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

by Robert Shearman

  We open this episode, though, with the regulars standing around, for what seems like an age, as the title caption appears. Those involved cope with this in different ways: the regulars are used to this and stand firm, but James Cairncross (as Lemaitre) elects to nod sagely, whilst poor old Donald Morley (as Jules) looks uneasy and then cracks, looking straight at the camera as if asking for permission to start acting again! Shortly thereafter, the Doctor gets very impatient, coming across as a stand-offish observer. History can jolly well take its course, but he just wants to retrieve Susan – who has, as it happens, recovered from her fever and illness very quickly. (They needn’t have given Ronald Pickup his TV debut as the physician after all, it seems; the travellers could probably have romped home two episodes earlier.) And as Robespierre here becomes a victim of the mob rule he perpetrated, we get to see that comic everyman, the jailer, switch sides once again as it suits him – for all his stupidity, he has a survival instinct which outweighs any moral conviction. Oh, This common body/ Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream/ Goes to and back, lackeying the varying tide/ To rot itself with motion.

  This story – and the entire season – comes to a close, though, with the Doctor and Ian’s echoing voices over a starscape, as if the travellers have just rounded off something momentous, and are off to find their destiny amongst the stars. Whereas the new series’ sense of self-awareness could become arch at times, here it’s surprisingly pleasant. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan have been about their travels together for a year (and we’ve chomped through them all in less than a month), and it’s been quite an achievement. Doctor Who has taken its first steps towards becoming something that’s truly remarkable – it’s already a strong series, with a lot of the hallmarks that make it stand out even today, and the series’ flexibility will make it capable of almost infinite form in future (even if nobody involved in making the programme yet realises just how diverse a format they’re dealing with – at present, doing the show without William Hartnell was surely unthinkable).

  Roll on Season Two – see you in four weeks! (Well, all right... tomorrow.)

  January 22nd

  Planet of Giants (episode one)

  R: Imagine it – Doctor Who has been off the air for ages! (Or a month and a half, anyway. They had it easy in those days.) And the audience knows the formula by now – there are the historical adventures, and there are spacey ones. The episode title reveals that the story is set on a “planet of giants”, and from that point on, you know to expect the latter – with lots of monsters, and maybe some dashings of bad science. The twist is brilliantly handled; the Doctor and his crew do what they always do, they set off to explore this alien world separately – Ian even rolls his eyes in exasperation to see that they’re all conforming to the cliché. And then, after finding strange creatures of unearthly size, they stumble upon enormous lettering telling them “Made in Norwich”. (That’s what’s especially funny about it – Norwich is such a decidedly anticlimactic place in which to find that anything is made.) The reveal that they’ve made it back to modern-day Earth – but are now wandering around a garden at the size of an inch – is one of the best jokes that Doctor Who has yet played. There’s something very appropriate about the fact that after so many bizarre adventures on planets with petrified trees and acid seas, our heroes now find themselves exploring crazy paving.

  And Hartnell is so impressive in that opening scene. He plays his first few lines in as deliberately neutral a tone as possible, so that he can best contrast it with his angry outburst when he believes the TARDIS is in danger, and then his winsomely charming self when he apologies to Barbara straight afterwards. It’s very skilfully done; he now understands all the contradictions of the Doctor’s character, and effortlessly plays them off each other to maximum effect. He’s never been as much in control.

  It’s childish of me, I know, but I also love this episode for the way that Frank Crawshaw plays the hapless Farrow. Bless Crawshaw’s heart, he whistles the letter “s” every time he uses it, and yet he’s stuck with having to discuss “insecticide DN6” and to say things like “This isn’t science, this is business.” It somehow makes this poor old fool, who seems to be almost inviting some unscrupulous businessman to shoot him dead, all the more real and sympathetic. He’s not just a bureaucrat from the ministry, he’s a bureaucrat who has a speech impediment.

  T: Now that we’ve become accustomed to the regulars and guest-cast facing all manner of outlandish forms of jeopardy, Forester pulling his snout little gun on Farrow seems quite odd. A slick-haired, besuited moneyman drawing a pistol feels like it’d be more at home in Dragnet than on Doctor Who at this point in its history. (And how fortunate for Forester’s fiendish plans that he brought a gun to his meeting with a man from the ministry – foresight is essential in business matters.)

  Ian has undergone something of a transformation – after the clueless outburst “What do you mean ‘close the [TARDIS] doors’?” (the ways one can interpret that statement are very few, Chesterton), he suddenly gets all groovy when the TARDIS lands, telling his mates to “sing out” if anything happens, and describing a cadaver as “stiff as a poker”. He’s pretty hip this teacher – I can imagine him shaking his booty at the school disco to show that he’s down wid da kids. The other regulars are on form though: Hartnell is quite amusingly detached in response to Susan’s hysteria about Ian being in the matchbox, and is curiously dismissive when he says, “someone picked [the matchbox] up, I suppose...” And when the Doctor snaps at Barbara as she helps him down from his peek at the house, Jacqueline Hill gives a very believable and naturalistically exasperated response.

  But of course, the most remarkable thing about this episode is the design work. As the camera pans up the garden path and see the house, the viewer assumes it must be a very good model – until Farrow is seen sitting in front of the full building later on. It’s quite brilliantly rendered, and doesn’t look like it’s studio-bound at all.

  Dangerous Journey (Planet of Giants episode two)

  R: When I first saw this as a cynical teenage fan, I found the idea of Barbara’s refusal to tell anyone she’d been infected by insecticide rather silly, and very contrived. I now think I was only half-right; yes, it is a bit contrived, but it seems to me a wonderfully human reaction of embarrassment and denial, and the ever-wonderful Jacqueline Hill (my God, why isn’t she praised more often; she’s fantastic!) sells it perfectly. It’s a great scene anyway; Ian is so distracted by giant litmus paper that he absently hands Barbara a handkerchief to wipe stickiness from her hands, whilst telling her in the same breath that the grains of wheat he’s left her with are covered in deadly poison! The way he so dispassionately shrugs off her cheery attempts to get him to contemplate other possibilities for why the wheat is glistening, and the way he reacts with bemusement when Barbara hopes to find in the briefcase something that will better explain the DN6 she now knows is threatening her life, sounds almost callous.

  And what about the giant housefly?! It’s one of the most effective Doctor Who monsters ever. It’s disgusting; it quivers. It’s little wonder that Barbara is so transfixed by it. This entire story really ought to look rubbish, the demands on the design team beyond any reasonable expectation for what we’ve come to expect on their budget. If this story were missing from the archives, we’d all assume it looked embarrassing. But when it exists for all to see, the design is so good, but so deliberately functional, we utterly take it for granted. Those sequences with the Doctor and Susan resting against the plug in the sink, or Ian trying to open the latch on a briefcase, are frankly extraordinary. Raymond Cusick has done an amazing job in designing this story – forget his work on the Daleks (and anyway, they’re all dead now, aren’t they, who’ll remember them?).

  This is, in so many ways, the most atypical of Doctor Who stories – the only one in which the regulars never interact with any of the supporting cast, for starters. But it’s also the introduction of a theme that serves as a series s
taple: the way that the mundane can be turned into something deadly. The camera follows the briefcase from the perspective of the “giants”, but we’re invited to imagine what’s happening to Ian and Barbara inside; the final image focuses upon the water running out of a sink, in what on the surface must be the most banal cliffhanger ever transmitted. Doctor Who is at its best when it wants the audience to look for threats in the most innocent of places – it’s from this that we lead to shop-window dummies coming to life, and the mythical Yeti sitting on a loo in Tooting Bec.

  T: You do have to pity Ray Cusick – he had to achieve all these technically complex designs, and was probably rather galled when he discovered that pretty much the only pre-filming allowed was for a cat! “Yes, Ray, we know you have to realise a fully functioning giant fly, but you’ll have to do that as live because little Tiddles refuses to attend rehearsals.” I still have no clue, actually, how that fly was done. It’s that good, and so unshowy that it’s been unfairly neglected over the years; it has to be one of the best special effects in the programme’s history. And it’s not just the scale that makes the sets look impressive, it’s the textures given to each object to ensure close-up accuracy, to the degree that they look impressive even in a cleaned-up print on a large, modern TV with good definition. Design-wise, this is a gigantic achievement.

  The environmental catastrophe threatened by DN6, interestingly enough, has become a timeless concern: champions of the Pertwee era should herald this as a worthy forebear of that period of the programme, and Forester is a selfish moneyman who’d be right at home as the central protagonist in a Russell T Davies script. On the other hand, Smithers – the scientist who created DN6 – believes that this insecticide will boost food production and help starving people all over the world, so he aids and abets the criminal Forester to achieve what he thinks are noble ends.

  And I can’t help but think that Alan Tilvern, playing Forester, is the sort of actor who could well have cropped up in Doctor Who more often – he has a suave villainy which suggests he could’ve stepped in had Phillip Madoc ever been unavailable. (Appropriately then, it was while filling in for someone else that Tilvern got his best notices – he took over from a stage-frighted Ian Holm at the last minute in the West End run of The Iceman Cometh.) And “Forester” is such a good, ironic name – an appropriately verdant moniker that serves as a sweet juxtaposition, considering how little the man cares for the environment. Perhaps his fellow businessmen are named “Woods”, “Spring” and (cough) “Bush”.

  January 23rd

  Crisis (Planet of Giants episode three)

  R: There’s no clearer indication of the way the series has changed in the space of a year than this. In Season One, our heroes would have scuttled back to the safety of the TARDIS the first moment they could. And if that was ever a justifiable course of action, it surely would be in this story: Barbara is dying from an incredibly powerful insecticide and can only survive if returned to her own size, and the rest of the crew have no way, given their shrunken state, of communicating with the normal world. (They’ve mentioned this fact a lot over the last two episodes, but here seem to have forgotten about it, so they even try to make a phone call to the police.) The thing is, even though they’re powerless to bring a murderer to justice, or to stop the licence for a bug-killing poison, they still insist upon behaving as selflessly as possible, unable to leave in the Ship until they’re as certain as can be that they’ve saved the world.

  And of course, they do no such thing. The Doctor delightedly tells his friends that before they left the laboratory, a policeman had come to arrest Forester and Smithers (how would he have been able to see that?), and supposes that’s a result of their intervention. In fact, Forester has been brought to justice by a nosey switchboard operator, and the fact that he rather stupidly thought he could imitate Farrow on the telephone just by wrapping the Universal Voice Changer (i.e., a handkerchief) around the receiver. He should have remembered that Farrow whistled his “s”s, that might have helped. The last season entailed a whole run of stories in which the Doctor didn’t particularly want to help anybody – and yet somehow managed to change entire lives in the process. And in this episode, the Doctor and friends decide they will help, but do nothing of any consequence whatsoever, and yet at the story’s end somehow think they’ve had an impact. Intentional or not – and I sadly suspect it isn’t – I think there’s a delightful irony to this. From this point on, with the TARDIS crew actively taking a heroic stance and battling evil where they can, the Doctor will become an ever-more dominant force. Look, next week he’s even going to be given an archenemy. But here, for the very last time, he’s a deluded old man who thinks he’s more important than he really is.

  T: What beguiles me most about this episode is the fact that, of course, it’s two episodes hacked together into just one. This must have been a monumental decision – no episode made since has been deemed unsuitable for broadcast. The show has always gone on, even if a silly pantomime lizard with wet paint has reared its lolloping head. But here, Verity Lambert judged that this story was so deathly dull that action had to be taken for the ultimate good of the show. The remounts of the pilot and The Dead Planet were a case of trying to get it right on the second try (the latter on purely technical grounds), but this is a bit different – it took great skill to take fifty minutes of material, cut them in half and still have the coherent instalment we’re shown here. And who knows? Even though the longueurs were probably removed for good reason, it means that some never-before-seen William Hartnell Doctor Who could, for all anyone knows, be languishing unnoticed in a film can somewhere.

  I’ve enjoyed this story more than I thought I would, because if you’re watching the show in broadcast order, there’s plenty that seems new here. In particular, two frequently seen names make their way into the credits for the first time: the fantastic Douglas Camfield gets to sit in the director’s chair, though Dudley Simpson’s debut doesn’t so much involve music as it does random jaunty noises. But I also note the appearance of Fred Ferris, playing the husband of the telephone operator. He was a stand-up comedian, but an actor too – a useful riposte for anyone who bemoaned the casting in future of Ken Dodd, Peter Kay and Lee Evans (and, indeed, Ian Boldsworth, Thomas Nelstrop and Bernard Padden – but most fans don’t moan about them because they’re unaware that they’re comics).

  I do wish that the script for Planet of Giants had been as memorable as the set-design, but if the programme-makers could only have one and not the other, they got it the right way around. The selling point here is that everything is large, and the production team admirably rises to the task of making it seem very real. But it’s also worth noting that Planet of Giants was pitched as the very first Doctor Who story of all, and that by the time it’s finally shown as part of Season Two, there’s already a feeling that the programme has moved beyond such gimmickry, and deserves (not to mention desires) a little more on which to hang a story. Which will be good for us, good for those making the show, and good for Doctor Who itself.

  World’s End (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode one)

  R: It’s very jarring to see the regular cast actually walking around on location. We’ve got so used by now to seeing what the house style of Doctor Who can be, in all its studio-bound glory, that to see it played outside makes it suddenly look so much more epic, somehow. What I love about this episode is that, for the very first time, there’s a self-conscious anticipation about the series – it knows that this is a big story. And the audience at home know too; the Daleks are back, the adventure has been well publicised – for the first time, the viewers know more about what’s waiting around the corner than the characters do. It’s a subtle difference in the way the episode is told, and a very stylish one. There’s an atmosphere to this that is grimmer and thicker than anything we’ve yet seen on Doctor Who, and it really feels like a different programme – the children’s series has grown up. The lack of a reprise subtly suggests that this is a dif
ferent thing altogether, and that a clean break has been made. And rather than opening with Hartnell pondering over a broken scanner in the TARDIS, instead we’re presented with a grotesque image of a man screaming out like an animal and all too eagerly committing suicide, leaving only a sign in the background telling us that it’s forbidden to dump bodies in the river. It’s astonishing they got away with it; Doctor Who has been experimenting with shifts in style ever since it started, but never quite as abruptly as this. It’s brave and exhilarating and more than a little unnerving.

  It stands a comparison with the other opening episodes we’ve seen from Terry Nation so far. Once more, it’s an exercise in the slow burn – the characters explore their surroundings for 25 minutes, and marvel at what they find. But this time, instead of remarkable bits of fantasy to goggle at, they find a London so dead that Ian wants to run away without further investigation. It’s the drab and ordinary turned into something sick and poisonous. Every time a Nation story opens, the cast find a dead body – in The Dead Planet, it was of a fossilised animal; in The Sea of Death, it was little more than an empty wetsuit. Here, it’s a strange parody of a man hidden amongst the rubbish with a knife protruding from his back. Any regular viewer watching this will have recognised the structure of what was going on – and also that it was being presented in a starker, realer way than ever before.