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

by Robert Shearman

  And the jailer wants to give Barbara a seeing to as well – if this behaviour keeps up, she’s going to get a complex. Perhaps if some of these guys unleashed their lust for her in front of Ian, he might start to notice her a bit more! But later on, it’s rather reassuring how Barbara gets all practical and treats her escape attempt in the efficient and homely manner with which you might imagine she’d make jam.

  Oh, isn’t Hartnell really lovely in his scene with little Jean-Pierre? It’s not just the salute he gives the boy, it’s the way he turns back and gives a really grandfatherly, affectionate wave. One can imagine Hartnell being like that with any young fans he might have met – he’d have melted their hearts.

  This story is good – it trots along really engagingly, and it has character. The blending of styles is such, you effectively get the sense that Doctor Who itself is undergoing some sort of revolution.

  January 20th

  A Change of Identity (The Reign of Terror episode three)

  R: The resistance pop up out of nowhere into the story, and start swearing they won’t rest until Barbara and Susan are safe! Barbara starts flirting with a rather dandy looking Frenchman! Ian manages to break out of the Conciergerie prison! The entire tone of the adventure changes in one fell swoop, and we’re rather delightfully within the realm of romantic melodrama. It’s the first time that a historical period has been used not to explore the society or the setting itself, but instead to feed off an entire familiar genre – in this case, inspired by The Scarlet Pimpernel by way of (as you mentioned) A Tale of Two Cities. The grimy realism of the last episode has vanished almost altogether – although you still get glimpses of something darker under the surface, most notably as the doomed Barbara and Susan are mocked by the watching peasant women. And if there’s some sacrifice to be made – most obviously with the character of Susan, as the source material Spooner is feeding off makes her abnormally wet and spineless – it also ensures the story becomes decidedly more fun.

  There are some lovely little bits of comedy here. Hartnell’s in his element, of course, at his best whenever he’s bullying some poor tailor or jailer into submission. But he knows too when he’s been trumped – however good Billy is at bluster, his deadpan reaction to Lemaitre’s insistent invitation that the incognito Doctor should accompany him to see Robespierre is perfect. I also love the joke that the Doctor goes to all the trouble of putting on a disguise to effect a rescue of his friends from prison – only to find, of course, this adventure series being what it is, that the girls and Ian have already escaped... separately!

  Then there’s the bemused expression on the rebel Jean Renan’s face, as it dawns on him that although he thinks he’s taking part in some derring-do melodrama, Barbara and the dishy rebel Leon Colbert are switching genre right under his nose, and going for something much less boy’s own stuff. And I also like the lovely cross fade from Colbert elegantly seducing Barbara over a glass of wine, to the jailer guzzling at his bottle.

  T: John Barrard gets much mileage out of playing the weaselly shopkeeper from whom the Doctor acquires his “regional officer” uniform, although I question the likelihood that the tailor would be selling sashes that denote such a high rank. Surely, such things would be issued when you were appointed to your lofty post? It’s not like I can nip into a shop and get some clothes that will grant me entrance to Number 11 Downing Street.

  It’s all right though, because it gives us another chance to see Hartnell manipulate a conniving prole, and he’s clearly having great fun with Spooner’s script. And there’s a lovely moment where he quite openly admits to having no money and Barrard instinctively snatches his coat back! The feathered hat that the Doctor eventually acquires is wonderful – it’s so ludicrous, I love it. And Hartnell plays against it in a self-assured and cocky manner that’s priceless; he’s clearly in his element, bluffing his way haughtily and running rings around the stupid jailer. Cunningham plays the part as an obsequious fool – as someone who is convinced of his own brilliance and dispenses his addled wisdom in such a way that you could imagine Johnny Vegas playing the role today. The Doctor, of course, uses his intellect and understanding to exploit the shortcomings of this arrogant ninny so effectively, we’ve no reason to doubt that the Doctor will prevail... until Lemaitre appears, and then we get worried.

  I can’t help but notice the odd lapse in logic: Jules says that everyone involved in his resistance cell should use Christian names only, but then refers to his two dead mates as D’Argenson and Rouvray. No matter – everyone in the serious part of the story is doing their turn with appropriate gravitas. I’m delighted when a favourite of mine, Edward Brayshaw, strides in as Leon Colbert. He has such presence, being handsome, dashing and full of virility – sad, then, that he’s now chiefly remembered as the bloke who played Harold Meaker on Rentaghost.

  And I have an odd confession to make... I’ve seen every existing Doctor Who episode countless times, and I have a number of recons. But because the majority of this story’s episodes exist, and I know what happens in the tale, I’ve never quite got around to acquiring the soundtracks to the missing episodes four and five. Until now. So yes, the next two instalments will be particularly interesting for me, as they’re the only two episodes in the entire history of Doctor Who that I’ve never experienced. And I call myself a fan!

  The Tyrant of France (The Reign of Terror episode four)

  R: This clearly sees the Doctor’s meeting with Robespierre at its centrepiece – and that’s a pity for two reasons. First, because it happens at the top of the episode, the remaining 20 minutes of Barbara fussing around a feverish Susan are the definition of anticlimax in comparison. And second... because, well, it’s really not very good. Dennis Spooner is at his very best when he’s creating colourful characters of his own: the jailer, the shopkeeper, the road works overseer, all without names, but all little cameo gems. You can see why he had to introduce Robespierre sooner or later; it’s a mark of these early historical adventures that the TARDIS crew had to interact with schoolboy history, and at this stage it’d seem criminally wasteful if the Doctor didn’t face off with someone extremely famous sooner or later.

  But it’s very awkward. You can sense that Spooner would love to have the Doctor rip into Robespierre, attack the regime of terror he’d created. But he can’t – because just as The Aztecs demonstrated that you can’t interfere with history, so this demonstrates that a writer can’t interfere with historical icons. There’s a respect that is shown to Robespierre here – not by the Doctor per se, but by the production team, who can’t challenge a factual monster here in the way they could a Tegana or a Tlotoxl. The conversation between the Doctor and Robespierre is toothless and undramatic, and it’s such a contrast to the vigour we’ve seen in Spooner’s writing in the previous episodes that it pulls us up short.

  I believe, though, that what Dennis Spooner is doing in The Reign of Terror is creating the real template for the structure of what Doctor Who will become. He’s the first writer really to get that balance between action adventure and comedy and – let’s face it – excessive padding that’ll become a staple of the show. He pitches lower than a Lucarotti, but the framework that Marco Polo and The Aztecs offered wasn’t really sustainable – the Doctor and his friends were reduced to sightseers in spite of their best endeavours to interfere. The Lucarotti historical depends upon famous real-life characters to give the setting the thorough educational grounding that he’s aiming for. The inclusion of Robespierre here is a valuable lesson for the Doctor Who producers – it demonstrates exactly why you don’t want these people from the past popping up and getting in the way of the action. There’ll be a few more attempts, of course, to get this right – with The Crusade being a notable example – but from this point on they’ll be sidelined, the story will be more important than the historical figures who inspired it. You may pop back into the past from time to time, but if you go to visit Leonardo da Vinci, he’ll be unavailable, and if you bump into King J
ohn, he’ll turn out to be an android. If you want Renaissance Italy or Victorian London, you’ll use the archetypes, not real people. After The Gunfighters, we’ll never again see a real-life historical figure on Doctor Who for 19 years, not until George Stephenson pops up rather awkwardly in The Mark of the Rani. And although this might seem like something’s been lost, I think actually the reverse is true: the Doctor is too overpowering a character to pay homage to someone more famous than he is. The reason the encounter between the Doctor and Robespierre is such so dissatisfying is because, by the end of Season One, this has clearly become Hartnell’s show, and the viewer should be paying him more attention than someone they’ve read about at school. (It’s only with Russell T Davies that that all changes, and the celebrity historical comes back with a vengeance! But more of that later. Much, much later.)

  So although I don’t think this is a very good episode on its own terms, I think it’s invaluable for what it represents. Modern Doctor Who sprouts from this. And even more from next week’s episode...

  T: Well, you can tell we’re in France, because everyone’s drinking. Susan has a brandy, and Colbert’s knocking back the wine...

  I agree with you about the Robespierre meeting – it doesn’t really advance the plot apart from giving Lemaitre another reason to keep the Doctor hanging around. In fact, the only really interesting thing that I can see about this episode is Ronald Pickup appearing as the duplicitous physician who treats Susan. How many actors cropped up in minor parts early in Doctor Who before disappearing completely, their CV tailing off as other less-precarious ways of earning a living took away the lure of greasepaint and stardust? Loads, I should imagine (here I’m thinking in particular of Jonathan Crane, whose sole acting credit on IMDb is playing Kristas in The Daleks). But Pickup has never stopped working, and one has to wonder if he hates Doctor Who because, despite all of his leading roles on TV and in classics at all of our finest theatrical institutions, he probably gets more mail about a week’s work he did four decades ago (and which doesn’t even exist on video, or even as telesnaps!) than he does about the rest of his accomplished career together.

  And speaking of people with prolific careers... it’s about this point that I think your previous comments on Stanley Myers’ music were a tad generous. You’re very good, Rob, at being able to turn something a bit naff into a metatextual piece of genius – but to a layman like me, it sounds like Myers has been briefed to score a kids’ show set during The French Revolution, and produced a childish, rompy piece of fluff that suggests he’s not really taking it that seriously. It might be telling he was never asked back to the series – and typically, went on to have perhaps the most illustrious career of any Doctor Who composer ever! This is the same Stanley Myers, after all, who consistently found work until his death in 1993, wrote the theme to The Deer Hunter and scored such works as Moonlighting (the Jeremy Irons film, that is, not the Bruce Willis/Cybill Shepherd dramady).

  One last point: it’s sometimes cited as a scripting cock-up that the dying Webster mentioned “Le Chien Gris” – a pub that Jules and Jean frequent – when he should have said the drinking establishment “The Sinking Ship” instead. So far, though, this makes sense: Webster wanted Ian to go to Le Chien Gris and hopefully find the spy James Stirling, and then go to The Sinking Ship, where... well, that can wait until episode six. It’s just worth noting that for now, that part of the script is watertight, and it only, er, springs a leak when we’re forced to presume that Webster mentioned The Sinking Ship off camera.

  January 21st

  A Bargain of Necessity (The Reign of Terror episode five)

  R: There’s a really important scene in this episode, and if it only existed in the archives, I think it’d have much more attention. But it’s not, so it doesn’t. It’s the argument between Barbara and Ian about the death of Colbert. There’s not been an awful lot of anger in this story, and all the death and treachery has been played mainly on the level of melodrama or black comedy. But Jacqueline Hill has a wonderful way with fury, and she tears into Ian, reminding him that while Colbert betrayed them, he was a patriot to his side. In this way, she insists that Ian look at history from a different perspective.

  But it’s Ian’s reaction that is so telling – the travellers, he insists, are involved now; they’re no longer cool onlookers to history, they’re actually part of it. And it’s the pivotal point at which Doctor Who changes. Ian tells Barbara he could just as easily have fired the gun that killed Colbert – they can no longer afford to be as dispassionate as they have, in retrospect, been for most of this season; their first instinct can no longer be just to run back to the TARDIS the moment there’s trouble, and hang the consequences. They have responsibilities to the people who befriend them, who take risks for them, and who can’t ever have Barbara’s perspective that they’re all figures in history and can be part of an academic debate. It blows a wind through the story, and demonstrates exactly what Spooner sees the future of Doctor Who as being – a series that is a lot more immediate than it has been before. Once upon a time, Barbara was judging history and even trying to alter history to the side she preferred; hearing her talk about the good that the revolutionaries have done – and their modern-day legacy – within the very house of the resistance group that saved their lives from those very same revolutionaries is tactless at best. It’s also clearly shows how looking at history from the outside-in even sounds faintly ridiculous. All the historical theorising in the world counts as nothing beside real emotional ties.

  And what’s great is that although Ian’s argument carries (sort of – it’s certainly the stance that the series from this point on adopts), Spooner has strengthened Barbara’s argument with the way he has written Colbert. The interrogation scene between him and Ian is fascinating – Colbert all but pleads with Ian for information, refusing to see himself as a villain, using the word “traitor” only in inverted commas, clearly believing he’s the hero in this story. Obviously, our sympathies are meant to remain with the resistance – Renan’s rather colourless speech in which he’s making a stand against anarchy makes that very clear – but it’s still refreshing to have that ambiguity here.

  T: You’ve rightly highlighted the most important scene. History tells us that the French Resistance members are the good guys, but – as Ian points out – when time-travel places you thick of it, it’s difficult to be quite so objective. Jules and company are only the “goodies” because our heroes were mistaken for the same kind of people they automatically try to rescue. The Doctor himself has toppled the decadent and powerful often enough (though, to be fair, never with something as cruel as the guillotine). But it’s easy for us to see people from the past as naive because they’ve not discovered electricity or Kellogg’s Pop Tarts, and yet here it’s a character from a supposedly more sophisticated time (Barbara, one of the audience identification figures) who comes across as green by trying to intellectualise their situation.

  Ian has indeed learned from Marco Polo, and his candour does him credit. We should pity poor Colbert, though – he’s the first Frenchman to learn that time travel exists, and he’s gunned down about five minutes later. And note how Ian tells Barbara he’d have killed Colbert himself, and that he got what he deserved. I keep telling you, he’s Jack Bauer! Next, he’ll be torturing people in the name of democracy.

  No, this isn’t as successful as Lucarotti’s work – it’s a template that is far more sustainable. If not for this paradigm shift, Doctor Who might have ended up as the equivalent of a show about football, but in which we only spend time with the people watching the match.

  Prisoners of the Conciergerie (The Reign of Terror episode six)

  R: This is a peculiar episode, and no mistake. It heads off in a completely different direction, into the area of unfolding history. Which means that one of the big showpieces of the episode involves watching one historical figure we’ve never seen before engaged in political discussion with another historical figure we’ve never s
een before. It reduces our heroes to spectators again, and more pointedly than they’ve ever been before – with Ian and Barbara watching the Napoleon meeting through a spyhole, there’s not even the pretence they’re still part of the action. Rather delightfully, though, the Doctor seems to take issue with all of this – he wanders off whenever Lemaitre is talking exposition, and has to be summoned back with a scowl.

  The best moments, again, are those involving Hartnell – his final scene with Jack Cunningham’s jailer is beautifully played, with the Doctor so wrapping him around his finger, it makes the little drunk’s head spin. With all these reversals of who’s in power – how one person can represent the state one day and be a traitor the next – it’s hardly surprising that the jailer can’t keep up with whether he’s meant to lock Hartnell up or be locked up by him. I did the French Revolution as a special subject for A-level, studying it in day-to-day detail, and I couldn’t understand most of what was going on with an index at the back!

  It also occurs to me that while William Russell is a very good actor, Ian Chesterton really isn’t. He wasn’t a good drunk in Marco Polo, and he doesn’t make a very good country bumpkin here. You should ease off on the amateur dramatics, mate – you’re going to get yourself killed if you carry on like that.

  And that’s it! The very first season of Doctor Who over. What a milestone! I’m very proud of myself. I just went downstairs and told Janie. She just stared at me, and asked me if I’d really spent the best part of an entire month on just one single year of the series. Weren’t there forty-bloody-five of the things? How long was this going to take? And I didn’t quite know what to say, really. So she and the cat exchanged looks, both sighed, and together trotted into the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

  T: We’re back to that football match analogy again, because, as you say, the regulars are simply watching the action rather than participating in it. Which is doubly odd since, if they know their history of this era, why do they need to dress up as yokels to identify who is involved in this historic meeting that will lead to Napoleon’s rise to power? Couldn’t they just have saved some hassle by telling Jules and Stirling that they had it on good authority that Napoleon was being groomed for office? Sod Ian’s poor acting, though – Jacqueline Hill has a rare off-day by being the only person in this story to put on a cod French accent. If this was a David Tennant story, you can bet that Barbara would have been told, “No, no... don’t do that...”, but nobody here seems to have instructed her to stop sounding silly. I love, though, the way that Napoleon comes to the pub incognito... but dressed as Napoleon! He’s almost begging for Barbara to offer him a drink so he can say “not tonight, Josephine...”