Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (15 page)

T:
Yay, Barbara is back! And without Maitland... perhaps she couldn’t tell if he was comatose again or not (I found it hard at times, I have to say). Unfortunately, her arrival, for some reason, makes everyone talk in exposition.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, for all my chiding of this tale for its childishness, the seeds were sown for the plot twist involving Bailey’s group of aqueduct-skulking humans over a month ago! Nowadays, you’d never be allowed to expect an audience to remember that far back without copious use of flashbacks or Previously Ons. But it’s interesting that all this death and disaster was caused by a petty little war, perpetrated by the equivalent of those Japanese soldiers you read about, hanging about the jungle, refusing to believe that they’ve surrendered.

And you’re right – Bailey is truly stunning, aided by the sympathetic reactions that Hartnell and Russell feed him. Yes, this man is the enemy, and yes, he’s committed a number of murders, but in some measure they actually feel sorry for the guy. And so do we, thanks to Bailey’s fragile dignity. It’s an established scientific fact that we don’t make actors like him anymore.

For all the criticisms one can level against The Sensorites – and for all the logic-holes I’ve mentioned – I enjoyed watching this story, and feel that it’s a bit of a neglected piece. It’s also, if I’m remembering correctly, the only Doctor Who story where the principle director and the writer had died – or, at very least, were missing and presumed so – before the series had become a huge phenomenon. I wonder how they felt about what they’d done for a few weeks in a tiny studio.

January 19th

A Land of Fear (The Reign of Terror episode one)

R:
All the regular cast look so much more happy now that they know they’re in another historical adventure, don’t they? I must say, I feel the same. I think I’ll be relieved when these Doctor Who people phase out all those odd monster and planet serials, and just stick to sending the TARDIS back in time. They’ll be doing that soon, won’t they, Toby?

The opening TARDIS scene is a joy, as William Russell and Jacqueline Hill flatter William Hartnell’s ego to the point where the Doctor seems to positively purr with the attention. It’s lovely – and quite a reversal of the sudden coldness the Doctor displayed at the end of the last episode, when he abruptly decided to put Ian off the Ship at its next stop. It felt like a rather crass way to shoehorn a cliffhanger in and generate some unnecessary tension, but here – especially as the Doctor thinks he’s taken Ian and Barbara back home, and so isn’t portrayed as just giving them the boot on some alien locale – it seems all rather like a charming bit of banter. There’s something very touching about the way that the TARDIS crew all react to the possibility that their travels have come to an end, that they really have reached contemporary Earth... Susan hugs her teachers in a whirlwind, and then rushes from the room; the Doctor, most touchingly of all, tries to deny he’s feeling anything at all, and becomes gruff and terse. And Ian and Barbara
try
so hard to be mature adults, and reason that they have to stop travelling some time – and then clearly feel such relief when they’re able to persuade the Doctor out of the doors and into another adventure. I also love the way that as soon as the teachers discover a chest of eighteenth century clothes, they begin to dress up in appropriate garb. By now they know the drill, and can even have fun with it.

There’s such a beautifully light tone to the episode... and it’s deceptive, of course, because it’s set to contrast with the horrors of the French Revolution. Stanley Myers’ music, too, all ironic refrains from The Marseillaise, adds to the idea that this is going to be something of a romp – and, as Susan indicates, this is the Doctor’s favourite period of history, so he’ll just
love
it here. Then we meet a couple of characters with guns, but it’s all right – within minutes they show themselves to be friendly. The standard structure of a Doctor Who story allows us to believe that the fugitives Rouvray and D’Argenson will be like Altos and Sabetha or Carol and Maitland – that they’ll be the supporting cast for this story, and share the adventure with our regulars. So it’s a genuine shock that they’re killed so brutally, especially since Rouvray’s brave stand in front of the peasants suggests he’s going to be a heroic figure like Marco Polo, but he’s cut down anyway. D’Argenson’s death is even nastier, as he’s perfunctorily shot off screen; he’s treated like a coward who deserves nothing more than an afterthought.

Suddenly, the revolutionaries seem much more threatening, and it’s telling that when Ian is told to shut up, he does. Ian, Barbara and Susan are imprisoned and led away by a mob while the Doctor is trapped inside a burning building – the fire so intense, it seems, that it’s even allowed to burn away during the closing credits. And all those jaunty little pieces of music from Myers don’t sound quite so funny any more – there’s something strained about them, almost mocking.

T:
Yes, Rob, the teachers do flatter Hartnell delightfully... but what really wins him round, I think, is Ian’s offer of buying him a pint. And then we’re told that the French Revolution is the Doctor’s favourite period of Earth history! What a time to choose – I take it he loves watching scores of upper-class toffs getting their heads lopped off.

Nonetheless, this is a great start to an adventure which seems anything but safe. There is the odd comedic beat, but it usually comes from such unpleasant characters, and we’re left in no doubt that there’s a genuine air of menace and danger for everyone, everywhere. The Doctor’s party really has arrived in a land of fear.

Dramatically, D’Argenson and Rouvray are the perfect characters to illustrate the backstory to the events that are about to unfold, and give us an insight into the societal make-up of this adventure’s setting. The former is terrified as his whole family has been slaughtered, whilst the latter is a polite, honourable man with an air of class about him. We’re told what they represent through character as much as exposition, which marks the return of a welcome complexity to the scripts. And then we see the soldiers that arrive to capture/execute the runaways – they’re spectacularly uncouth, a rabble who are in it for the killing more than anything else. They’re genuinely unsettling, and seem more
alien
than even the Sensorites.

Laidlaw Dalling makes a huge impact as Rouvray, although he’s aided by Ken Lawrence (playing the soldiers’ lieutenant), who tries to reaffirm his authority in the face of Rouvray’s commanding confrontation. Rouvray only mucks it up when he gets a bit too hoity-toity for his own good (note to self: it’s probably best not to call people pointing guns at you “peasants”), which helps us to understand both sides of the divide in this conflict. D’Argenson’s death taking place off screen is a conscious decision that forces our imaginations to run riot: Heaven knows what that horrible mob did to him before administering that final bullet. It’s blood curdling.

And do you know... I just remembered that I’d meant to keep a tally of how many times the TARDIS lands silently (as it does here), but didn’t. (Curse this book, it’s taking me away from valuable list-making duties!) I have an interest in such things because although we now take various aspects of the TARDIS as constants (the materialisation sound, the Ship’s interior, etc), certain details haven’t yet been decided upon, even as we enter the last story of the first season.

Guests of Madame Guillotine (The Reign of Terror episode two)

R:
I absolutely love this episode. But there are some very odd things about it.

To kick off – it appears to be told in two entirely different time periods! We start the episode with Ian, Barbara and Susan arriving in Paris. Then they’re sentenced before a judge. Then they’re taken to the prison. Barbara attempts to reassure Susan that her grandfather will have escaped the burning house... and we then cut to the Doctor, who’s only now recovering consciousness, with smoke still visible behind him! How long has he been out? Even assuming that the captives were taken to Paris by carriage – and the episode before suggests that isn’t the case, that they were marched there in all discomfort – and even assuming they were sentenced and imprisoned at a breakneck speed, a couple of days must have passed at the very least. But the scenes with the Doctor
can’t
be taking place in-between the scenes featuring his friends – the series has always told its stories in chronological order before (save for some clearly signposted flashbacks in the first episode), but now it’s not even pretending to be sequential. Just in case you thought we should be turning a blind eye to it, the episode then makes it perfectly clear that the Doctor’s journey to the city is a long and arduous one – as if to emphasise still further that his companions’ journey there must have also taken a lot of time.

I don’t for a moment think it’s a mistake; it’s a very deliberate way that the writer, Dennis Spooner (soon to be the series’ script editor), is telling the story. And it suggests that he’s not interested, like John Lucarotti was, in marking the passage of time in a logical and accurate way. On the contrary, he’s going to go for the structure which best tells the story, and we accept it – even though it’s pretty obvious we’re leapfrogging backwards and forwards in time every instant that the episode cuts between the two plotlines. But what it does, very cleverly I think, is give a vague unease that you don’t quite know as a viewer how you should be interpreting what’s going on. Which is made even more obvious by the second odd thing:

... which is that, by the end of the second episode, we
still
haven’t worked out who the important guest characters are yet. Very oddly, not a single person introduced in A Land of Fear makes it into this one, except for the little boy who rescued the Doctor from the burning building. (He gets a lovely scene too; Hartnell’s rapport with the little tyke is terrific, and the salute they share absolutely gorgeous.) You watch this episode therefore waiting to identify who’s going to be significant, who’s going to be this adventure’s Za, this adventure’s Marco or Tlotoxl... and time and time again, you get completely wrongfooted. When a prisoner is thrown into Ian’s cell, you think he might be the one – and then he promptly dies the moment he starts saying something interesting. The Doctor encounters a road-works overseer on his journey, and you think maybe
he
might be significant – but within a few minutes, he’s been brained by a spade, and he’s out of the story. By the episode’s end, the most screen time has been given to the jailer – and he hasn’t even been given a name!

The cleverness of this is that it makes our heroes’ plight seem all the more real; they can’t even bond with anyone, and you really feel at the episode’s end that Barbara and Susan really might be lost in the anonymity of history. In The Aztecs, they were under threat because they were divine and all-powerful – here, they’re just caught up in someone else’s story, and no-one even cares enough to ask them who they are. And it helps the spy story element of the adventure too; the government official Lemaitre only makes his first appearance some 40 minutes into the adventure, and the story has been structured in such a way that we’re given very little reassurance we’ll ever see him again, let alone that he might be the master-spy James Stirling that Ian has been told to watch out for. After all we never saw Rouvray or D’Argenson again, did we? In a story that has often been remembered as the first “comedy historical”, it’s notable how unsettling all this is.

And it means that whereas very little really
happens
this week – Barbara and Susan realise their attempts to escape from their cell are futile, Ian is stuck in
another
cell altogether, and the Doctor can’t even get to the centre of the action without being waylaid by a bit of padding – that lack of forward momentum is very effective. It genuinely suggests that for once, our heroes are in a hopeless situation. Oh, and we get our first bit of location work! That’s the Doctor, that is, walking down country lanes and across fields! ... okay, it’s not
actually
William Hartnell. But Brian Proudfoot does a good job of imitating his walk, even if it does stray a bit too close to being jaunty.

T:
Dennis Spooner’s voice is still prevalent in the show today. The series may not have survived were it not for the Daleks, but I don’t think it’d be as beloved without its wit, satire and fun – all of which Spooner here brings into play. Hartnell clearly enjoys these aspects too, spitting his hands before knocking out the boorish works-overseer (who, brilliantly, calls the Doctor “skinny”!). And when asked if he thinks he’s clever, Hartnell gets the wonderfully Doctorish line, “Without any undue modesty, yes!”

Despite all the levity, however, much of this is grim stuff. The image of a guillotine – which at first looks like a photograph, then unfreezes as the blade sails down – evokes the opening titles of the Classic Serial’s A Tale of Two Cities, and this cruel icon hangs forebodingly over the whole episode. The prison cells are dingy and dirty, and Lemaitre seems quite a threat as he pins Ian against the wall. Our heroic science teacher is having none of it, though, facing Lemaitre down and putting much ice into his addressing the man as “Citizen”. Yes, it’s true: Ian Chesterton is a latter-day Jack Bauer. With the passage of time, it’s easy to mock Ian’s middle-class earnestness and manners, but we’ve seen him a) fight Ixta to the death, b) leave Vasor to his fate, and c) here hold his nerve against the powerful man who has his life in his hands. Ian is as hard as nails were allowed to be at teatime in the 1960s.

Also appearing opposite Ian is Jeffry Wickham (playing the dying prisoner Webster), who is a charming man and a good actor. It’s amazing how someone could appear so early in his own career and the show’s history, and yet, whilst continuing to be gainfully employed for the next 45 years, somehow conspire never to appear in Doctor Who again. And did you notice, Rob, how Ian’s cell is glossier and more impressive than Barbara and Susan’s, by dint of it being recorded on film? Of course it’s symptomatic of William Russell being the last of the regulars to take a holiday, and only appearing here in pre-recorded sequences.

The jailer keeping everyone locked-up, though, is a curious fellow... although Wang-Lo in Marco Polo put paid to the myth that the jailer is the show’s first attempt at an out-and-out comic character, it’s interesting to note how Jack Cunningham plays the part in a broad Northern Accent. We don’t question for a second that this is a kind of shorthand to suggest he’s a different kind of Frenchman to others we’ve seen – and yet, when the same trick is played with aliens, we don’t buy it so easily. Which is funny in its own way, because this is a long-held technique (think about the number of Chekhov productions you’ve seen where actors adopt regional accents to signify what class of Russian they’re playing). We’d have howled with laughter had the Fourth Sensorite used a Geordie accent to show that he’s a bit rougher than his posher fellows. It seems we can accept a Frenchman from, say, Bolton, but not a Voord from Hull.