This is a really great story, isn’t it? One of the very best we’ve seen yet. It’s a terribly clever study of autocracy, with bursts of bizarre heightened comedy, and moments with giant killer crabs. I love it.
T: It’s almost as if they’re having a War Machines reunion to mark Ben and Polly’s last full story. In addition to Harvey, Sandra Bryant played the club-owner Kitty in that story, and she briefly appears here, in episode one, as a young woman named Chicki. (Although she’s replaced in episode four by Karol Keyes, aka Luan Peters – quite why they didn’t just change the character name, I’ll never know, because it’s not as if Chicki actually does anything noticeable.) I thought Harvey was rubbish in The War Machines, but his gentle, naturalistic performance in this is excellent – he elevates a potentially unmemorable character into something rather special.
It continues to be mysterious, this adventure – only being able to watch it as a reconstruction adds its mystique, and the Macra are probably more impressive in our imaginations than they would have been on screen. Even so, Davies seems to keep everything quite shadowy; there’s plenty of smoke and the music’s spine tingling stuff, so I’m prepared to embrace this as a genuine classic. And I appreciate that the recovered censor clips give us some visualisation of the Macra themselves – sadly, the nice chap who took the off-air footage that exists seems keener to capture the oft-photographed Doctor and companions than, say, the rarely glimpsed giant crab monsters!
Troughton continues to shine. I love the bit where he scribbles his mathematical formula on the wall and marks himself out of ten. He then – to the audible frustration of the Pilot, which shows why the Doctor adopts such tactics – sounds childishly gleeful at the prospect of an almighty explosion. He has an air of jollity, but never lets you forget that underneath lurks a darker, graver complexity. And this week, he’s got a script that behaves in exactly the same way! It’s a thrilling combination.
And, it has to be said, Michael Craze is fantastic. He’s always been very likeable and naturalistic, but here, given an opportunity to flex a different acting muscle, he’s excellent at suggesting the layers of his possession – he shouts the work ethic and meaningless litanies like a man wrestling with inner conflict. It’s tough to pull off being “possessed” or “hypnotised” acting without sounding silly, but Craze pitches his performance perfectly. It’s also wonderful that when the real Ben seeps through, he urges Polly to run for it whilst he faces the killer crabs alone – in this regard, he’s the perfect companion.
The Macra Terror episode four
R: So. This is an episode where a fascist state disposes of its dissidents and outsiders by gassing them to death in a room. And an episode in which Jamie tries to escape from his captors by performing a Highland fling to a bunch of overexcited cheerleaders. The Macra Terror’s brilliance is the way that it contrasts its extraordinarily grim depiction of a totalitarian regime, with a happy bouncy style that delights in the silly extremes of its propaganda – and suggests, as a result, that they’re all part and parcel of the same thing. Troughton’s Doctor is just ideal in this setting, sending up the serious concerns of the story and tweaking the nose of evil; the scene where he interrupts a coup d’etat by telling the Pilot and Ola to apologise to each other as if they were five-year-old children is very funny. But it’s also very apt: Ian Stuart Black has written a tremendously angry piece of political satire, but dressed it up as a monster story for five year olds. The implication is that there’s nothing quite as trivial and pathetic as the monstrous crabs, screaming at everyone to obey them – and that we’re only in danger when, as killjoys like Ben, we take the anarchy that the Doctor represents too seriously, and prefer governed order. “Bad laws are meant to be broken,” says the Doctor mischievously, and he’s never before quite embodied the spirit of revolution as he does here.
And any story which has the regulars dancing their way to the TARDIS and to freedom gets a thumbs up in my book.
T: What makes this work so well is that Ian Stuart Black has taken the best elements of Doctor Who’s very early years – the skewed oddness, the desire to terrify the kids – and melded them seamlessly with the more thrusting, gutsy, dynamic approach of Lloyd and Davis. At the same time, he has clearly nailed what Patrick Troughton is all about – the Doctor’s line that “confusion is best left to the experts” is delightful, as is “I’m sure there’s no need to be scared... well, I think there is.” This Doctor never seems certain that what he’s going to do will work (as opposed to the Hartnell Doctor’s certainty that his intelligence would prevail), which makes him charming whilst concurrently upping the jeopardy. And how appropriate that the Doctor only decides to bugger off when he’s told he’s about to have an official position of authority bestowed upon him! He’s becoming more anti-establishment with every passing story.
Meanwhile, Jamie’s little bit of business with the all-singing, all-dancing colonists is great fun. Frazer Hines gamely throws himself into the comedy, and appears to stumble into a curious episode of Britain’s Got Talent that’s overseen by a mesmerisingly upbeat cheerleader. Despite the tits and teeth, it’s quite disturbing to hear the words of mental enslavement sung to us; the mind-control at work here is nauseating and peculiar even by Doctor Who standards.
This instalment is a charming ending to a lively tale that could have easily been formulaic, but performs the estimable trick of being thought-provoking, delightful, weird, exciting and frightening. It could almost be the ultimate Doctor Who adventure.
I want to let everyone know how happy this story makes me. Ra-ra-ra!
March 21st
The Faceless Ones episode one
R: Having now established himself as an anarchic force, it’s frankly wonderful to see Troughton for the first time in a contemporary setting – and having to deal with the suffocating inertia of British bureaucracy. The growing frustration he feels as he’s asked to present his passport, and go through the proper channels to declare he’s seen a dead body, finally spills over into complete denial. The scene where he’s on the floor of the airport hangar looking for clues, utterly impervious to the thick sarcasm of the Commandant, is beautifully played.
And there’s great use of Jamie too. The reality of aeroplanes (“yon flying beasties!”, he calls them) is on the same level of his understanding as electrocution with ray guns. It’d be so easy to have written Jamie merely as someone who couldn’t understand what was going on, a sort of kilted Katarina. But the brilliance of his character is, perversely, he blithely takes everything in his stride – and so can’t differentiate between the technology of a contemporary Earth story and of a sci-fi adventure. The Doctor knows enough not to mention ray guns, but it’s all the same to Jamie – and so accidentally makes the Doctor’s story look ridiculous. It’s a terrific reversal of that repeat gag that has bothered me so much this season, that people are thick just because they’re from history – here Jamie assumes that if the Commandant can take flying beasties in his stride, he must be open to everything else too. But just because he’s from The Future, it doesn’t mean he’s smart.
It’s the first contemporary episode that feels deliberately odd. The War Machines went to such pains to establish some idea of normalcy, down to the Post Office Tower and famous newsreaders. The Faceless Ones pretends it’s doing something similar, showcasing an ordinary working airport, and contrasting the Doctor and his police box against it for comic effect – and then presents us with images of uniformed air crew producing futuristic weapons, and helping horribly scarred men up escalators. And for the first time in ages, there’s a genuine mystery as to what’s going on. It’s almost comical to see Donald Pickering (playing Blade – one of the Chameleons, a group of infiltrating aliens) fuss so much about postcards, and spend his time between kidnappings licking stamps. But in a series which usually makes its crises pretty obvious, episode one of The Faceless Ones provides lots of peculiar clues but no easy answers – and for once, you watch Doctor Who scratching you
r head and wondering what on Earth is happening. By the time it ends, you still can’t get a handle on what the tone of this new story can be, and that’s very refreshing.
T: The famed double-act of Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines has clearly clicked by this point, and there’s a telling – if unintended – subtext when Spencer (another of the Chameleons) snatches Polly while Troughton and Hines are seen walking away, looking so right together, unaware that she’s even gone. Hines is now a fully-fledged foil to Troughton, the latter issuing comedy kicks as the former keeps putting his foot into it.
If the last story was about clinging onto free will, this seems to be concerned with having your identity removed entirely. Seeing familiar old Polly denying who she is – and refusing to acknowledge her friends – is disconcerting, and very off-putting. But I find that the credit for this episode’s success lies more with the actors involved than writers David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke, because the script keeps giving people naff stuff to do. After Blade decides not to kill the Doctor because the authorities won’t believe him (surely, it would be sensible to do so anyway, just to be sure?), he tells Spencer, “We’ll gain nothing by questioning [Polly].” Sorry, what? If he means there’s nothing to gain but answers to his questions, then yes, I suppose he’s right.
Still, I won’t let a couple of slips mar my enjoyment of this. It’s moody, it’s interesting and it’s funny. The setting really works, especially as the aeroplanes aren’t just taken from stock footage. The villains are particularly good – Victor Winding is low-key and emotionless without being wooden as Spencer, and Donald Pickering’s Blade positively ices up the screen; there’s a really bold and eerie moment where he stares directly at us through the lens. And for ages, the only copy I had of this was an edited Australian print that lacked Gascoigne’s death and most of the Chameleon stuff, so those lingering close-ups of the scabby hands – included in this uncut version I now possess – are rather novel and exciting to me. It’s a simple but impressive make-up job, the gnarled mitts impressively contriving to be both scary and pathetic. (And it’s just typical that with so much of this era gone entirely, we here have an episode that escaped the junkings twice. It’s like when you haven’t worked for a while, then get offered three jobs on the same day.)
Oh, and I should mention something that Victor Winding himself once pointed out to me – when Spencer goes into his office after murdering the copper, the door handle comes off in his hand, but he blithely carries on and places it on the table. Colin Gordon (playing the Commandant) was apparently shocked when this happened, because he hadn’t really done TV in an electronic studio before, and couldn’t believe how rarely it afforded the opportunity for retakes.
Anyway, I’m enjoying this – the final shot may be in a medical centre, but the series itself is in rude health.
The Faceless Ones episode two
R: The Doctor pretends that his rubber ball is a bomb, and throws it around an airport for comic effect. My God. You’d never get away with that nowadays on children’s television. That’s a sign of how times have changed...
Anneke Wills and Michael Craze here log their final week of work on the series. We last glimpse Polly unconscious in a packing case, and Ben frozen by a ray gun – neither what you’d call very auspicious departures. (We do glimpse them again in episode six, in a prerecorded bit that’s intended to make their farewell “proper”, but effectively both are being written off as abruptly as Jackie Lane’s Dodo.) What’s interesting is the way that just as the production team were determined to make Lane as unsympathetic as possible – all posh and stuck-up – in her final episode, they do the same here. And just as this was done in The War Machines to throw new girl Anneke Wills into a good light, here it’s Wills being obnoxious to Pauline Collins. There’s almost an aura around Collins’ Samantha Briggs – a young woman looking for her lost brother, who is given spunk, a no-nonsense wit, determination, loyalty, the opportunity to flirt with Jamie and the honour of solving the postcard mystery. She’s so clearly being groomed for a role as replacement companion. I like her a lot. I don’t like her big hat, mind you. It’ll have to go, or I don’t think she’ll last the course.
The postcard scam the Chameleons are perpetrating is one of those wonderful bits of plot which seem extremely clever at first, then rather contrived and unworkable the more you think about it – and then, ultimately, rather clever again, and for that very reason. It’s perfect Doctor Who imagination, then. Basically, the scheme entails the Chameleons suggesting to all of their passengers that they write postcards to their family before they even arrive at the destination, and they’ll take care of the bother of sending them out later themselves. It’s utterly daft that people go along with it – and yet, and yet... because the flights are targeted at the Club Med-type age group, you can just about buy it as an especially smart comment on the indolence of modern youth. It asks the audience to accept an awful lot – and especially that this trick works time and time again on so many flights, and only ever one Liver Bird and one pipe-smoking detective ever think to investigate it – but it’s not just a plot contrivance, it’s also funny.
As is the terrific scene where the Doctor, Ben and Jamie have a council of war hiding from the authorities in a photo booth – only to pose with wide smiles if a customer thinks to pull the curtain. Cramped on top of each other like that, it’s what travelling in a blue police box ought to be like.
T: I dunno... you’re jumping the gun a bit with Ben and Polly, aren’t you? You’re mainly using benefit of hindsight; there’s nothing in this story yet to convince us that it’s pretty much the last we’ll see of them. (For all we know at this point, they could wake up inside their packing crates next week and solve the mystery.) And it’s quite a nice episode for Michael Craze, who looks as though he’s going to make a breakthrough and rescue Polly, but then gets zapped. I will grant that it’s pretty ignominious that his last line of dialogue is delivered via a small monitor in the corner of the screen, but it’s quite horrifying having the Doctor watching Ben being overcome, impotently unable to do anything about it.
I really don’t understand why Innes Lloyd was so bloody merciless when it came to dispensing with the regular cast members – sacking you is one thing, but shoving you out in episode two of a six-part adventure seems a bit rude. It also means that Anneke Wills spends her final minutes on the show either playing a character who’s not the real Polly, or playing the genuine article as she’s shoved in a box in a trance. It’s hardly the ideal way to spend her last week at work on the series, and it must have left a nasty taste in the mouth.
But, I am heartened because Troughton uses the word “smithereens”! (I love the word “smithereens”.) There’s also a really clever bit where the Chameleon named Meadows knows a piece of information (that he’s moved house) that isn’t on his counterpart’s records – it lets the audience know that the Chameleons don’t learn stuff about their victims by rote, but that they’ve actually assimilated the information, somehow, from the minds of those they impersonate. And prior to this, there’s another lovely moment where he gets used to speaking, and a dial is twiddled to sharpen his language skills. This is hardly a faultless script, but the writers are clearly thinking about the scientific elements of the fiction.
And I just remembered – didn’t you comment, Rob, that you’re not fond of Sam’s hat? So (dare I say it?), are you saying you wouldn’t like a hat like that, then?
March 22nd
The Faceless Ones episode three
R: Bernard Kay is rather fun in this as Inspector Crossland; he makes a spirited attempt at a Scottish accent, and sometimes gets away with it. Is this the first time that an actor has appeared in the series for three different guest star parts? (Dallas Cavell really doesn’t count, does he?) I haven’t really been keeping track – Toby, do you know? What I love about Kay is that every time he appears, he plays another character entirely – there’s nothing to link his amiable Crossland, doing lots of lovel
y acting business with where to put his pipe, with the angry Tyler from The Dalek Invasion of Earth or the dangerously self-controlled Saladin from The Crusade. He’s utterly out of his depth here, encouraging the Doctor to have free run of the airport with the sort of benign patience that can only mean he hasn’t followed a word that the Doctor’s been claiming, or warning a couple of aliens about the long arm of the law. (“I don’t think it’ll quite reach where you’re going,” deadpans Donald Pickering smoothly.)
T: To answer your question... Tutte Lemkow did, of course, have three roles in the Hartnell era, but they weren’t exactly huge (he was relegated to playing shifty foreign nutters with various bits of their anatomy missing – still, it’s a living). Bernard Kay is a far more versatile and brilliant actor – he’s one of my absolute favourites. I especially love the Scottish accent he uses here – there’s no scripted reason for him to do it (or the pipe, for that matter), it’s just him putting some effort into thinking about character, as you expect actors to do. Kay’s approach to the part also allows Troughton a lovely little moment of emphasis when he says “Scotland Yard”.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 46
