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

by Robert Shearman

  The first thing that strikes me about these first two episodes (gloriously restored on DVD) is the sharp contrast between the black and the white – I remember most of this era as being resolutely greyscale. Here (and I don’t know whether it’s the quality of the print or a conscious lighting design) the blacks provide a spooky, inky darkness, with the light flashing brightly in the gloomy recesses of the Cave of Skulls. Waris Hussein also specialises in close-ups, wisely telling the story by concentrating on the characters – he looms up on Derek Newark as his face twitches, intimating that his caveman character is assessing a complex situation, with realisation slowly dawning. Or look at how Hussein holds on Hartnell as Za lies injured, the Doctor’s eyes darting about as he formulates the dastardly plan you mentioned.

  For all that fandom has questioned the Doctor’s morality in this episode, he’s a great character – one who begins the episode by telling his companions that he’s “desperately sorry” for getting them into this predicament. (K liked that vulnerability, delivered as the travellers are trussed up in the corner of a cave looking a bit useless.) But before long, there’s the oft-quoted moment where he tries to take Za’s life. We tend to create Doctor Who in our own image, and so I’ve often just tried to pretend this moment didn’t happen, that it was an aberration on the part of a production team who weren’t quite sure what the show was about. Now, thanks to the new series, I can assess it differently – perhaps it’s the Doctor’s proximity to humans that makes him a better person. He needs Ian to be a moral arbiter, and fortunately Ian himself isn’t a dull do-gooder – his anger at the Doctor’s actions makes for a great, sparky dynamic at the centre of the show. Indeed, the shifting allegiances and lack of cosiness makes this far more interesting than the story’s simple premise might suggest.

  It’s often great to act in Doctor Who – to relish the fruity dialogue of a powerful alien warlord, or to play an overblown, pompous grotesque. But getting trussed up in flea-ridden animal skins and grunting? By all rights, that should be embarrassing, so let’s give the cast credit for pulling it off. Hur’s keening as Za lies injured is brilliant – it’s recognisable as grief and fear, but it’s not expressed in modern terms, and so comes off almost animalistic. Alethea Charlton isn’t playing a sophisticated character, but she’s made a very sophisticated acting choice. Then when Barbara offers to take Hur to water, to help, she accepts but brushes her off physically. These creatures operate with a completely different moral code – and their unpredictability is what creates the tension in this story. This is a far more complex piece than I’d hitherto believed, the only downside being the hysteria with which poor old Carole Ann Ford and Jacqueline Hill are expected to react to everything.

  But as much as everyone fixates on the Doctor’s attempt to brain Za, a moment from the outcome to that scene strikes me as being the essence of Doctor Who. Recognizing that the travellers have shown mercy, Za tells Hur: “Listen to them, they do not kill.” If ever there’s a mantra for the show, that’s it.

  The Firemaker (An Unearthly Child episode four)

  R: There’s a bit in the previous episode where Za and Hur suspect Old Mother intends to kill the TARDIS crew, and suggest that if they prevent her from doing so, the Doctor and his companions might feel so indebted that they’ll give them fire in return. It’s a sort of Sesame Street logic that you get in a lot of children’s television – happy moralising that says that if you’re nice to people, you’ll get a reward. And all this business about the cavemen’s believing that Ian’s name is “Friend” seems part of that – you automatically know where you are with it, it’s a bit twee, and very pat, but offers clear values of decency and fair play that all the children watching should aspire to. (Even if you do wonder why the cavemen, all of whom speak fairly sophisticated English, know the word “enemy” but are so baffled by its antonym.)

  So the happy ending is set up that the Doctor will drive away Kal, show Za how to make fire, and then be set free with waves and cheers and promises (no doubt) that the Tribe of Gum will be much more genial to newcomers in future, and maybe even elect leaders with some sort of democratic system. You can see the expectation on Ian’s face – rather patronisingly, he teaches Za how to rub two sticks together, as if he knows this is the way that the story should work.

  But it doesn’t. It’s another tease on behalf of Anthony Coburn, and rather a brilliant one. Once Za’s life has been saved, and his authority has been secured, he’s an even greater threat to the travellers than he was before. Ian is left to berate himself that by giving into Za’s demands, he’s effectively demonstrated that he’s weak and vulnerable. A few weeks before The Daleks shows us the evils of pacifism, here Doctor Who is criticising appeasement. It’s worth remembering that this programme was being made in the wake of the Second World War – if the Daleks we’ll see waving a plunger next week are clearly Nazis, then there’s something about Chamberlain’s failure to secure peace at Munich with Hitler about the TARDIS crew’s dealings with the Tribe of Gum. The conclusion offered here is a bit of a shock, because Doctor Who very soon becomes a programme which (to all intents and purposes) is very liberal minded. Za ought to have killed Kal, his rival for leadership, from the moment he saw him rather than offer shelter to the only survivor from a different tribe – because outsiders are dangerous, and will challenge you. And the Doctor ought to have brained Za with a rock when he had the chance, because you can’t teach savages such concepts as friendship or loyalty.

  It’s wonderful just how dirty the regulars are at the end of the story, as they stand in the sudden brightness of the TARDIS control room, smeared with grime. It’s an element of realism we won’t see very often. But it’s also very appropriate – we’re still learning what the parameters of Doctor Who can be, and in its morals it’s a much dirtier programme than we might have supposed.

  T: Talk to actors and they’ll bemoan the state of the industry, the lack of rehearsals, the limitations on spontaneity. And watching these episodes, you’ll see another now-lost performing art that probably took half a term to conquer at drama school: the Stop-What-You’re-Doing-For-Several-Moments-So-The-Episode-Title-And-Writer’s-Credit-Can-Be-Superimposed-Over-You Masterclass. Howard Lang (playing Hur’s father Horg) has to do it this time by looking inscrutable, and last week Eileen Way’s Old Mother had to pause, knife in hand, while Anthony Coburn’s name got its five seconds of allotted screen time.

  Talking of whom: goodbye, Mr Coburn. He was there at the beginning and a key instrument in the show’s genesis, and yet both he and another important contributor, production designer Peter Brachaki, don’t make it beyond the first story. But Coburn’s dialogue has some wonderful qualities – as well as all the quotable stuff from the regulars (the Doctor’s “Fear makes companions of all of us”), the material Coburn gives the cavemen wonderfully crafts their earthy inarticulation – “Za does not say he did this or did that,” the animal “took away your axe in its head”, etc. These aren’t just grunting savages – Coburn suggests character and thought processes whilst not allowing them to express such things in modern parlance.

  The staging helps too: the fight between Kal and Za is really nasty. Jeremy Young (Kal) bites Newark at one point, and Kal’s death rattle is piercingly offbeat and bloodcurdling; likewise, the ungainly way his twisted body is dragged off is unpleasantly, bluntly realistic. Then when Hur (whose name, by the way, makes you wonder if Horg would have called his son “Hym”) pops in, and Alethea Charlton brilliantly plays the scene with her back to the regulars, rubbernecking Kal’s crumpled cadaver with animalistic fascination. I’d always had her down as a rather prim, mumsy actress who got shoehorned into playing dowdy roles, but she’s been great in this.

  As the credits roll, K unconsciously echoes my previous thoughts about the alienness of this civilisation – she tells me she was “gripped” even without the diversions of funky aliens. Fight arranger Derek Ware’s name pops up in the credits, and as it turns out, he’s a mutual acqua
intance – he taught K how to fight (and did a bloody good job, if some of our past arguments are anything to go by).

  I still don’t think that having the TARDIS crew encounter cavemen the first time out of the gate was necessarily a wise choice, but I do feel sympathy for an adventure that’s always been overshadowed by the seminal episodes that surround it. However primitive the setting, this is an estimable piece of work.

  January 3rd

  R: It’s all very odd, this. Last night I was invited to a dinner party. And who do you imagine was seated opposite me? Waris Hussein! Only the bloody director of An Unearthly Child. Our host put us together, rather endearingly, because we’d both worked on Doctor Who, so thought we might have some connection. (Yeah, but it was 40 years apart!) Oddly enough, though, we did have a connection – we both realised we had the same enormous pride in Doctor Who. Hearing Waris speak with such enthusiasm about the scene in which Za dropped a rock on Kal’s head (he told me he’d had an argument with Verity Lambert about it, as his cabbage-crushing sound effect was much more gruesome), I realised that it was never going to leave me alone either, that it was always going to be a fundamental part of my life. Janie asked me later whether that bothered me, but do you know? – I actually found it heartwarming.

  What was amusing was that Waris kept on asking me if I knew who the eleventh Doctor was going to be – as if I had some insider knowledge! (And as often happens nowadays, the 13-year-old fanboy in me flipped somewhat, knowing that the director of Marco Polo was pressing me for Who spoilers.) I got home, though, to find out that later today the new casting is going to be announced on BBC1. It’s almost too exciting to go back to the Hartnell episodes. But these ones are pretty momentous, aren’t they...?

  T: There must have been something in the water yesterday – you met Waris Hussein (I’m very jealous), and there’s a new Doctor on the horizon. As I type this, the announcement is two and a half hours away and I’m furiously batting off text messages from people who think the fact that I’ve done a mildly successful one-man show about Doctor Who means I’ve got a hotline to the production office. Irritatingly, they’re the same people who spent the whole of December shuffling up to me, sagely tapping the side of their nose, and informing me (with no little self assurance) that they had it on good authority that David Morrissey was the new Doctor. I genuinely have no clue who it will be, and am very excited indeed. So shall we kill a bit of time watching some Hartnell?

  R: Do you know, I think we should.

  The Dead Planet (The Daleks episode one)

  R: To state the bleeding obvious: this is the first episode of Doctor Who set on an alien world. It’s a funny thing, though, but whilst the series has often celebrated the sheer wonder of going backwards in time – companions from the black-and-white era to the present day beaming with enthusiasm to find that they’re either in an Aztec tomb or in Dickensian Cardiff – it’s much more mealy-mouthed about space travel. The Hartnell years almost seem to be deliberately avoiding the opportunity to show a contemporary character marvelling at the prospect of setting foot on a distant world – after Ian and Barbara depart, we’ll be given a whole stream of replacements from the future, to whom planet hopping is no more remarkable a concept than catching a bus. (Russell T Davies’ new series, with its emphasis upon wonder, surprisingly shies away from it as well – so much so that Rose Tyler, the first character to represent the audience’s point of view, first steps off Earth in an untransmitted adventure, so we never get to see her reaction to that locale.)

  It’s worth asking why that’s the case. It can’t just be that the programme makers are more comfortable showing off historical costumes and pageantry, so can do so with greater confidence. (Besides which, Skaro here doesn’t look that much more alien than the rocky wastes where Ian and Barbara first encountered the cavemen.) Instead, it’s that the settings of the past are much more familiar, and our schoolteacher characters are able to offer information and points of view which make them seem useful. Ian and Barbara are unwilling travellers – given the opportunity to walk around a petrified jungle and encounter strange horned creatures made out of metal, all they really want to do is complain about the journey diversion. It’s a dangerous game for the series to play, to turn its first alien world not into a place of magic and beauty, but instead somewhere no-one much wants to be. We’ll see in the 1980s, when Tegan Jovanka in Season Nineteen regularly reacts to mind-popping spectacle with sarcastic cynicism, how this approach can be a bit wearying. But it works so very well here, precisely because Barbara’s despair, and Ian’s over-cheery attempts to make the best of things, are so very realistic. We’re five weeks into this show, and yet none of our lead characters have yet given themselves over to the stereotypes demanded by adventure series, where the excitement of the chase and death-defying thrills are actively being sought. Here, we have a couple of ordinary people from sixties England being given a sight that no-one else on their world has ever seen – and they show more genuine enthusiasm at the bacon ‘n’ egg sweet they get from the TARDIS food machine.

  What the episode does, though (and most usefully), is put the Doctor centre-stage. For the last few weeks, the TARDIS crew have shared a common aim: run away from wherever their Ship takes them. (It’ll be a recurring plot point of most of these early adventures, and it’s telling that even when Terry Nation sits down to write Destiny of the Daleks some 14 years later, he includes in the first episode something which prevents the crew from just getting back inside the TARDIS and taking off, as if that’d still be their first impulse in that phase of the programme.) The sight of the Dalek city in the distance is the first thing in Doctor Who that is meant to inspire awe – but in spite of that, only the Doctor has the slightest interest in exploring the thing. It’s as if the Doctor alone understands the sort of TV series he’s appearing in – it’ll be a great deal safer every week if no-one bothers to get involved in an adventure, but it’ll be a duller show for the audience to watch. Much has been made of how Hartnell’s Doctor is a darker, more selfish character for the scene in which he sabotages the Ship just so he can have his own way, but I think that viewpoint misses the tone completely: it’s actually very funny, Hartnell playing his concern for the TARDIS breakdown with very mock sincerity, and giving us a delightful little chuckle as we fade to the scene change.

  And the upshot of all of these attempts to avoid the alien city is that it makes it all the more threatening. It’s nothing more than slanting corridors and whirring doors, but Barbara’s panic as she loses herself amongst them is tremendously well played by Jacqueline Hill, and very credible: you really believe that within minutes of venturing into the unknown, she’s fallen apart. Which builds up all the better to that stunning cliffhanger – again, what we see isn’t any more impressive than the cheap sets, but by now we so share our characters’ dislocation from the ordinary, the sight of a wobbly sink plunger represents something truly terrifying.

  It’s also an episode in which William Hartnell fluffs a lot of his lines, as he becomes increasingly wont to do. But I find it curiously moving that his biggest stumble is in the scene where he asks Barbara to talk to his granddaughter – it’s a confession that he needs someone else’s help, and his first real attempt to talk to Barbara on an equal level. The awkwardness of Hartnell at that moment, intentional or not, is very real and very touching.

  T: Well, this episode is very evocative for me. I remember a visit to Longleat where I gawped at the book The Early Years in the shop. It oozed class: it had big black and white photos and design drawings, and – most importantly – it was about “old” Doctor Who. I’d yet to see any of the episodes shown before I was born, but anything broadcast prior to about 1976 (except, of course, The Gunfighters) was officially regarded as Good Doctor Who. So imagine my delight when I was searching our old house for things to do one day when everyone was out (or Mum was busy in the garden), and I happened upon a copy of the aforementioned book hidden in a cupboard in a plastic bag, obviousl
y set aside for a Christmas gift. I’d guiltily go back to that cupboard in the ensuing months, reasoning that if I looked at the pictures but didn’t read the text, I was somehow not cheating. And so the images of these stories – The Cusick Stories – became extremely familiar. When I finally watched the episodes, there were very few things on screen I hadn’t seen in massive close-up or drawn from every angle.

  So I hope it’s with no disrespect to Mr Nation when I say that it’s not really the dialogue that strikes me with this episode; it’s what we see, and most evocatively, the sounds we hear that fuse to make the titular dead planet such an evocative place. The visuals of this story hit you first – asked to create a jungle, a ledge with a view to a sprawling city below and the corridors of that city itself (and to fit them all into a cramped BBC studio), designer Ray Cusick doesn’t flinch. He’s aided by a curious visual effect (one which I previously thought was just a symptom of bootlegging, but which the VidFIREd-DVD reveals as a deliberate production decision): an overexposed lens used for those early moments in the jungle gives everything a curious, blasted quality.

  And yet, I feel as if sound-designer Brian Hodgson is the unsung star of this episode – the haunting, unrelenting caterwauls of the jungle, the scraping of the TARDIS door and even the sound of the TARDIS scanner all aid the storytelling in abstract ways. Meanwhile, Tristram Cary’s discordant, subtly menacing music is creepy and alien. Then – and just as important – there are the contrasting moments where they decide not to use sound: the camera that follows Barbara, the city-doors that close silently around her... moments like these are the most effective in an episode that, fittingly, ends with a treated, echoed scream climaxing in darkness.

  The Survivors (The Daleks episode two)