Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (43 page)

The Smugglers episode four

R:
Hmm. It’s honestly a little hard to know what to make of this one. The scope of the series is changing – it’s now becoming increasingly normal to have an episode made up of stunt action sequences and fighting. And there’s an awful
lot
of fighting in this episode; according to well-worn interview anecdotes, this involved stuntmen who’d get killed get out of shot, then put on some different clothes and re-enter the fray! Whilst watching the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the army’s attack on the War Machines at the warehouse, I considered how lucky we were to be able to
see
these sustained scenes of fisticuffs, because we’d be lost if we were relying upon nothing more than a soundtrack and a set of blurred telesnaps. It’s only with this episode that the luck runs out... for all I can tell, amid all the shoutings and death gurgles, Michael Godfrey’s Captain Pike sounds as demented as he should be. It’s great that a pirate who was so downplayed to an assumed level of gentlemanly sophistication should come across as such a nutter when the chips are down.

T:
Like you, I can’t think of much to say because the video is missing. There seems to be lots fighting and charging about on horses – and of course boats and coasts always look good on screen and are unusual sights in Doctor Who.

The characters, at least, hold my attention irrespective of the action sequences. Cherub is such a gleeful villain that one feels a bit cheated when he gets nobbled early – especially as we get that rather tiresome trait of one villain dispatching another, and thereby doing the hero’s work for him. George A Cooper and Michael Godfrey (respectively Cherub and Pike) have both given great performances – they’ve had fun without sending the show up, and it’s been a delight to boo and hiss them.

And Cherub isn’t alone in having a face-off with Pike – the Doctor and the Squire get the chance to do so as well. What’s interesting about this is that the Doctor, even when bluffing Pike and playing for time, rejects the opportunity to acquire cash and is firm about the sanctity of human life. Strictly speaking, he’s only stalling so Blake can come in and defeat the baddie, but the Doctor’s presence is vital. Being exposed to the Doctor’s generosity of spirit has made the Squire see the error of his ways, and he’s the one who prevents Pike from killing the Doctor and emerges a reformed character. (That’s very Russell T Davies, that.) This section of the adventure, and last week’s “moral obligation” bit, are really most unexpected. They’ve managed to smuggle something quite fundamental and lasting about the series into one of the least showy and venerated adventures.

At the end, the Doctor buggers off before anyone can say thank you. This is becoming a habit. Speaking of habits, did the baddies
really
have to be smuggling tobacco? It’s been 44 years since this story was made, and yet everyone involved seems intent on reminding me about smoking!

March 8th

The Tenth Planet episode one

R:
Well, we
know
this one is special. It’s the introduction of the Cybermen, and Hartnell’s swan song, so it’s hard to rid the story of all its weighty significance and look at it objectively. But I think, even though I’m straining to do so – here I go – that it
still
stands out as something distinctive.

For a start, there’s that setting. The snow effects are pretty good, and it looks all so wonderfully bleak; this is the first time the series has given us what is going to be a bit of a hoary old chestnut – the isolated base under siege. You almost couldn’t get more isolated, and the way the episode turns the North Pole into a landscape as alien as anything we’ve ever seen before is very clever. And then there’s the time: 1986! It’s another first, a dip into a
near
future, which means that everybody can look normal and talk normal and have normal concerns – but that when the gloves are off, the events that take place here can be as far reaching as those on a different world. The series can have its cake and eat it, playing with contemporary characters but without the need to put all the toys back in the box as neatly as it did with The War Machines.

And just listen to all that variety of accents and nationalities, and even – my God – different skin colours! It doesn’t matter particularly that the cast are stereotyping the types of foreigners that they’re depicting – that we get a horny Italian who sings Verdi, or an American who shouts a lot and calls the Doctor “pop” – because it’s a forgiveable shorthand to demonstrate that this story has truly international consequences. It’s helped by all the maps in Wigner’s office, let alone that there’s someone in African dress. It all contributes to an atmosphere of world concern never yet felt in Doctor Who before. And this is compounded by the scenes on Zeus Four, in which the extremely realistic acting from Earl Cameron (playing a Yank) and Alan White (an Aussie) as the space pilots who begin to panic as they lose control of their spacecraft make for some of the tensest scenes seen in the Hartnell era. And all this achieved by two actors, always static, sitting in a couple of armchairs side by side...

The appearance of Mondas, the tenth planet, too is a highlight. A couple of stories ago, we were asked to be in awe of a computer that could calculate square roots – now, for the first time in ages, there is a real sense of intrigue and wonder in the programme. That planet appearing on the screen, that false Earth, is a haunting image. It’s the best introduction any alien race has had in the series since the Daleks, and it’s a great deal more interesting. As the American sergeant blasts away in panic at the creatures moving towards him through the snow, there truly is a sense of something momentous happening in the programme.

T:
Well, this is certainly
different
... Gerry Davis – here co-writing this story with Kit Pedlar – ultimately went off to work in America, and you can see his predilection for American-style TV here. It’s all military, macho, space faring stuff. The presence of “Yanks” (including John Brandon, playing a sergeant) in the cast grounds the episode somehow, making it feel more like a prosaic action/adventure than a twee space opera. Having Americans playing Americans over here in Britain tends to make everything more realistic (as the man who wrote Dalek, I’m sure you’d agree)... but then Robert Beatty saunters in as General Cutler, and demonstrates that having Canadians playing Americans does the same trick.

The whole presentation of this is solid, realistic and less fantastical than usual; everyone is dressed relatively normally, so the setting is immediately plausible. The part of me that used to petulantly defend the series against all the slights it suffered in the dark years – particularly with regards its production values – loves this grounded solidity. But another part of me – the one that’s rediscovered the magic of this era by doing this exercise – is starting to miss what separated the programme from other TV: its strangeness. Up until recently, Doctor Who was interesting because it was a bit weird; even some of the historicals had a mysterious, frighteningly alien aspect. Not any more, though. For all of the rollicking jeopardy we saw in The Smugglers, the bravura characters and situations therein were recognisable types. Under Doctor Who’s new regime, the past (or in this case, the near future) may be another country, but it comes with a map and interpreter thrown in for free.

That this episode works at all is mostly down to the director, Derek Martinus. The camerawork is slick; he keeps everything moving and doesn’t indulge in frivolity. The bustle of the control room is conveyed very effectively, with over-lapping dialogue and convincing bustle. I like little touches like one of the astronauts, Schultz, being referred to as “Blue” (Australian slang for redheads, if I remember the mini-series Anzacs correctly). They use his surname when more formality is required – because not even your friends always address you in the same manner do they Rob, Robert, Mr Shearman? It’s little things like this that help us to buy the outlandish; the low-key interactions between the two astronauts, as well as their colloquial dialogue, is bang on the money.

And isn’t the music interesting? The infamous piece of stock music named “Space Adventure” is here used for the Cyber-march, but not the part of the piece that will become the norm for the Cybermen. Instead, we get the opening, suspenseful build-up (it’s even laid over the reveal of Mondas, but at a slower speed). And in that same scene...

Hurrah! The moment arrives... as the creatures march through the snow, there’s that pan-up from their bare hands – which are impervious to the cold – to those odd faces which flirt between the frightening and the ridiculous. It returns that sense of strangeness to a show that recently has been a little more down to Earth than we’ve come to expect. I
love
the cliffhanger here, and could do with more of this type of eeriness, please!

Why, it’s enough to nearly make me forget that one of the soldiers was having a fag (this is getting beyond a joke, now).

The Tenth Planet episode two

R:
The Cybermen are great! By later standards, of course, they look very primitive – but that’s precisely the point. There’s something rather distasteful about the way they proclaim they are the superior race in all their dubious splendour of awkward plastic frames and cloth skull faces. When you see later Cybermen talk about their desire to upgrade the human race, you can perhaps see their point – in their metal robot suits, they
do
look pretty impressive. But this bunch are all the more horrifying because they look like they’ve been cobbled together by machines with no appreciation of beauty or elegance – such things, of course, are unimportant. To be turned into an Earthshock Cyberman would be pretty cool. To be turned into one from The Tenth Planet would be obscene.

I love their voices too. Nick Briggs told me of the time he played the Mondas Cybermen voices for a Big Finish story, and the way that Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton fell around laughing at the strange sing-song he imitated. But again, it feels like the
parody
of human conversation, all the inflection put into the wrong place; the English language has been turned into something grotesque and alien. And that’s all the more emphatic because for all the terrible things they say – for all that they kill and let people die – they’re incredibly
polite
about it. “That really was most unfortunate, you should not have done that,” says the leader, a little like he learned how to talk from a training film for waiters. The Cybermen have really only seemed properly emotionless
once
, and it’s here, in this story, where every threat comes out as something vague and matter-of-fact.

The deaths of Schultz and Williams are so simply conveyed, the monitor screens going blank to signify that Zeus Four has exploded. It’s all the more moving for that. Indeed, death is a serious business for this story. The way that the camera lingers just that little bit too long on the soldiers killed by the Cybermen at the top of the episode, their corpses already getting buried beneath the snow; the wonderful smoke effect that comes from a body shot by the Cyberman’s gun; best of all, the way that Ben is truly appalled that by taking the Cyberman’s weapon from him, he’s obliged to shoot him dead – a Cyberman cannot feel fear, so cannot be intimidated. I could say that there’s something nicely apt about a Cyberman being blinded by something as frivolous and human as a movie in a projector – but I dare say I’m just taking the metaphor too far.

T:
I remember being shocked as a kid when I read the novelisation to this story – it had “The First Exciting Adventure with the Cybermen” on the front cover, and yet it was hard for me to rationalise that statement with the cloth-faced creatures depicted in the illustration. And yet... I think they’re
brilliant
for all the reasons you outline above. We’re Doctor Who fans, so our default mode is to look for existential body horror where others would mock primitive technology. To put it another way, we don’t allow an arrogant modern perspective to colour the impact of these impressive creatures. The Cybermen’s voices
could
sound silly, yes, if you were inclined to take it that way, but there’s something very apt about its distortion of our speech patterns and the almost benign computerised lilt. It’s like being threatened by a Speak & Spell machine.

And what about those open mouths that the Mondasians have?! No wonder they don’t bother to synch up the voices – the technology makes the sound variation, so lip movement is redundant. This might initially look a bit laughable, but why
wouldn’t
manufactured speech be issued in this way? Besides, it makes them look all the more like dead men walking. The only shame here is that the Cybermen don’t know how to pronounce – of all the words at their disposal! – “cybernetic”. It’s like Monoids being unable to properly say “waddle”.

It’s also a bit eerie that these Cybermen are so
polite
compared to the ones to follow... certainly, they seem to keep inviting the humans to Mondas in a jolly way that suggests tea, cakes and perhaps a cucumber sandwich. In addition to this anomalous social etiquette, one of the Cybermen has one of the most ridiculous names I’ve ever heard: “Shav”. Granted, all of these Cybermen have pretty rubbish names, but you can at least rationalise the likes of “Krail” because there’s something a bit metallic about it, and while “Talon” simultaneously sounds scary and a bit stupid, you know can tell how they got there. But “Shav”? I’ve no idea what the thinking was behind that one.

As for the humans that inhabit Snowcap Base... well, you know how I wrote last episode that this all seemed a bit American? Here it almost goes too far in that direction, as we get the dreadful cliché of the bullish commander finding out that his son has gone up in the second capsule. This is a very, very silly and spurious addition to the script, I have to say – all we need to discover now is that they haven’t spoken for several years, or that the son is engaged to Barclay’s daughter. But if General Cutler’s motives seem a bit wooden, there are some lovely little touches of realism in his control room – Barclay has a drink, Cutler yells at him, and Dyson asks off camera if he’s all right. That sort of thing would only normally happen if Barclay was about to snap under pressure, but here it’s just a little moment of truth that helps build up the drama. And Dudley Jones, playing Dyson, also sells what’s a very strong line for this programme – I’m quite shocked to hear him say “Oh, for God’s sake, Barclay!” The new production team may have rejected the offbeat experimentation sought by the previous regime, but they do know little boys get excited by tough, grown-up language and situations.

March 9th

The Tenth Planet episode three

R:
It’s the penultimate outing for Hartnell’s Doctor – and he doesn’t even appear. The actor fell ill during rehearsals, necessitating a quick rewrite. In retrospect, his absence is rather galling; give it a few episodes, and I know I’ll be missing this first incarnation like mad, and in his dying fall, I want him to get as much screen time as possible. (It’d be unthinkable to have any other Doctor end his tenure with so slight an appearance – even poor old Colin, knocking his head against the console, gets a better build-up than this.) But even though it’s an accident, it does suggest that something very
wrong
is happening to the Doctor, which at least will make his departure less abrupt. And Hartnell’s loss is Michael Craze’s gain. He takes over a lot of the Doctor’s lines, and his character gets an added depth it sorely needs, becoming the focus of the rebellion against General Cutler. (There’s a lovely moment when Dudley Jones, playing the scientist Dyson, warns Cutler that “the old man may be right” – clearly he didn’t get the rewrites!)

So the Doctor is missing – but, strangely enough, the Cybermen are barely in this either. They get one beautiful sequence where they’re massacred in the snow; director Derek Martinus ensures they die so gracefully, you almost feel sorry for them. And that shift of allegiance seems apt this week. The enemy now is, for the moment, not a race that by losing their emotions have ceased to be human, but General Cutler – a man whose emotional concerns for his son have blinded him to reason. It’s a terribly clever conceit, and Robert Beatty does a fantastic job making Cutler both a dangerous warmonger and a loving father who can hardly bear to listen to his son’s jokes when he first talks to him over the tannoy. As Ben struggles through ventilation shafts trying to prevent an ill-advised attack on the Cybermen, and advising everyone that their best line of defence is to wait, I’m struck by how much a volte-face this is from Doctor Who’s usual stance. Time and time again, whether it’s Ian persuading the Thals into action against the Daleks, or Vicki leading the Xerons into revolution, or Steven urging the humans to fight the Monoids, Doctor Who has always suggested that active effort is a stronger force than passive acceptance. And quite understandably so – this is an
action
series after all. It’s a mark of just how odd The Tenth Planet is that it’s pushing so hard in the opposite direction.