Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (19 page)

T:
At this point in the series, we’re so used to seeing Doctor Who done “as live” that the actors getting from one set to another is often witnessed in laborious detail. So here, it’s curious how one minute we have the rebel Tyler telling Baker to help the Doctor and then – bang – he’s opening a cell door and freeing prisoners, with no scene to bridge the gap. Mind you, the Dalek ship is clearly a very efficient place – since the rebels infiltrated it, the baddies have found the time to repaint the Supreme Dalek and robotise Craddock.

But the film sequences are again impressive, and the music helps them trot along nicely. Inside the museum, though, those annoying “Vetoed” signs (which the resistance members use to communicate with each other, sort of) again draw attention to themselves. I believe this started out a gag on Martin’s part (tellingly, they aren’t mentioned in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of this story) because he’d wanted to do something and been, er, vetoed – but unless you’re aware of this, the “joke” simply becomes an intrusion. It’s a shame, as other little touches like the Dalek graffiti are rather fun – putting an insignia on an invaded country’s monuments is the sort of thing petty dictators do.

You’re right, though: Baker is (or rather,
was
) a nice chap, isn’t he? There are so many little touches of humanity here – David gives Baker a hip flask, Baker tells the Doctor he hopes he finds his friends, etc. – that you can’t help but warm to the character despite his limited screen time. And then my stomach lurched when he surrendered and the Daleks shot him anyway! Dialogue and characterization haven’t always been Nation’s strong suits, but – as with the Thal being dragged under the water at the end of The Daleks episode five – he’s often very good at writing horrifying vignettes.

Unlike some people, by the way, I don’t mind the bit where the Dalek talks to a dummy and mistakes it for a real person – it’s a quite alien thing to do, I suppose, in a way that the Dalek leader clearing his throat really wasn’t.

January 25th

The End of Tomorrow (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode four)

R:
I know the actor who’s inside the Slyther! That’s dear old Nick Evans, who does charity work with Janie. Once in a while, he tells me proudly of his days spent inside a Dalek casing. He never shows off about being inside a Slyther, though. But, do you know, watching it now, I think the Slyther is actually rather good! It’s clearly just a bag with a bit of a claw poking out of it, but it’s so misshapen, so expressionless, that I actually find it rather disgusting. Maybe it’s the effect of watching all the episodes in order, but I’m actually adjusting to expectations of the time. Or maybe I’m just getting soft in the head. What do you think?

One other thing that really oughtn’t to work is the absence of William Hartnell. He’s ill this week, having injured himself in a fall on set, so a hasty bit of rewriting means we only see the back of Edmund Warwick’s head doubling for the Doctor after he’s inexplicably fainted. But actually it does a lot of good to the story. David Campbell is given a lot of the Doctor’s lines, and a certain genius in disabling ticking bombs – and suddenly, there’s a chance of rapport between him and Susan, and a more credible reason why she might be attracted to an also-ran character and want to settle down with him. It’s a curious episode because besides not featuring the Doctor, it doesn’t feature a lot of Daleks either – I’m quite sure that if there was an episode that the production team would have chosen Hartnell to be injured during, it wouldn’t have been this one.

But again, mainly by accident, it works because it shifts the emphasis upon human villains instead. Up to now, the only human characters we’ve met are either resistance members or the poor souls who had been forcibly converted into mind-controlled slaves. Now, Terry Nation gives us the chance to see the uglier consequences of totalitarian occupation and plague disaster: the human race doesn’t necessarily just bond together as one, but also produces scavengers and black marketeers. Once again, it’s a depth you don’t usually get with Doctor Who alien-invasion stories; yes, you get the odd misguided traitor here and there, but not those who are amorally taking advantage of the situation. After an episode in which we’ve seen the human race portrayed as something which is heroic and proud, where men seem to queue up to display their willingness to die for the greater good, the likes of the black marketer Ashton leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. And that there
are
Ashtons about only makes the memory of Dortmun’s sacrifice all the more powerful.

T:
It’s worth going over again – the leading actor is unexpectedly absent, so as everyone prepares for the next episode, they have to rewrite and re-jig the whole bloody thing! And so they do, because there’s so little time between recording and broadcast, and they’ve no choice. Modern producers would sob into their lattes and have an extra line of coke before finding out who to blame for the episode not being completed, but these young turks just got on with it. By the way, I’ve met Nick Evans too – he’s a lovely chap. Do you think the other blokes inside the Daleks were jealous of him getting to play the Slyther as well?

But oh, if only Richard Martin had been able to do
everything
on film – I love the shots of the Robomen atop the wagons, whipping and cajoling suitably grimy (and plentiful!) extras. And look, they’ve had to pay Alan Judd for an extra week, just to get that shot of Jenny emerging from the museum with Dortmun’s corpse in the frame. It’s a great shot, but the money might have been better spent on using something other than a still picture of a paper plate to represent the Dalek saucer. Or some footage of an alligator that doesn’t look about three inches long (although the shot of Tyler framed in the hatchway, firing his gun at the little creature, is so good it almost sells the sequence).

The Waking Ally (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode five)

R:
What’s this “waking ally” mentioned in the title, then? Did I miss this?

The women in the wood who give Barbara and Jenny up to the Daleks change the tone of the story completely; they look like something out of a Grimm fairy tale. In the
one
concession we ever get to the twenty-second century, we get the older of the two nostalgically remembering the moving walkways and the astronaut fair – which makes it all seem unreal, as she and her partner look as if they’d be better suited to joining the Tribe of Gum than the space-age future that Nation has dreamed up. The younger woman is almost positively feral! I think it’s so clever, this, that the moment we get an allusion to the utopian ideal of 200 years hence, it’s from the mouths of those who have been brought so low that they’ve become Dalek collaborators – and can easily justify their actions, rummaging through a grocery bag for sugar like kids opening a Christmas present, and reasoning that the women they’ve betrayed would have been captured anyway.

No, it’s not a good week for Barbara or Jenny – they’re caught like Hansel and Gretel and bundled off to the mines. It’s not a good week for Ian’s friend Larry Madison either. Amidst all the epic plotting, and the attention given to the
national
implications of an invasion, there’s been this little background storyline of a man searching for his missing brother. In some ways, it foreshadows Abby’s search for her son in Nation’s later Survivors series – but it’s not overplayed here, it only surfaces in the way that Larry can’t resist referring to what his brother Phil says and believes; it’s clear that Larry idolises him. There’s a certain grim inevitability that nothing good will have come to Phil – but Larry’s discovery that he’s become a Roboman, his desperate pleas to make Phil remember his wife Angela, and the determined way in which he chooses to die alongside him are the most touching moments yet in a story which has rather forgotten gentler feelings of love and affection.

T:
Larry’s self-sacrifice actually brought a tear to my eye. It’s so sad, and the mutual death is horribly touching – kudos to Peter Badger, who I understand added Robo-Phil’s final utterance of “Larry” in rehearsal. This allows the two brothers to be together, fleetingly, one final time, in their dying moments. It’s a typically grim Nation subplot, but he’s smashing at this kind of Boys’ Own stuff.

But yes... the “waking” what? The “ally” who? Perhaps this refers to the Doctor being on his feet again, but he woke up last week (albeit out of shot). And anyway, he wasn’t supposed to be
out
of action then, and I’ve not heard of the title being altered at the last minute due to Hartnell’s injury. And even if that were the case, is there
nothing
else of note about which they could have named this episode? How about “Slyther Me Timbers” or “Fratricide of Doom” or (sorry) “Prisoners of Cod Science”. Whatever the reason, I bet it’s the only time in the history of the English Language that the words “waking” and “ally” have ever resided next to each other.

And I really must try to perfect the “flirting over dead fish” technique that David uses on Susan sometime – it’s terribly effective and results in (for Doctor Who, at least) quite a passionate kiss. And the Doctor’s being a wily cove about this: “Something’s cooking,” he says gleefully, twinkling at the young lovers.

January 26th

Flashpoint (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode six)

R:
I suppose, if you wanted to be critical, you could argue that wrapping up the entire invasion of Earth in 15 minutes flat is just too easy. And of course it is – but I think that rather misses the point. The
plot
of The Dalek Invasion of Earth is nonsense. For Heaven’s sake, it relies upon the idea that the Daleks want to mine the magnetic core of the planet, replace it with an engine and fly it around the galaxy like a bus. But Nation was always more interested in the symbols that the story offered as opposed to its hokey science – and so it is here. The problem with almost
every
Doctor Who story (classic series and new) is that however epic the crisis offered, the conclusion will inevitably feel a bit glib – and this story is about as truly epic as Doctor Who will ever be.

But the symbols of the victory
do
matter, even if the plotting of said victory is rather muddled. After five weeks of Doctor Who being at its most sour, the triumph here as slaves and Robomen alike turn upon the Daleks is very powerful. There’s even a bit of comedy to those symbols, in that lovely scene where Barbara bluffs to the Daleks about several imminent uprisings against them by drawing upon her history teaching – and reminds us in the process of mankind’s ever present desire to fight for freedom through the ages. Yes, it’s ridiculous, the sounding of Big Ben as soon as the invasion has been foiled. But it’s extremely moving too, and Hartnell knows how to play the sentimentality of it perfectly – a hand on Tyler’s shoulder, a smile of hope and a soft repeat of “Just the beginning”. Wonderful.

And all that is as nothing to the departure of Susan. She’s not been the best written of characters, shame to say, and her potential was clearly squandered. But right up to the end, Carole Ann Ford has tried her damnedest to find that ground between teenage cry baby and strange alien girl, and her final scenes are amongst her very best – she finds at last a cause that gives her identity and a man who loves her, and yet she’s unable to leave her grandfather, unable to
grow up.
William Hartnell sometimes looks a bit flustered when he’s dealing with plot-mechanics, but give him a scene which invites him to focus on truthful emotion, and he’s heartbreaking. He’s never been better than in the sequence where he puts all his attention upon a hole in Susan’s shoe, awkwardly pretending even to himself that he’ll repair it – that he can continue travelling with the granddaughter he loves so much. It’s not so much the speech that’s later repeated at the start of The Five Doctors that made me cry – oh yes, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I cried all right. It was more the way that having delivered that speech, he rushes the TARDIS dematerialisation with a couple of farewells, quickly, before he can change his mind.

Did you cry, Toby? Oh go on. I hope it wasn’t just me. I’d feel like a right prawn.

T:
Tears welled, but they didn’t cascade – but then, I’m a tough nut to crack. But before we got to that last scene, there was some fun to be had along the way...

As you say, final episodes are very difficult when the scale is so large, but I think they get away with it here. Well, almost. You have to wonder, retroactively, why Dortmun put so much effort into perfecting a Dalek-killing bomb when it turns out that simply whacking the Daleks with rocks will be more effective. And there’s a
lot
happening in that final explosion that finishes off the Dalek mining operation, isn’t there? The stock footage goes all over the place – I can just about buy the lava flow, as the Doctor mentions a volcanic eruption, but is the explosion really so powerful that land falls into the sea and then deserted buildings tumble down?

But, who cares – this episode is about Susan’s departure. I’ll happily put up with a perfunctory plot resolution because these last ten minutes are the best. Hartnell is just superb, holding his granddaughter close because he knows that when he goes back into the Ship, he’ll never be able to do so again. Carole Ann Ford is good too (although unfortunately, she’s forced to clutch onto a drainpipe at one point), and it remains a shame that she was rarely allowed to be as alien as she was in the pilot. She’s lovely in her parting scene, though, especially when the TARDIS disappears and she puts her hands out to feel where it once stood. It’s a worthy send off, and Hartnell’s oft-quoted final speech is played magnificently.