Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (38 page)

With the best of will, the majority of this episode is very stupid, and one can only hope – given that this episode is missing from the archives – that the impassive ballerinas looked spooky and jerky, and that the dance was macabre rather than lamely unconvincing. That Dudley Simpson seems to have popped a few happy pills before scoring this doesn’t exactly fill me with hope, I’m afraid to say. And do you know, I was joking earlier when I said they’d be playing Hunt the Thimble – I’d forgotten that that’s precisely what they do. Oh yes, and Sergeant Rugg proves he’s up there with the vase-tossing Monoid Two in the palpable threat stakes – smashing, as he does, a number of plates. (I can’t wait to till the epic end-of-season finale where some dastardly fiend threatens a whole cabinet of Wedgwood.) So much of what Rugg and Mrs Wiggs do is pointless banter; I know they’re supposed to be
deliberately
annoying, so as to distract Steven and Dodo – but they’re still annoying! I’m sure I could come up with a character whose speech sounded like nails on a blackboard, but I don’t think the audience would be terribly grateful.

I should be nice, though... none of this is to criticize Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera, whose versatility and commitment throughout these three episodes has been admirable. They’ve given very distinct and utterly different performances in each of their roles. I’m assuming they were hired to play George and Margaret in the original, Donald Tosh-edited version of the script, and I’d love for that version to be uncovered. Whilst the George and Margaret idea might not have hit home with the kids or stood the test of time, I know in my bones that Tosh would have ensured that proceedings were beguiling, strange and offbeat.

And while the ballerinas may have been scary – much like the clowns are in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy – I really, really love the doll’s house set. That’s what Doctor Who is all about – making our childhood staples into nightmarish, distorted (and in this case, oversized) mirror images. And as ever, Peter Purves admirably carries the proceedings while Hartnell is away; Steven keeps us rooted in reality and is surprisingly harsh and single-minded – he’s prepared to accept the fate of his opponents if it gets him closer to his goal.

The programme-makers really do seem to be flirting with a trademark violation when Cyril says that he’s known to his friends as Billy. No wonder Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter, was annoyed. What next, putting Bertie Bassett on screen with an alias? That would never happen! Oh, and look... Tutte Lemkow’s name is in the credits. If that’s not going to get your episode marked for destruction, nothing will.

February 27th

The Final Test (The Celestial Toymaker episode four)

R:
Hmm. Oh, bugger it, I’m finally coming round to your point of view, Toby. This really isn’t very good. Graham Williams once said, after watching this one surviving episode to research his abortive Nightmare Fair script for Colin Baker, that he was amazed the audience in the 60s put up with watching a game of hopscotch for half an hour. It’s not that the hopscotch in itself is the problem, I think – and look, they’ve made the floor electrified, so at least unlike last week’s games, there is an iota of jeopardy! – but the way everyone reacts to it. Dodo says at one point that she thinks she’s going to enjoy this game – as if she hasn’t yet twigged that if she loses, she’s going to be turned into a Barbie accessory – and Steven is sulky and bored. Those would be fine reactions if this were episode one, but it’s episode
bloody four
, and although we’re reaching some crisis point, no-one seems to feel any urgency whatsoever. There are the elements of a good episode here, I think, in spite of the fact that, yes, it really is watching three people play hopscotch for half an hour. Peter Stephens is rather brilliant as Cyril, and it’s his sudden swings from jolly schoolboy to something much more scheming and spiteful and then back again that gives the proceedings an edge; his performance, frankly, also suggests the way the tone of this whole thing might have been played. But if there were only the sense that Steven and Dodo realised what was now at stake, and played the game in as deadly earnest as their Bunterish opponent, this might be rather exciting. As it is... it just isn’t.

And so the story rather dribbles to a halt. And though there’s the hint that there might be a twist to all this – that even having won the games that the Doctor has lost the war – it’s resolved in such a contrived manner (the Doctor just happening to give a perfect imitation of Michael Gough’s voice) that you wish the hint hadn’t been made in the first place. It’s a niggling problem that’s effected a lot of Doctor Who lately: the raising of an Interesting and Difficult Dilemma, which is minutes later solved so haphazardly as to make it redundant. This isn’t as bad as that whole sequence in Volcano where the Monk destroys the TARDIS lock just so the Doctor can magically restore it two minutes later – but it comes close.

At the end, you only get glimpses of the macabre story in my head that I cherished as a kid, the best example being the charred doll of Cyril after he’s been electrocuted. It’s really rather gruesome. I’ll hang onto that image, and pretend the rest of the episode was that nasty.

T:
Peter Stephens
is
magnificent isn’t he? In previous instalments, when we were robbed of his facial and physical presence, he came across like Christopher Biggins – but here, the audience can see how he switches with consummate ease from the smug, smiling faux schoolboy into the terrifying grotesque we know he is underneath. He does all the “Yaa-boo” sucks stuff excellently, but is also creepy and threatening. The production as a whole could have done with a bit more of this duality. Good though Silvera and Singer were, there was never a psychotic undertone to their japery as there is with Stephens; oddly enough, he’s the only thing that hints at what this story is renowned for being – a nightmarish, dark spin on the nursery.

Michael Gough is also a great actor, but as the Toymaker, he doesn’t get to do much except order big bits of Toblerone to move about. Still, he does look great in that splendid costume, and he exudes a polite, feline menace – but it has to be said, he’s not the most memorable villain, and there have been more impressive performances thus far in the series from lesser-known actors. I’ll grant you that he has some nice moments – I like the way his hand stiffens in anticipation as Hartnell goes to make his last move, and the way he vanishes from the robot’s telly tummy to appear behind Steven is very effective – but at the end of the day, he’s the villainous equivalent of someone who challenges you to a game of cards you’ve never played before, and keeps bringing up new rules that coincidentally play to his favour and against yours.

I’d probably be over the line of this book’s parameters to comment upon the way that Dodo is written as possibly the stupidest person in the history of time (she is, though – when she falls for Cyril’s “hurt foot” trick, despite his having demonstrated a number of times that his key characteristic is duplicity, she loses all dignity). But it might be fair of me to mention that for all of this story’s good intentions, its main fault is that everything is just a bit
too
literal. In trying to invoke the sort of episodic jeopardy of other Doctor Who stories, Gerry Davis has removed everything that was unusual and therefore remarkable about it; thanks to the constant rewrites, it seems to have lost its raison d’etre. I’m not saying Tosh’s version would necessarily have worked, and I’m aware that I’m talking as an adult (if the Davis version was suitably entertaining for the kids in the audience, good for him), but I suspect that it would at lest have been interesting. And I’m not sure this is.

I actually feel a bit bad that with The Chase, I was able to admit that rewatching it made me reconsider my lowly expectations of it – but The Celestial Toymaker really hasn’t, and even the surviving episode four doesn’t desperately convince me that this story is badly in need of re-evaluation. But, we can only
try
to look for what’s positive in each story we encounter on this journey – and you can’t win them all, can you?

A Holiday For the Doctor (The Gunfighters episode one)

R:
Fan reputation is a funny thing. You remember that convention panel we were on a couple of weeks ago in LA, Toby? We were discussing the future of the series, and what we might expect under the aegis of Steven Moffat. And a woman in the audience piped up, as if she were delivering holy writ, that there were two monsters she didn’t want to see make a return appearance in Doctor Who. The Zarbi were one, and the Gunfighters were the other. Leaving aside the rather odd idea that BBC Wales
might
be planning Revenge of the Clantons or The Bat Masterson Stratagem, it reinforced again this peculiar idea of The Gunfighters as the show’s nadir. That was based on the fact that it had the lowest ratings ever (not even remotely true), looked cheap and nasty (nope) and had jokes in (aah... guilty as charged there, your honour).

Of course it has jokes in. It’s a Donald Cotton script! You can tell that much from the appalling pun in the title, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not the comedy classic that The Myth Makers tried to be, but something far more restrained and gentle. In a way, I rather prefer that. The Myth Makers could afford to be bizarre and self-parodic, its characters speaking in anachronisms, because it was set at a time of myth and legend that was only on mild speaking terms with established history. The Gunfighters is set less than a hundred years before its first broadcast, and had Cotton’s comedy been as freewheeling, it’d have looked as silly as The Feast of Steven. So instead of verbal tricksiness and broad satire, what Cotton gives us instead is character comedy. And it’s lovely – to see Steven and Dodo excited at the story’s setting, and get carried away playing cowboys, restores that element of fun that’s been missing from the show for months.

And better yet... look, everyone, William Hartnell’s back! I don’t know who that strange intruder in the TARDIS was while John Wiles was on the watch, but the actor playing this Doctor has brilliant comic timing and subtlety, and there’s a sense of joy to Hartnell’s performance again. Notice his exasperation as his friends forget about his toothache as they play about, his fear as he realises he’s going to have a tooth extracted without anaesthetic by a first-time dentist, and his delightful naivety as he misinterprets Seth Harper’s summons to be shot as the greetings of a new friend wanting to buy him a drink. It’s a relief to see this Doctor again, the one I want to share adventures with in time and space. The one who has the skill of a deadpan comedian – the moment where he mutters after his operation that he’s grateful he didn’t need his tonsils out is probably the single funniest we’ve had all season.

T:
There’s an interesting sociology experiment in which a teacher is told at the beginning of the year that six pupils are the best, and six others are trouble. A year later, the top six and bottom six in the class match what she had been told – and yet, the kids had initially been picked entirely at random. And this is what has happened with The Gunfighters... back in the days when so much of Doctor Who wasn’t commercially available, Doctor Who – A Celebration (1983) famously informed us that The Gunfighters wasn’t just a bad Doctor Who story, it was
the
bad Doctor Who story, and it’s suffered from an inherited negative perception ever since. I vividly recall, in fact, overhearing a young fan ask another (they must have been 11 or 12, the little whipper-snappers – this is when I was a wise old sage of, ooh, 15), “What’s the worst Doctor Who story... apart from, of course, The Gunfighters, which everyone knows is rubbish.” I very much doubt that they had
seen
it, of course, and yet these young rascals felt certain that this adventure was horrid – even though, I would argue, it’s got far fewer shortcomings in the departments of writing, direction and acting than so much of what surrounds it.

As you say, Rob, this is nothing like as bold as Cotton’s script for The Myth Makers... nor should it be. It’s a witty pastiche that asks us to have fun with the conventions of a popular form. The comedy works very well – Hartnell is great (and slightly more restrained than normal; his grasp of the deadpan is much better than all that dotty giggling), I particulary like his exhortation to his “fellow thespians” and the way he keeps referring to Wyatt Earp as “Mr Werp”. Speaking of whom, John Alderson is splendid in the role – he’s comfortable in the genre (he acted in the States a lot, and indeed died there), and has the authority to pull it off. There’s an openness and a lightness of touch about him, which means he can handle the funnies too. When the slightly embarrassed Steven is forced to apologize, “No, you see, I’m not really a gunman...”, Alderson’s polite response – “You did kinda make that look obvious, didn’t you, boy?” – is charmingly amusing.

And if we’re highlighting the key actors on display this, Peter Purves is game, isn’t he? If ever there’s a lack of consistency in his character, he adapts his performance to fit whatever style the week’s script demands from him. So today, he’s come over all Morton Dill, with a blizzard of comedy double takes and nervous bravado. The zealous comic gusto Steven displays here is completely different to the angry pragmatism he used to make events in The Celestial Toyroom have the appearance of being even vaguely threatening. In this era where the lead character is being more and more sidelined, Purves is an unsung hero.

For good measure, this first episode also gives us a dentist’s shop advertised by a massive molar hanging outside, and a great scene between the Doctors Who and Holliday, where the latter offers a bash on the bonce as an anaesthetic before removing the Doctor’s tooth, and whose response to our Doctor’s haughty “I never touch alcohol” is to say “Well I do...” and knock back a mouthful before operating. It’s wonderful stuff! I hate to say it, Rob, but perhaps the reason this story isn’t very beloved is that they don’t understand that it’s not taking itself entirely seriously? Is it wrong of me to point out that some quarters of fandom aren’t famed for their sense of humour? I’ve even seen the Doctor’s response to Holliday’s “Good bye and good luck” – “The same to you and many of them!” – listed as a mistake, as a goof, when it’s clearly a deliberate choice. With every scene, Donald Cotton is trying to strip away all the dour seriousness and gritty moodiness of this genre and muck about with it. If some people don’t get how much of this is meant to be a joke... well, don’t shoot the writer.

February 28th

Don’t Shoot the Pianist (The Gunfighters episode two)

R:
The thing is, though, you can see why fandom didn’t embrace The Gunfighters. They weren’t (just) being curmudgeonly, or failing to have a sense of humour. The plotting is slow, to say the very least. And it’s a story that hinges entirely on the Clanton brothers wanting to kill Doc Holliday, and mistaking him for the Doctor. That’s it. There are no other frills to this. It’s structured very oddly, so that every time you think the story is getting somewhere, the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon pops up to make you feel distanced from it. (It’s not that it’s a bad tune, or that Lynda Baron can’t sing – but we’ve heard it in so many contexts already by the end of episode two, performed by Peter Purves and Sheena Marshe as well, that it does begin to grate.) And although the acting from all the supporting cast is pretty strong – especially Anthony Jacobs as a charming Holliday – the accents are
abysmal.
Across the board. And from line to line. You might feel that within the comedy they’re intentionally bad, but they’re not – there’s nothing intrinsically funny in being pulled out of the action every time someone opens their mouth.

So although I’m really enjoying The Gunfighters, I can understand completely why a fandom who was picking its way through the black and white stories, and looking for monsters while doing so, might prefer The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It’s all a matter of context. More than ever, watching these stories in order, day after day, I can appreciate The Gunfighters for its charm and its sense of fun – it really does feel like a breath of fresh air, and to be given permission to
laugh
at something is a joy. And William Hartnell continues to shine. I just love the Doctor here – watch his childlike delight in being able to show “Mr Werp” that he can swivel a pistol, and his bemused irritation that everybody keeps giving him guns. It’s a performance that recalls the dotty old grandfather from Season Two, but played with less fumbling about, less tics, and more down-to-earth accurate comic timing. This isn’t the greatest story of the Hartnell era, or the greatest comedy of its time either – but it may just be a collection of Hartnell’s finest moments. And if for nothing else, that makes it something to cherish.

T:
I’m a bit reluctant to lay into accents – it’s usually something done by lazy critics, and often erroneously. (A number of my mates mocked the American accents in some of the new series episodes until I pointed out that the actors in question were actually using their own native brogue.) But on this occasion... well, your highlighting of the vocal shortcomings is fair enough. John Alderson’s Wyatt Earp is spot on, but the baddies are all over the place, save for Shane Rimmer’s Seth Harper. So it adds insult to injury when Harper is the first person to get killed! What? Why didn’t they cast Rimmer (a Canadian) as Ike Clanton? The man they’ve cast instead, William Hurndell, is giving one of the oddest performances I’ve ever seen – it’s not just the accent; physically and verbally, he’s a real mush. At times he reminds me of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz! And it’s to this charisma-free plank that they’ve given the job of rallying the lynch mob.

Otherwise, William Hartnell continues to give a kind of performance that really suits him; he’s blithely pulling this off with all the skill of an old sweat who knows what the gags are and how to throw them out. Peter Purves likewise hurls himself into this and emerges pretty unscathed, although there are occasions where he flirts with reminding us of Roy Castle in that Dalek movie! And it’s a bit odd that Purves is singing live, whilst Sheena Marshe (as Kate, Doc Holliday’s girlfriend) is so badly dubbed, you think for a moment she might have been replaced by a Dalek-made robot double. But I love that everyone seems to be having fun with this – it’s a great moment when the actors playing the baddies opt to deliver the line “Alive, that is!” in unison, even if they spectacularly fail to pull it off. And isn’t Anthony Jacobs terrific as Doc Holliday? I adore the way he tips his hat to Harper’s corpse, then smacks Dodo’s bum!

It sometimes happens in entertainment that when the tone is comic, everyone decides that that’s enough and they don’t really bother in any other department... but that’s not the case here. For all we might enjoy the comedy aspects of The Gunfighters, it’s wonderfully designed – the sets are absolutely fantastic, the costumes work both in terms of authenticity and what they say about the character of the people wearing them, and they’ve even got a horse in the studio! And there’s an underlying current of tension to all of this – the darkened scene in Holliday’s salon is moodily lit, benefitting from the sly quips and mutual respect issuing from the veteran gunslingers. There’s also a shocking moment in the pub where Bat Masterson shoves the Doctor with some force. It’s quite unusual to see the leading man (played by an actor we know is frail) chucked about quite so unceremoniously.

For my money, this Corral is a lot more than OK.

Johnny Ringo (The Gunfighters episode three)

R:
It’s the first time since Kublai Khan popped up on our screens that a character (apart from the Doctor) has been deemed worthy of taking the title of an episode. And the first time since then too that by making a late appearance in a story, a real-life historical figure has changed the entire tone of the drama. As Johnny Ringo, Laurence Payne blows like a cold wind through the plodding comedy of The Gunfighters. Death suddenly seems more serious, the stakes more tense. We go from one scene where it’s inferred that Doc Holliday has gunned someone down just to steal his breakfast, to Payne’s fantastic introduction, in which he amiably terrorises poor barman Charlie and then shoots him dead before turning in for the night. Payne is excellent; he crafts Ringo as the first character in this story who isn’t hiding behind a silly accent or comic shtick, and by playing it so completely straight, he allows the rest of the comedy to seem much funnier in retrospect. Certainly, the scene where Dodo orders Doc Holliday at gunpoint to take her back to Tombstone has a different feel to it in the context of Charlie’s death – but it’s probably the high point of the episode, and Jackie Lane’s finest moment on the series, as she so reluctantly turns protagonist and then visibly crumbles with relief once her demands are met, asking her victim for a glass of water.

T:
Anyone doubting the intentions behind this story need only to listen to the fantastic (but irritatingly catchy) ballad, which goes bonkers this week! “So pick him up gentle/And carry him slow/He’s gone kinda mental/Under Earp’s heavy blow.” You say that he’s gone kinda mental, Lynda? Well, if he has, he’s not alone!

The comedy is again superb, and the actors are clearly relishing the opportunity it presents. The Doctor’s suggestion that Holliday is a friend of his (“He gave me a gun, extracted my tooth, what more do you want?”) and Steven’s sotto voce repudiation of it are very funny, and Hartnell is also great in the prison scene – the moment where he innocently shows Earp Ringo’s Wanted poster is blissful, especially when Earp rolls his eyes and chucks the picture away.