Of course, this doesn’t excuse incompetence, laziness or both. There’s plenty of that in Doctor Who throughout its history. But when an episode like this one clearly doesn’t care that it can’t do the effects, and just gets on and tells its story, it seems rather churlish to blame it for what it never intended to do in the first place.
The Death of Doctor Who is not a great episode. But it does have two versions of the Doctor fighting each other with walking sticks. That’s the sort of thing I like. You saw Edmund Warwick and William Hartnell? Pish and tush to that.
T: I don’t know... having Warwick double as Hartnell is one thing, but to have Warwick’s face clearly visible in long shot, and then to make him mouth Hartnell’s pre-recorded words, and then to cut to a close-up of the real deal is utterly bonkers. Why didn’t they just have Hartnell play the Doctor-robot, save for scenes where a body-double was unavoidable? I can try to be kind, I can try to be understanding, but the whole robot-Doctor Who section of this episode just seems terrifyingly inept. The Daleks even tell each other that they’ll follow the android... then go in a completely different direction. And you know things aren’t quite right when the normally dignified Barbara pretends to machine gun the Daleks!
Fortunately, once Edmund Warwick has received his just desserts (and the Doctor issues a parting joke about him needing a doctor!), the pace actually ramps up quite nicely. There’s a wonderfully downbeat “things aren’t too good are they?” moment between the Doctor and Ian – Hartnell is pleasingly grim in his outlook, while Russell is very stoic and brave. I’m less sure about what Dudley Simpson is doing, though – as the Daleks surge forward in force, the music decides to evoke a romp around Monte Carlo. And then Camera 5 strangely appears in the background. (My friend Peter Crocker, entertainingly enough, maintains that this is a Mechonoid probe, planted there to spy on the Gubbage Cones.)
But if nothing else, there’s a sense in this episode that as far as our heroes are cornered, the chase itself is over and the confrontation between them and the Daleks is imminent and unavoidable. As part of this, the Doctor does the right thing and, without consulting his companions, bravely (and unsuccessfully) tries to delay the Daleks by posing as the robot-Doctor. It’s a superb moment for the character, and a scene in which, without ceremony, the Doctor becomes the hero and Ian’s usefulness to the programme comes to an end.
February 8th
The Planet of Decision (The Chase episode six)
R: This is by far the most satisfying, and the most exciting, of all the episodes in The Chase. The Mechonoids are actually rather a witty idea: a bunch of robots who have been abandoned by the colonists who designed them and have since “gone native”, and are now capturing the odd hapless human and putting him on exhibition in a zoo. (It does make you wonder what pleasure the robots can possibly derive by staring at humans, but that’s part of the fun.) There’s a terrific battle between the Daleks and these new robots, which rather bizarrely manages to look expensive (all that film!) and cheap (those cartoon explosions!) at the same time – and that, actually, sums up The Chase admirably. And Maureen O’Brien very creditably takes the part of a whimpering girl who’s scared of heights and makes her fear honest and realistic.
But it’s ironic, nevertheless, that this rather epic finale with the Daleks is upstaged entirely by the departure from the series of Ian and Barbara. The last ten minutes or so are just wonderful. That quiet realisation from Jacqueline Hill that, at last, there’s a means by which she can get home – it hadn’t even occurred to Ian, and it’s beautiful that before he decides whether he even wants to leave the TARDIS, he checks with Barbara what she would like to do. Once she’s committed to the idea of returning to Earth, then so is he – my God, the love he feels for her just shines through. They utterly deserve that photo montage of their messing about with pigeons at Trafalgar Square – if any two characters had a right to celebrate the joy of home comforts and the glories of being ordinary once more, it’s these two. And Hartnell, typically, is extraordinary in these scenes: he is so good at the heartfelt. He can’t bear to lose them. When the Dalek ship dematerialises, he daren’t even turn around to watch it vanish. He watches them on the Time and Space Visualiser, his face ashen and pained as he realises that, happy as they are, he’ll never see them again. “I’ll miss them,” he says. Right with you, Doctor. I’ll miss them too. They were magnificent.
Mind you, Peter Purves looks very promising as Steven, the new companion. He’s given a standard bit of long exposition, and makes it seem a result of two years’ worth of isolation. The way that he can barely contain his delight at seeing fellow humans once more – and yet backs away from them as the disbelief keeps kicking in – is really well observed. The toy panda will have to go, though. If Steven keeps throwing really good escape plans into chaos every time he forgets his panda, the Doctor will come to a very sticky end.
T: Morton Dill is back! Or, not really... while playing Steven, Purves is pretty unrecognisable as the well-meaning Alabaman who laughed at the Daleks in New York City. The incoming companion has a splendid moment where he asks the travellers to repeat his name, and bites his lip as it is said back to him. He’s deeply affected by hearing another human being address him, and he has such a natural delivery in his reactions to the crew. First he shakes Ian’s hand, then the Doctor’s, and then apologetically yet vigorously does Ian’s hand again – it’s very human, very clever and very subtle. I do have to question Steven’s choice of risking life and limb for a teddy bear, but hey – a guy gets lonely in prison.
But it’s Ian and Barbara that we’re meant to concentrate on now. Setting aside the fact that the Doctor becomes so happy to see Ian that he says he could kiss him (move over, John Barrowman!), we really will miss these two. The realisation that they could return home is performed beautifully – they’re desperate to get back, but they’ll be sad if they do. It’s also spot on that the Doctor reacts to their announced departure by being spiteful and ranting, and that Ian loses his cool and yearns for the comfort of having a pint in his native time! And of course, just as it looks like their argument will end in tears, it’s down to Barbara to smooth things over with the old man. Her admission that her life will never again be this exciting is just lovely, and Hill plays the lines with a composed but heart-rending modicum of wistful regret. It’s interesting that we don’t see Ian and Barbara actually say goodbye to their friends – the Doctor testily takes the two of them into the DARDIS, and then exits alone. Perhaps witnessing the actual moment where they part would be too much to bear.
The photo montage that shows Ian and Barbara back in London, 1965, might seem very unusual to a modern viewer, but – as directed by Douglas Camfield, as part of pre-production on the next story – it’s a great send off with them happily charging about and scattering pigeons. They’re deliriously happy, and I can only hope that after Ian gets his pint in the pub, there’s a bit of hand-holding and some fumbled offers of coffee back at his place. While Jacqueline Hill has always been (rightly) lauded for her acting, I do feel that William Russell is something of an unsung hero of these early years of Doctor Who. He generally takes on the brunt of the action and arbitration, and he’s always delivered and done so with authority. I salute them both.
And do you know, while I’ve been less than kind to Richard Martin’s work, he wraps up his Doctor Who tenure in the best way possible. The pitched Dalek-Mechonoid battle is terrific – there’s a good use of camera cranes, gun close-ups and animated explosions. I’d be fearful about Martin doing more stories, but I do appreciate that he here goes out in style.
Did I really say this adventure was in the bottom five stories of all time? Does it really score nought out of ten? Nope, not with episodes like this up its sleeve.
The Watcher (The Time Meddler episode one)
R: You remember how yesterday I was banging on about TV conventions expecting the audience to suspend their disbelief? It still happens today, of course – everyone accepts th
at the incidental music isn’t really there. So it’s gobsmacking when, at the end of the episode, William Hartnell all but appears to wander off set to find a gramophone playing Now That’s What I Call Monastic Chanting. The series has spent so long asking its viewers to accept that its regular trips back into history have a certain truth to it. And yet here we are, back at the most famous date in English history – oh, and look! There’s Alethea Charlton again, with many of the same dirt stains on her face now that she’s playing a Saxon peasant as when she was playing a cavewoman. It all looks very proper, and as the Doctor says, we’ll soon give that arrogant new companion a dressing down and prove that we can time travel after all. But it suddenly looks as if Steven’s scepticism is warranted – a Saxon is found with a wristwatch, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop have just been discovered hiding behind a curtain. Perhaps Steven was right after all. Perhaps that hat thing with horns on really was just a space helmet for a cow.
T: I’d like to ask: why couldn’t it be a space helmet for a cow? Given all the space pigs/space rhinos/space wasps in the new series, this just about seems conceivable. And didn’t Gareth Roberts once write a story with some gun-toting space bovines for a DWM comic strip? I know he did! It was called The Lunar Strangers, and the space-cows had little protuberances in their environmental helmets to accommodate their horns. Why, this is sounding more plausible all the time...
Anyway, back in 1066, this whole episode is quite a meandering tease, and a definite first for the series in that we’re made to question the veracity of the when it’s occurring in a way that we haven’t really done before. There’s not much by way of danger, though – the Doctor has a dainty little chat with a rather too lovely and prim lady Saxon villager, and the villain of the piece spends most of his time eavesdropping. The script does have many comedic Dennis Spoonerisms, but it’s less full on than The Romans, and so finds itself stuck in an odd no man’s land between that story’s excesses and the lofty worthiness of Lucarotti and Whitaker’s efforts.
But even if we’re meant to be uncertain about the time period, and exactly what sort of genre we’ve found ourselves in (it looks and feels like a pure historical – but why, then, does the Monk have a wristwatch?), the people involved in making it are showing no such vagueness as to what they’re doing. Director Douglas Camfield isn’t settling for “this’ll do”, or “that’ll be fun” – he’s clearly striving for everything to look good. He uses angled shooting (the shot of the TARDIS from above, for instance) to sell the lie that we’re outside rather than in a studio, and he’s aided by Barry Newbery’s astonishing design work (that moving sky is exceptionally convincing). On the acting side, Hartnell is very low key and magnanimous in the first scene, and the new TARDIS dynamic gets off to a flying start. The Doctor is crotchety with the bullish Steven, whilst Vicki is bouncy but not afraid to chide. It’s curious, though, that the Doctor seems delighted that they’re in 1066. (What is it about this man? He seems to revel in visiting periods of history renowned for their mass slaughter!)
On a somewhat minor note, this is the first time the “D” in “TARDIS” is said to refer to the word “dimensions” plural, not “dimension”. It’s a mistake that won’t get rectified till 1996, and it’s also interesting to discover that in Steven’s future of astronauts, space rockets and dubious toy panda use, they still have police boxes.
And I’m sorry, but someone has to say it. Peter Butterworth is very underused – he barely gets a line. It turns out that, in this episode at least, he was just The Watcher all the time.
February 9th
The Meddling Monk (The Time Meddler episode two)
R: We cut from a scene of the Doctor’s captor laughing at our hero to his singing to himself while he’s preparing a nice fry-up breakfast for him. Like the sudden appearance of the gramophone, this wrongfoots the audience – villains in Doctor Who are often funny, but they never know they are. Peter Butterworth’s Monk was an eerie figure in the first episode – he barely said a line, hid in shadows and was generally weird and enigmatic. Now, with Hartnell off on holiday for a week, he gets to take charge. The Monk’s attempts to take snuff in a howling wind are amusing, his ingratitude to the Saxon women who bring him food is nicely deadpanned. And for all the fact that the Monk is clearly meant to be a comic character, there’s still something rather unnerving about him. Indeed, it’s because he’s comic – we can’t get a handle on him. The best scene is the one where Steven fools the Monk into revealing that he’s seen the Doctor, using that hoary old plan of making the villain reveal things that they couldn’t possibly know. (All copyright Terry Nation, by way of The Keys of Marinus in several instances.) But Vicki suspects that the Monk’s apparent stupidity is just a ruse to lead them into a trap. Here’s a character who wants you to underestimate him, with his comic bumbling, double takes and funny faces only masking a great intelligence. Who does that remind you of? And you suddenly remember just how big a part Dennis Spooner later played in shaping the character of the second Doctor. Here he is, a prototype Patrick Troughton, all in monk’s clothing.
Peter Purves continues to impress, mostly because he doesn’t in any way try to elicit the audience’s sympathies. The viewers at home will still be missing Ian and Barbara – I know I am – and rather resenting this new upstart. Steven works well precisely because he doesn’t care. He’s like Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the child who refuses at first to play along with the fantasy of Narnia. The way that he beats up a peasant out hunting makes us feel uncomfortable, and he’s hotheaded to the Saxons who fear he might be a Viking. But Purves very skilfully allows him to thaw bit by bit – the way that he grudgingly thanks Edith for the food that she gives them, after all of his rudeness, is wonderful.
T: As you say, Purves is superb, especially the way he uses steel and modern parlance – “I’m not mad about you either!” – in response to Eldred-the-clichéd-mistrustful-villager’s braying. Vicki then chimes in too, and what’s really interesting about this scene is how much – a mere two weeks after Ian and Barbara left the series – the new TARDIS team is gelling together. With Hartnell on holiday (again? He had one only two months ago!), Purves and O’Brien carry the story adeptly. There’s such nuance in the way Steven thanks Edith twice for her kindness, and gives a stately “God be with you...” as he goes, giving the impression that he’s genuinely embarrassed about his patronising behaviour towards the good-natured villagers. And I love the bit where Vicki suggests that the Monk is double bluffing them, putting the layers of second guessing into the story, and suggesting that the next episode’s promise of “A Battle of Wits” won’t be too wide of the mark.
But for all the compassion and comedic elements on display in this episode – for all the cosy business with cod Vikings and a funny monk – there’s no escaping the conclusion that the Vikings rape Edith off-screen. This is pretty unpleasant stuff, and actually quite difficult for modern viewers to get their heads around (almost undoubtedly, nothing like this would appear in the new series). Any children watching this might well gloss over the event – either not comprehending what’s happened, or knowing (as I did, when I was eight) that the Vikings traditionally did rape, murder and pillage without understanding what that really meant. At 35, having gained adult knowledge of what rape is, I find this all the more disconcerting. Michael Miller, playing Edith’s husband Wulnoth, expertly sells us on what’s happened to his wife without saying anything explicit, but then... well, the scene isn’t helped by the appearance of the bewhiskered and bulging-eyed peasant Eldred, who reminds me too much of Michael Palin’s shriller characters in the Monty Python films.
Nonetheless, this sub-plot raises the stakes, and makes clear that the Vikings aren’t quite as silly as they appear at times. (It’s easy to make fun of Ulf and Sven because they’re a bit weedier, but Geoffrey Cheshire looks excellent as the Viking captain – his massive frame is bedecked in an impressive costume, and his strong, pock-marked features are augmented
by his hefty beard. And Gunnar the Giant – killed in a throw-down with the Saxons – is a great sight too.) I’m just glad that things are kept from getting too mature and depressing by Dennis Spooner writing in such frivolity as the Monk making breakfast (there’s something rather jolly about seeing an eleventh century monk pottering about frying eggs), and the joyful way that the Doctor chucks water over the Monk’s head.
A Battle of Wits (The Time Meddler episode three)
R: The first thing that leaped out to me was the high quality of Douglas Camfield’s direction. The second season of Doctor Who has entailed some pretty ropey and don’t-give-a-toss direction to its stories; it’d be against the spirit of this diary to name names, but if Toby gave me a Chinese burn, I think the words “Richard Martin” might pop out.
What we have here is so striking in contrast. Take the scene where the two Vikings in the woods argue about whether they should take refuge from the Saxons or not. We don’t care about the Vikings, frankly – Sven and Ulf are hardly the most rounded of characters, nor the best acted either, and this little part of the storyline isn’t half as interesting as a time travelling monk. But Camfield provides real energy to a rather dull discussion, giving it danger and edge, and eventually frames it so that both Vikings are in extreme close-up, so that one of them looks complicit at last to the other’s cowardly plan. It’s brilliantly done, because it’s the work of a director who tries to maximise the drama or the comedy at every turn. For comparison’s sake, there’s that bit where the Monk needs to leave the monastery to see who’s knocking at the door, and get surprised by Hartnell from behind. These sorts of things are very theatrical, and always a bit eggy if they’re not blocked properly, but here it’s surprisingly tense and pays off as a good joke, with a stern-looking Doctor pretending that the stick he’s holding against the Monk’s back is a rifle. A few weeks ago, there was a sequence in which Vicki had to somehow sneak into the Dalek time ship, avoiding detection while the Daleks were distracted by Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster. All it needed was good blocking, and it would have worked – but because it looked as if it was being filmed without rehearsal, it’s a confusing and illogical mess. What Camfield brings to a production is smoothness. The Time Meddler is not the fastest paced of stories, but you can relax with it completely, because it all feels deliberate and crafted.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 24
