenes are the ones where the Administrator and the Second Elder argue about a policy of appeasement towards the humans. It’s interesting in part because Peter Glaze’s fervent attack on the pacifism of his brothers is really just the flipside of Ian’s discussion with the Thals – only this time, the TARDIS crew are on the receiving end of the aggression. Although Glaze is clearly portrayed as the story’s villain, without a shred of ambiguity to it, it’s easy to sympathise with his stance – especially when Susan openly laughs at the way the Sensorites run, or John and Carol treat them as if they’re tardy waiters. There’s still a clever twist or two up this story’s sleeve (thank God), but watching it now is a faintly uncomfortable experience, as the amiable racism of the humans (and the way Doctor
continues
to shout at the Sensorites, even though he knows it causes them pain) isn’t challenged by the episode at all, and the distrust the Sensorites show in response is labelled purely as evil. It’s all a bit too simplistic – we’ve seen during this first season how Doctor Who keeps on trying to find a tone to play off, and at this point it’s clearly Children’s Television. But not in the way that John Lucarotti interpreted it, with subtle instruction and shades of depth. No, here the Administrator is rumbled as a baddie primarily because he was a bit abrupt with Ian and Susan once he’d been put in a position of power. Because that’s right, kids – evil people give themselves away because they’re
rude
.

Pah. I’m grumbling too much. I’m supposed to be pointing out what’s good and worth celebrating. Peter Glaze, then. They’ve stuck him behind a mask, they’ve given him the broadest of characters to play – but the funny little feller from Crackerjack is really going for it, blowing the cobwebs off the staid Sensorite society. He’s worth the admission price alone – the regular cast are going through the motions a bit, but Glaze mines the most out of every scene he’s in, a single tilt of the head suggesting pride at his elevation, or haughty disdain to the humans he so despises.

T:
We get one of the biggest and most obvious fluffs in the entire series: “I heard them over... er... t-talking.” And yet, William Hartnell isn’t to blame. Stand forth (or Fourth), Arthur Newall, your place in history is assured!

Some of the Sensorites’ attributes continue to raise questions – we’re told that loud noise hurts them, but when Third shouts at the Second Elder, the latter is caused pain while the perpetrator of said noise feels nothing. So, it seems that a Sensorite could charge about shouting and banging, giving everyone around him tinnitus, but would be perfectly fine and oblivious to it himself. (Actually, I know a busker like that in Manchester City Centre.)

Good on the Third Sensorite, though, for releasing the Fourth to help instead of doing that ridiculous and boring strategy employed by villains on 24: killing their useful ally for incompetence. Oh, and note how the cliffhanger – in which Carol is kidnapped – is the first instance of a non-regular in peril being used to entice us back next week.

A Desperate Venture (The Sensorites episode six)

R:
John Bailey does a wonderful turn as the Earth commander, who’s been hiding in the aqueducts poisoning water for years, and yet still believes he’s fighting an honourable war. His soldiers wear long beards and carry pointed sticks, but he still has the hearty bonhomie of a colonel who believes in the well-ordered discipline of the drill. It’s a lovely performance because it’s very funny – here is a man who genuinely cannot see to what a ragged state his xenophobia has brought him – but it’s dangerous too, teetering on the edge of paranoia. He rails against the Doctor and Ian with threats of courts martial, and is only reassured when he’s promised all the attention of a welcome committee. Subtlest of all, though, is the way that Bailey clearly feels
disappointed
that the war is over – his underlings emerge into the sunlight with such relief on their faces, they almost don’t mind that they’re captured by the Sensorites, but this is a soldier who, in supposed victory, has lost all his life’s purpose. He’s only on screen for a few minutes, and yet he plays the part with such energy, and with such thought, that it livens up the entire episode and reminds you how long we’ve had to do without performances of this calibre. Hartnell and Russell clearly perk up too as a response.

There are some lovely moments here – Carole Ann Ford is very affecting when she talks to the First Elder about her home planet, and by the end of the episode, she clearly feels homesick and wishes that she could have a permanent base. (Not much longer to wait now, love. You’ll see, contracts are up for renewal soon.) And I love the way that as Ian and the Doctor venture into the lair of the Earth soldiers, Hartnell rolls up his map and passes it to him wordlessly as a weapon. Russell’s bemused facial expression is priceless – but he brandishes it ahead of him nonetheless.

So, that was The Sensorites then. It’s a little hard to see what it was trying to do, really. It tries to be a tale about the evils of racial hatred, with the Sensorite Administrator and the Earth Commander both so caught up in their fears of the unlike, they are determined to exterminate the other. In that sense, this is really quite a moral little tale, and a clear development of the first Dalek story; it’s a more complex and more realistic take upon war, where extremists on both sides are responsible for the sufferings of those caught in the middle. But for all that it has two and a half hours to play with, Peter R Newman’s script barely finds time to bring out any of that depth – it prefers instead to give attention to the relationship between John and Carol, who by the story’s end behave like pseudo-companions, and who by patronising the Sensorite culture are only a subtler form of the racism we see from those humans trying to poison the aliens.

I think The Sensorites’ intention is honourable, but it’s naively written. The Administrator doesn’t even get an exit scene – he’s been the most interesting character for the past four episodes, and he deserves
some
conclusion, whether it be a comeuppance or a redemption, but he’s packed off into exile off screen as an afterthought. It’s just another symptom of the way that the story pays lip service to respecting the Sensorites – to treating them as a civilised culture – but at the end of the day doesn’t really feel they’re worthy of our attention. We wave Maitland and his crew off back to Earth – those are the characters we’re meant to identify with, not these funny little aliens with the big feet.