Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (25 page)

I can’t help but fixate on Richard Shaw, who plays the governor – he was so very good as Sladden in Quatermass and the Pit, and delivered one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. It was
way
ahead of its time in terms of naturalism and conveying sci-fi moments without appearing daft or hammy. He’s neither of those things here either, but he does play Lobos a little low key considering he’s the main villain. To be fair, there might be a reason for that – Shaw wrote to me once, saying that he sustained a severe blow to the eye during the making of this story, but had to carry on. That’s why I can be so forgiving when he’s Lobos: the man was concussed! The most
colourful
performance in this story, though, is Ivor Salter as the Morok Commander. He’s bellicose, but an unfortunate side-effect of his testy bluster is that he clearly hasn’t had time to learn his lines properly, and you breathe a sigh of relief when he gets to the end of a sentence with its meaning still vaguely intact.

Finally, Rob, how much do you think Vicki will be venerated in the history books of this planet? If not for her help, the Xerons would still be standing around being wet and sincere. They even seem lame when they tell Vicki, “You can see we’re nothing like [the Moroks]”. No, you’re not, sweetheart – they’re not the ones wearing plimsolls or drinking space coffee from space cups, and unable to muster enough intelligence to overcome a security machine that can be defeated by silence. (Had Ascaris led the rebellion on Xeros, they’d have won within minutes. Still, Maureen O’Brien takes great delight in outfoxing a blithering machine that seems less complicated than Windows XP.)

Oh, all right... I must have just one more jab (but a
loving
jab, I promise you!) at this episode, because it contains one of my absolute favourite stupid moments in the show’s history! A guard confronts Ian and company at gunpoint, then allows them to plot amongst themselves for what seems like five minutes, and then says, “Enough talking!”... as if, somehow, his being out of shot allows the viewer to forget that he’s present whilst our heroes discuss how they’re going to deal with him.

February 5th

The Final Phase (The Space Museum episode four)

R:
At the end of the day, it seems that whatever the TARDIS crew did in the museum, they
were
just working towards getting captured and made into exhibits. But, rather wonderfully, ever since they arrived on Xeros, they’d been changing events more subtly – by speaking to people and making a difference to them, they’ve set into motion a chain of events that allows them to be rescued. It’s what Doctor Who is about, fundamentally – that these journeys through space and time
do
have an influence. And it’s a very new-series idea, that the day is saved not directly by the Doctor, but by those who have had their lives touched by him. But this is the first time that the classic series comes right out and says it, and it’s as if this is the answer that the production team have been working towards for the last two years now, the reason why Doctor Who matters.

The Space Museum might be a bit unloved, a bit naff – but I think that it makes a statement like that is very important. And it can do so purely because it’s within a rare context where we’re invited to consider the consequences of what would have happened had the Doctor and friends
not
gone down a certain corridor, or
not
encouraged the odd Xeron or two. “Our lives are important; at least, to us,” said Hartnell at the very close of the first season, in a scene which could give no conclusion to a discussion about whether or not the Doctor makes any real difference to anyone. Now it’s stated, unequivocally, that he does. It’s optimistic and it’s vital.

I did a DVD documentary for this story a little while ago called “Defending the Museum”. I was rather surprised when I got behind the camera to realise that no-one else was prepared to be taking part in such an exercise –
that’s
how bad this story’s reputation is! And, yes, I exaggerated how much I liked it for comic effect, and I can’t pretend it’s all that successful a production... but I
do
think there’s much here to admire. Not least for the line, “Have any arms fallen into Xeron hands?” A line like that is
so
bad, you just know it had to be deliberate.

T:
Oh, you weren’t the
only
person they asked to defend The Space Museum, Rob – I was just too expensive.

Here at the end of the story, I realise I came to it the wrong way round upon my initial viewing of it. I had first read Glyn Jones’ wonderful novelisation, and so all I could see when I actually watched the story was what I thought was missing from it. And there
are
some frustrating glimpses of what could have been – it seems odd to see poor old Sita being gunned down whilst Dako is only coshed on the head, but the book clarifies that the Morok who bashes Dako (Peter Diamond’s character – “Pluton”, if you prefer) changes sides. He also spares Gyar (a dishy Xeron who doesn’t even appear in this TV version) out of mercy and heroism. Little touches like that are completely absent here, alas, and the next time we see Diamond’s character, he’s zapped to death while beating a hasty retreat.

And did you notice that whereas The Crusade entailed each regular being given a plot strand that played to their strengths, here it’s almost the opposite? The Doctor spends most of the story frozen or locked up, Ian wanders around with a babbling Morok and Barbara is stuck in a gas-filled room. Only Vicki really has an impact on events – fortunately, it’s just enough to save the travellers from being freeze-dried. Speaking of which, it’s worth noting that Lobos implied the freezing process might have a permanent effect on the Doctor’s brain – and, to judge by the Doctor’s giggles and muddled delivery here, it might be worth keeping an eye on him in future. Perhaps Lobos was right, which would help us to rationalise any future piece of Hartnell flubble!

The Executioners (The Chase episode one)

R:
Ha! This one has a tone so unlike anything we’ve seen on Doctor Who before, and it seems determined to bemuse the audience from the very beginning. We kick off with a reprise from last week, where a Dalek takes orders to arrange for our heroes’ extermination. Nice and dramatic, you might think... and then we cut straight to Dudley Simpson playing some inappropriate lounge music. For the next 20 minutes, everyone has a jolly good time watching TV, doing a spot of dancing to The Beatles, catching up with sunbathing and some light reading – in fact, the basic equivalent of your average 60s family on holiday at the beach. And you might be forgiven for thinking that the most terrible consequence likely to happen all episode is that Vicki has ruined Barbara’s sewing project. And then, rising out of the sand, comes a Dalek grunting like a pig.

And suddenly, it all makes some sort of weird sense.

Probably the most identifiable image in Doctor Who so far has been the cliffhanger to The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode one, where a Dalek is seen rising majestically from the Thames. What we’re given here is a parody of that same sequence; it’s too much of a coincidence otherwise. And all that we’ve been watching is to be seen in that spirit; we’ve never seen the TARDIS crew as complacent as this before. At first it seems ridiculous that they’re all getting so excited about the Time and Space Visualiser, a television that allows them to see any event in history – wow! – but hang on, chaps, look about you. You can
go
there in a moment! But this is a portrait of our regulars being lazy – it’s far easier to watch Marco Polo passively on a TV than go and meet him yourself, just as it’s far easier to read about space monsters than it is to confront them.

And so it goes on. The TARDIS lands on a strange new planet, and Ian is given a magnet – a device so remarkable that he literally ignores this alien world he’s standing on so he can marvel at the gadget instead. No-one can be bothered any more. When Ian and Barbara first arrived in the TARDIS, it was a source of fear and wonder and unimaginable adventure; now, it’s a place where they can laze about on a Sunday in their dressing gowns. The magic is over. They’ve taken it for granted. It’s time they went home.

There are lots of little touches to admire here. They obviously haven’t room for the TARDIS console this week, so there’s a terrific shot of the Doctor reaching out to the viewer to operate the knobs and levers. And I love the fact that the Doctor’s the sort of man who can sunbathe without even taking his jacket off. And the Shakespeare sketch is actually quite funny – I can sympathise with any writer who keeps on being stopped and given ideas for stories. (If I were in a pretentious frame of mind, I’d point out how the three sequences we see on the Time and Space Visualiser sort of echo the way that Doctor Who treats its history stories. The first is a bit didactic and po-faced, and the historical figure is treated with enormous respect. The second sends it up a bit. And by the third, no-one can be bothered with historicals any more, and would much rather try to be up to date and funky. But I hate pretension. So I shall say nothing of the sort.)

T:
Right, cards on the table – I have a confession to make. The Chase is, as I write this, one of my least favourite Doctor Who stories of all time. It’s in my personal bottom five, definitely; I’d rate it a zero out of ten. So, you’ll have to forgive me if this gets difficult, but I thought I’d better be honest with you (and anyone reading this) up front. Okay, see you in 25 minutes...

Hello, I’m back now. What’s interesting is that for an episode that’s menacingly entitled The Executioners, this was actually written with comedy at the forefront. The regulars’ insouciance is very much a dramatic irony, as we know the Daleks are on their way to wipe them out. Unfortunately, as part of this, the regulars are all out of form – William Hartnell is written as much more of a consistently doddery old buffer (which allows him a couple of nice gags, but also some way OTT “comedy”), William Russell seems disinterested, Jacqueline Hill is unusually shrill and Maureen O’Brien is just drunk. (“I am redundant round here,” Vicki says – careful love, future producer John Wiles might be listening.)

Really, that’s my problem here. The Executioners isn’t bad per se, but almost everything about this – the script, the acting, the direction – well, it just feels a tad slapdash. Ian (a schoolteacher!) says “Barbara and I” instead of “Barbara and me”. Richard Martin’s predilection for getting the Daleks to repeat everything all the time leads to an unintentionally funny moment where Hill dramatically says, “Doctor, he said TARDIS!” (Yes, he did, Barbara – about 25 bleeding times.) Also, as the three Daleks expertly glide into their time ship (twice over, for benefit of boosting their numbers), one of them noticeably uncouples his mid-section. I’m very sorry to say this, but I’ve never seen the series this
complacent
, to such a degree that when Abraham Lincoln talks of a “Nation... so dedicated”, it’s pretty clear that he’s not talking about Terry. (Top marks for Robert Marsden’s cameo as Lincoln, though – he was something of a Lincoln specialist, so getting him was a bit like securing Simon Callow as Dickens. I said “a bit”, okay?)

And, all right, the Dalek emerging from the desert and coughing is an oh-so-clever subversion of the iconic cliffhanger from the year before. And yes, there’s no realistic reason why a Dalek
wouldn’t
clear its throat if it had been submerged in sand. But the coughing does somewhat undercut the dramatic intent of the cliffhanger: the much-garlanded cliffhanger to The Caves of Androzani episode three, one supposes, wouldn’t be so revered had the Doctor shat himself just before impact – even though you could hardly blame him for doing so.

I’m trying to stay upbeat here, Rob – I’m really trying. If I were being honest, this isn’t as bad as I’d feared. It’s okay. It’s fun and frothy and odd. I’m just not sure it’s any of these things in the way it was
intended
to be.

February 6th

The Death of Time (The Chase episode two)

R:
This is altogether a rather more thoughtful affair. Terry Nation continues his analogies about the way society responds to totalitarian aggressors – the Aridians are rather a spineless bunch, who adopt a policy of appeasement, and resign themselves to handing over our heroes to the Daleks in return for their own lives. It’s an alternate take on the pacifist creed of the Thals, and an altogether more treacherous one – and Nation makes it very clear that the Daleks have no intention of sparing the Aridians once they have the hostages they want; notice how they blast away at a couple of especially effete examples who are polishing sand from the TARDIS with all the efficacy of someone cleaning a toilet with a toothbrush. What gives them a dignity denied them by the plot is William Hartnell’s forgiving acceptance; he’s understanding, if not condoning, why these strangely fey aliens would sacrifice him. What’s really rather impressive is that within a single episode, we are invited to sympathise with the Aridians, and to see them much like the Menoptra from a few weeks before – indeed, their strange hand movements and vocal inflections have a touch of Roslyn de Winteritis about them. We hear the story of their society, and how they’ve been threatened by the Mire Beasts. And then, so quickly, we’re required to do a volte face and to despise these apparently benevolent creatures for their treachery – to despise them because they haven’t even got the honesty to be obvious threats like the Daleks, and would instead kill the Doctor with such timid apologies. Hywel Bennett appears to play one of the Aridians as if he’s constantly on the brink of tears. Doctor Who has no time for appeasement, and clearly indicates that it’s no better than active collaboration with the enemy.

There’s still room for humour, though. Nation is still parodying the conventions of the series; Ian snaps at Vicki and call her a fool for stopping to scream at a monster, and seconds later Vicki does the same thing back at him for gawping at another. There’s the first real moment of Dalek comedy, where a subordinate is told off by its impatient commander for being a bit thick. And, rather weirdly, Ian wants to call this same Dalek “Fred”, whilst the Doctor insists on waving at it and calling it “Auntie”. No-one quite bothers to explain why.

T:
In this case, what you call “parodying a convention”, I would – with great reluctance – call “crap comedy”. There’s admittedly no reason to
not
to have a coughing Dalek, or a dim-witted (or at best, “work experience”) one, but they’re impossible to take seriously. What makes the Daleks such chilling adversaries is their very alienness – take that away, and you remove their core brilliance. It doesn’t seem worth it for the sake of some rather limp humour.

Which is such a pity, because while we’ve previously seen Daleks in their city, and on twenty-second century Earth, and in water, they’re now on sand and look very impressive gliding about on it. Also, notice how they exterminate the first Aridian they see (it’s Brian Proudfoot! – oh, how the mighty Tigilinus has fallen into an uncredited role!), and
then
identify the species and decide that they’re not necessary. The Daleks’ strategy here is “kill first, decide what to do with the rest of the population later”. It shows that they’re nasty to the core, and their amorality and coldness regarding death is so very effective. If I get techy about Dalek humour, it’s because it threatens to hamstring so much of this – the scene where the Daleks gun down Proudfoot, for instance, wouldn’t have been improved had Richard Martin yielded to the temptation of adding a line like, “Oooh, it gets your gun sore, all this shooting, doesn’t it Timmy?” You know, to be funny and all that.

(And so long as I’ve “broken the seal” and am venturing into criticism of Martin for just a little bit, let me say that he continues to be such a clumsy director, I can’t even work out which Aridian gets killed because the Mire Beast attack is shot so ham-fistedly. Also, the bit where the Dalek pitches over the cliff is visually impressive, but seems so disjointed from everything else – largely because it was shot in broad daylight and then inserted into a “night” scene – it looks like a random incident, not part of the narrative. There, I feel better now. Let me switch gears back to being positive...)

The Doctor is magnificent in this episode. His pragmatism in the face of the Aridians’ decision to hand him and Barbara over to the Daleks shows great dignity, and is sensitively played by Hartnell. I wouldn’t agree with you that the programme is too heavy on appeasement – we’re made to feel sorry for the Aridians, and the Doctor doesn’t condemn them for their actions, because they’re understandable. These people appear to have no weapons or means of defending themselves whatsoever, and they’re being compelled to surrender two strangers. What choice do they have?

As part of this discussion, there’s a superb moment when Hywel Bennett (as Rynian, one of the Aridians) beats about the bush and rather gently asks if the Doctor and Barbara have eaten, and the Doctor in reply – but without malice – bluntly asks what the decision is regarding their fate. He’s stoic and impressive, but it’s quite a sweet Aridian moment too, as Rynian shows concern for the captives despite being prepared to, however reluctantly, sell them out. (In fact, I have a theory about Bennett’s performance – perhaps all the Aridians are
trying
to cry. If they weep long enough, their planet might stop being arid, and they’d have to re-Christen it Lachrymosious or something.) It’s also worth noting that the Doctor doesn’t save the Aridians – yes, he manages to get the Daleks off their backs, but they’re still stuck with a Mire Beast infestation. It’d be unthinkable today that the Doctor would just shoot off and abandon people in such an oppressed and increasingly dangerous situation.

As with the previous episode, this is okay. It’s not great, but it’s okay. I’d still caution against using the words “Death” and “Time” in a title ever again though, no matter what the medium. (Fingers crossed...) And one last thing – we never
did
find out what that smelly stuff Ian and Vicki found last episode was. Mire Beast poo?

Flight Through Eternity (The Chase episode three)

R:
As Toby and I pack our bags so we can jet off to Gallifrey convention in Los Angeles in a few days’ time – sunshine! jacuzzis! theme parks! I can hardly wait! – it’s easy to forget how in sixties Britain, travel to the USA was almost ridiculously expensive, and the idea of New York was exotic and alien to the average Doctor Who viewer as the planet Aridius. My parents moved to New York in 1962 and lived there for the best part of a decade, so that when Barbara and Vicki look over the side of the Empire State Building, it could well be my mum and dad they see walking the sidewalks beneath. My parents have always stressed to me just how strange a world this city of skyscrapers seemed to them when they first arrived, and that’s the image you get here. To see the TARDIS crew as tourists once more – however briefly! – and in
America
, is really rather exciting. And there’s a charm to this very long comic scene where Alabaman idiot Morton Dill meets first Doctor Who and then the Daleks on top of one of the most iconic buildings in the world. It’s such a strange mix of American clichés that don’t really fit together – Dill’s belief that he’s watching Hollywood movie stars, even though Hollywood is two and a half thousand miles away, makes some curious sense because movies are the things everybody just
does
in the USA. And because Dill is the focus of the scene, and we’re seeing our heroes and their mortal foes entirely through his eyes, his delight at the crazy magic of what Doctor Who represents is really rather infectious. The accent Peter Purves adopts while playing Dill is awful, but that’s part of the joke, and his double takes are priceless.