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

by Robert Shearman

  And, of course, that’s where the oddness just starts. If I said that The Savages had an air to it that no-one involved had ever watched the programme, then that goes double here with knobs on. To see the Doctor in a contemporary setting for the first time is weird enough – what makes it all the weirder is that no-one producing the show seems to realise it’s never happened before, and treats it as if, like The Avengers, this is what Doctor Who has always been doing. (And before too long, of course, they’ll be absolutely right! But what’s bizarre is that we go from a situation in which contemporary adventures were unthinkable to one where they’re the norm immediately, with no blurring in between.) Professor Brett knows who the Doctor is, and Sir Charles accepts his presence immediately. Verity Lambert once complained that the Jon Pertwee Doctor was too much part of the establishment, but that’s nothing to a William Hartnell who has a personal secretary, waltzes into scientific establishments and press conferences as if they’re routine day job stuff, and whose fab gear gets compared to disc jockeys in trendy London nightclubs. Frankly, at the end of the episode, when Wotan expresses his interest in a certain chap called “Doctor Who” paying him a visit, that they even get his name wrong is hardly a shock at all.

  But the episode works well. At times it all feels staggeringly naïve, at others it feels fresh and real – and, bizarrely, it’s the collision of that which makes it so much fun to watch. There’s something wonderfully charming about seeing the Doctor be amazed at a huge computer – just because it can work out a square root of a small number at a speed considerably slower than a pocket calculator. And though the Inferno nightclub is a rather peculiar mix of groovy cats dancing and kids drinking soft drinks, the scenes there are utterly unlike anything we’ve seen in the show before. Anneke Wills as fun-lovin’ sailor-cheerin’ good time girl Polly makes Dodo look staid and old-fashioned within a single episode. And it’s peculiar to note that although the BBC put the kibosh on Jackie Lane speaking in a Cockney accent when she was introduced, it’s only a few months later grumpy sailor Ben Jackson can get away with it. (Someone should keep an eye on him. He beats up a fellow patron, and makes a lunge for the barmaid a huge leer on his face. I reckon his Coca-Cola has been spiked.)

  All this, and John Cater (as Professor Krimpton) in a frankly tremendous scene fighting against his possession and insisting upon the superiority of human life over machines.

  T: Jackie Lane never did a bloody Cockney accent, it was Mancunian! Will this torment never bloody cease? If you mention Harold Pinter when we get to The Abominable Snowmen I’ll have you shot...

  Other than that, though, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Innes Lloyd has clearly never seen the programme before... first he had a grotesque children’s nightmare rewritten into a load of unthreatening parlour games, then he gave us an episode of Star Trek (albeit three months before the first Trek episode aired), and now we have a twentieth century larks in which the Doctor (sorry, “Doctor Who”) gains access to everywhere with ease. If the latter isn’t very convincing with what we’ve seen before, though, I do like it – having the Doctor trusted from the outset gets rid of lots of tedious to-ing and fro-ing whilst he proves himself and wins everyone’s trust.

  In terms of style, this episode is a self-consciously hip depiction of 60s life (just look at how the nightclub-owner tells the Doctor “I dig your fab gear”!). Polly is a breath of fresh air – she’s funny, upbeat and stunning. And Hartnell looks wonderfully incongruous in this contemporary setting, especially when he walks the London streets in that hat (it’s obviously his twentieth century hat, as we haven’t seen it since An Unearthly Child). His performance in the opening scene is shockingly all over the place, though – you almost have to wonder if he’s rattled because he’s just seen Innes Lloyd at the other end of the studio, linking arms with Patrick Troughton and taking him up to his office for coffee and a little chat.

  Is this story that made Doctor Who the programme we’ve come to know and love, though? Wasn’t it inevitable that the series would eventually come to Earth so the viewers had some sort of investment in, or identification with, the proceedings? The Savages was a curiously detached experience, and I found it difficult to care about what was going on. The War Machines by contrast isn’t perfect, but it starts to shape Doctor Who into a series that is about confronting our fears, or creating fear out of the everyday. It’s a cracked mirror, one that gives us skewed reflections for comedic, satirical, frightening or entertaining effect.

  Intentionally or otherwise, Innes Lloyd has happened upon that something we now take for granted: the modern setting. As a result, Doctor Who will never be the same again. The Doctor’s visits to the present won’t happen with a lot of frequency just yet (even in this story, the Doctor will become saddled with two more modern-day companions whom he can’t take home because he can’t pilot the TARDIS properly), but before too much longer, his returns to twentieth century Earth will become a default setting; they’ll be a matter of course, of habit. The Doc returning to Earth is like me with cigarettes... I don’t know why I do it, but if I don’t do it on a regular basis, I’ll get all testy.

  Like you, though, I’ve no idea why they pronounce Wotan as “Votan”. But I love the fact that he gets his own credit!

  March 4th

  The War Machines episode two

  R: The murder of the tramp is incredibly brutal. Right up to the moment he dies, he’s playing the part as a comic cameo, doing jokey coughs and pretending he’s just come out of the ‘ospital. The look of horror on his face, when he realises these workmen are in earnest and are actually going to kill him, is like a realisation that he’s strayed into the wrong TV show; this isn’t Steptoe and Son after all. And it’s the very inhumanity of the death that’s so memorable. Mob lynching has been a recurring trope in the third season – it was used for comic effect in The Gunfighters, and rather more chillingly in The Massacre. But right after the broadcast of The Savages, in which the elite victimise the underclasses, the destruction of the homeless man by all the people with jobs looks very deliberate. The tramp even looks like he’s wandered off the set of The Savages, all scraggly beard and rags.

  And it’s that inhumanity which makes The War Machines work so well. Yes, you can laugh at its fumbled attempts to be “with it”, or its hugely dated understanding of computers. And the War Machines themselves, let’s face it, are as impractical and ungainly a bunch of killing machines as Wotan could devise. But it’s scenes such as the one where Major Green decides to test the efficacy of a War Machine’s gun by trying it out on the first hapless technician he points at – and, even more powerfully, the way that the victim just stands there without fear and gets shot – that give the story such power. And no-one is safe; just by picking up a phone you can become enslaved to Wotan’s will and lose your identity. This is the very first story to exploit a contemporary setting to the full, and it hasn’t taken long before the programme has insidiously turned innocent everyday objects into instruments of fear.

  Michael Ferguson directs all the warehouse scenes wonderfully; there’s a cold beauty to the way these workmen, their individuality sucked out of them, work like machines to produce more machines. (And this comes only a couple of stories from the debut of the Cybermen – you can see Kit Pedler’s influence on the story premise seen here.) Weighed against this is the Doctor – Hartnell is superb at displaying, in contrast, real warmth and tenderness. The gentle way in which he relieves Dodo’s hypnotism, in what turns out to be her last scene, is gorgeous.

  And, yes, Jackie Lane’s gone! Just like that! It’s staggeringly abrupt. Ironically, Dodo leaves the series on something of a high, as she’s far more interesting as someone possessed than she ever was when left to her own devices. Lane plays these scenes really cleverly; if there’s one thing that has typified Dodo, it’s that she behaves like an infant, and you can see Lane playing her character as evil merely by... not doing that, and acting her age. Dodo becomes an adult for her last gasp of screen t
ime, and we don’t like her very much. Her innocence has gone, and so is her point. Bye.

  T: It’s probably fair to say that The War Machines tends to be one of the more popular stories from Season Three – certainly, it has the advantage of actually existing in the archives (not that this has helped The Ark or The Gunfighters as much). And yet, for my money, this isn’t in the same league as the much-less-feted The Myth Makers, The Massacre or even (yes, a controversial choice, this) The Gunfighters – not because The War Machines is bad, but because, apart from the direction, it’s a pretty pedestrian affair. You can make some accommodation because this is something of a template for future stories, so it’s a bit excusable that so many subsequent adventures did this sort of thing much better... but, er, the truth still remains that the subsequent adventures did do this sort of thing so much better. Script-wise (and wherever Innes Lloyd was when he wasn’t watching Doctor Who, Ian Stuart Black was clearly with him), nothing much happens here, except for an aborted attempt to kidnap the Doctor and the very lengthy construction of a hugely impractical tank-monster. And poor old John Harvey, as Professor Brett, isn’t just forced to do zombie acting – he’s a zombie who spouts exposition at two other zombies.

  Some of the elements you’ve already hinged on, Rob, are amongst those I’d have a go at. Look, there’s a comedy tramp played by a bloody awful actor! Oh, and the newspapers already have a picture of him on file, and so can get the story in their first editions with such speed and efficiency, despite the murder happening in the early morning hours. And yes, it’s a bit creepy when the workman willingly stands before the machine as it tests its gun – but he’s also obliged to fall over dead when it seems to miss him completely!

  Still, there’s plenty of good in this – the production values are on the whole excellent, and there are some impressive film sequences, with the director choreographing everyone’s movements with an eye towards interesting visuals. Ben Jackson is proving to be a sprightly addition to the series – he’s polite, thoughtful, resourceful, respectful of the Doctor and played with chirpy charm by Michael Craze. And speaking only for myself, I’m very entertained by the way John Harvey provides No. 1 in what’s to become an occasional series called Hadoke’s Hilariously Rubbish Sci-Fi Bits. When Brett gets the line, “He must be destroyed...”, his voice (for some inexplicable reason) goes up several octaves on the final word, thus speaking in a fashion people only do in science-fiction series. I find it hugely amusing that Stephen Fry does a similar thing in the futuristic segment of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, when he orders “Send them to the sprouting chamber!”

  But by God, Rob, you’re right – it was an unforgiving business, being a Doctor Who companion in the 60s. Seventeen minutes in, we get our last shot of poor, plucky Jackie Lane. Saddled with a dopey character, she was never less than enthusiastic – and while she maybe she wasn’t up to much as an actress, I do feel a bit sorry for the way she gets to spend her valedictory moments. Whatever your feelings towards Dodo, she deserved better than to end her time with us snoozing on a chair.

  The War Machines episode three

  R: There’s a protracted action sequence which lasts over five minutes where the army take on a War Machine in a warehouse. It’s the sort of stuff which will seem a bit passé during the UNIT years, but we’ve never seen anything like it on Doctor Who before. Michael Ferguson does wonders considering two things especially – that all the soldiers’ guns lock so that they can’t actually fire, and that all the War Machine can do against them is fire a fire extinguisher and knock over crates. It ought to be ridiculous. Instead, it feels like Doctor Who from a new era, with a concentration upon the visual rather than the verbal. And it builds up to an extraordinarily effective cliffhanger, in which only the Doctor stands indomitable against the advance of the killer machine. Beautiful stuff.

  And, as if to remind us we’re still in 1966, there’s also a painfully long scene in which Sir Charles has an entire phone conversation with not only the minister but the minister’s secretary; it’s completely from his point of view, and he says not only what the audience already know, but what he’s already told the Doctor he’s going to say. So it’s a strange, unending painful repeat of exposition that was unnecessary the first time. I bring it up not to mock it, but to point out the strange collision in this episode between the old and the new – between the pitched battle on film that Ferguson milks for all he’s worth, and the strange, clunky studio-bound drama that thinks it’s still a piece of theatre. Isn’t that one of the things that’s so extraordinary about Hartnell’s Who, that you can see the trappings of traditional TV even as it’s doing its best to shake them off?

  T: If I previously thought that The War Machines was a ho-hum affair, I now have to confess that if Innes Lloyd’s intention was to give the series an injection of vitality, it seems to be working. The newcomers shine here – debut director Ferguson finds ways to keep all the bits of business in the warehouse (tossing and lining up guns, filling crates with ammo, etc.) interesting, and there’s a great moment where Major Green whacks a worker unconscious and the War Machine tidies him up. But Anneke Wills and Michael Craze are continuing to impress too – there’s a lovely connection between them when the brainwashed Polly lets Ben go, and the look she gives him suggests a lingering humanity beneath the robotic conformity. Ben himself is all fired up, full of impetuosity and urgency, and striking the right dramatic note. And while we will eventually take the military for granted on Doctor Who, in this context their presence seems exciting, modern and grown-up.

  And while you’ve rightfully given credit to Michael Ferguson for the battle sequences, we should also give a little nod to the Doctor Who Restoration Team – they’ve seamlessly woven many recovered clips into the action, and have used clever zooms and other techniques to create footage where the pictures are missing. In fact, the sharpness and clarity with which these old prints are presented on DVD is sometimes extraordinary, and the quality of the film footage of the war machine in the alleyway is breathtaking too.

  Finally, I should mention that this is a great episode for playing Spot the Extra (baldy Hugh Cecil and the estimable Pat Gorman both feature heavily) – which makes for a useful diversion, because if you give the script any attention whatsoever, it’s clear that much of it is nonsense. The triumvirate of baddies shout the plot out in a most uninteresting fashion, and even the enthralled Polly gets in on the act, inexplicably telling Ben everything she knows, even though she acknowledges he hasn’t been programmed. (Even stranger, she admits that there’s no guard because nobody would want to escape – which Ben obviously does.) Still, should Wotan ever want to conquer a planet where the main industry and technology is crate based, he’s onto a winner.

  March 5th

  The War Machines episode four

  R: It’s trying very, very hard – and it mostly succeeds. There’s not an awful lot of story, really – one War Machine just sort of fizzles out, another gets reprogrammed and blows up Wotan – but it’s the stuff around the plot, all the frills and fripperies, which are what make this episode interesting. The use of real TV newsreaders popping up to alert the viewers that there’s a menace on the streets of London is actually rather startling. The story has very consciously avoided using real landmarks of the city, almost exactly the opposite of the way The Dalek Invasion of Earth gloated over its famous monuments; the most iconic thing seen here has been a man gunned down in a recognisable phone box. There’s a reason for that, of course – in the Dalek story the aliens had already won, so there wasn’t a need for a huge number of extras slowing down the filming and incurring cost. But in spite of radio messages instructing the population to stay indoors, it’d be unreasonable to suppose that a sequence in which a War Machine came gliding over Trafalgar Square would work without a lot more budget.

  So how does the series get around this? It shows the scale, rather brilliantly, through use of the media. It’s telling that one of the very first things we see in th
e episode is the famous face of broadcaster Kenneth Kendall. It’s not the best place in the story for the cameo, because the crisis hasn’t started yet, and indeed Kendall’s message is largely one of reassurance. But it’s the best place for the episode as a whole; from this point on, you imagine the events are being played out on every TV and in every newspaper, that this is a situation really affecting the entire world stage. By halfway through the episode, you can resort to an actor on the phone pretending to be an American journalist, and a few voiceovers as people listen to the radio – it doesn’t matter, because the job is done, and we’ve been given enough to imagine a scale the BBC simply can’t afford.

  Michael Craze is really throwing himself into the role of Doctor Who companion, even though the character has no idea that’s what he’s already become. He’s brave and loyal and charmingly self-sacrificial. His willingness to take the risk of capturing a War Machine off the Doctor’s shoulders is terrific – mostly because he tactlessly offends the Doctor in the process by saying he’s too old to perform such a stunt. And it’s touching the way he obsesses about Polly’s safety all the time – not because he fancies her or nuffing (of course not), but because that’s the bird that saved his life. He’ll be great fun in the TARDIS, I think. On the face of it, Anneke Wills hasn’t had much to do except get hypnotised – but again, it’s the way she acts like a companion, the way she fights against her mind control (even though no-one else has that ability), which mark her out as something special. And it’s quite clear that Innes Lloyd has no compunction about dropping Jackie Lane. There’s not a single companion departure yet which hasn’t tried to pluck at the heart strings – not even Adrienne Hill’s, and she was only there for five episodes! But here, the Doctor is clearly hurt by Dodo not even bothering to say goodbye to his face, he remarks upon her ingratitude... and that’s it, we never hear her even mentioned again. (Well, not until the fifth Doctor has his brain sucked out by the Daleks and she pops up in a little clip. So, he hadn’t forgotten her after all! Bless.)