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

by Robert Shearman

  And there are some great moments. The social awkwardness of Clent, trying to express just how much he’s come to value the Doctor – Peter Barkworth is quite brilliant in this scene. The casual cruelty of Storr’s death, as the Ice Warriors assess his uselessness and dispose of him so peremptorily that their victim has only seconds to realise his life is in danger. The eagerness that Angus Lennie (as Storr) shows when finding in Frazer Hines a soulmate, someone who also cannot understand the science of the base, and the way that he throws away his life trying to help this new friend. And, as ever, best of all, the calm authority with which Patrick Troughton takes on the responsibility of talking to the alien aggressors – firmly telling his frightened friends that he refuses to take weapons with him. That he looks in his fur coat just as primitive as the hapless Storr, and that he too is parroting the naïve belief that he can reason with the Martians, can hardly be lost on us.

  T: This adventure continues to run the whole gamut of philosophical issues, using what could have been a bog-standard contest with some reptile men to focus on weighty issues such as science versus nature, technology versus humanity and man verses alien. Clent in particular is something of a marvel; lesser writers would have made him either an obstinate figure with whom the Doctor butts heads, or a helpful, sympathetic leader – yet in one scene here, he’s both. He bullies Victoria in his efforts to find out what type of engines the Martian spacecraft uses – part of an effort to determine whether or not it’s safe to use the Ioniser against the encroaching glaciers. But then, when the Doctor says he’s going to personally investigate the matter, Clent gets all vulnerable and human – he can’t quite bring himself to make a rousing speech that will keep the Doctor from going, looks to Miss Garrett for help at one point and finally snaps out his acquiescence. I hate to think that the nuances of Peter Barkworth’s brilliant performance would have remained lost had these episodes not surfaced – Penley’s description of his former boss is great (“He’s got a printed circuit where his heart should be”), but Barkworth evolves the character into so much more than that.

  The chief drawback to all of this wonderful character texturing, for me at least, continues to be the scruffy Storr (whose name, by the way, sounds like the monikers of Martians to come). He’s a berk – someone who takes his anti-science views to such an extreme, he’s blinded to all reality and pragmatism about the topic, and ends up looking like a stupid idealist. In short, he’s an ill-educated loudmouth who gives the environmental lobby a bad name. Just look at how he chides Penley because the Martian weapons were “scientifically designed”. Well, duh – so’s your cooker, you numpty! I can’t help but feel that Storr isn’t in the story because he’s a serious component of the unfolding discussion about man’s relationship to technology – instead, I suspect he’s just there as collateral damage, someone the Ice Warriors can bump off to remind us of their cold matter-of-factness. And it does work in that regard – Martinus famously cast shorter actors here as the humans, and seeing Bresslaw tower over little Angus Lennie is visually impressive. Matters get sickeningly terrifying when Storr is caught between Zondal and Varga as if he’s a frightened rabbit, and they end up blasting him down after assessing his uselessness (or, rather, non-usefulness). In death, at least, Storr is a stark demonstration of the warriors’ dispassionate soldiery.

  Overall, I’m finding so much to like about this story. The sturdy, visually impressive sets look great on film, the chase scene is terrific, Bresslaw wonderfully looks like he’s having a kip (as his head sinks into his body carapace like a turtle), and there’s that superbly stylised music. It’s an ethereal female voice contrasted with the sudden chomping, clunking solidity of a... er, is it a glockenspiel? Well, it’s a voice and an instrument anyway, which work at odds to underline the themes of the story in a neatly distinct fashion.

  The Ice Warriors episode five

  R: Don’t get me wrong here, I’m really enjoying my journey through Troughtondom. But it may well be a mark of the fact that the series has by now given itself over entirely to monster-led sci-fi japes, that there are fewer genuinely stand-out performances given by guest actors any longer. The stories are falling into certain types, and therefore the characters do too – in principle, there’s little to distinguish General Cutler from Hobson to Leader Clent, they’re all gruff leaders of bases under siege. Looking back at The Moonbase, I wouldn’t necessarily fault Patrick Barr for his bland performance, because he merely played within the limits of the stereotype he was given.

  So when Peter Barkworth gives his take upon a similar role, the fact that he mines so much from it is extraordinary. He’s playing a man in an impossible situation, and goes from grim resolve to dreadful panic within moments. In one scene he’s attacked by Penley for giving up hope, and then attacked by him minutes later because he’s too hopeful. It’d be so easy for Clent by now to be nothing more than a series of tics – and we’ve seen so many characters recently descend quickly into insanity (Cutler, Lesterson, Maxtible, Klieg) that we’re quite prepared to add another loony to the list. But it’s the way that Barkworth ferociously holds onto his character’s dignity that is so impressive, sometimes in spite of the script. There’s that very funny moment when he tries to rally his troops about him, only to be met by flat indifference from Walters – and Barkworth makes this attempt at optimistic cheerleading something that is genuinely touching. He makes the indecision of the character come to life quite brilliantly, understanding full well that any course of action he follows could be considered suicide. By this stage we can see perfectly clearly how the story must end, that the Ice Warriors can only be defeated if Clent pulls himself together and uses the Ioniser – and all these outbursts of angst are just delaying the inevitable. But Barkworth makes his agonies feel like a real character journey. And that’s helped by the terrific encounter he has with Peter Sallis’ Penley. Both Penley and Clent have spent so much time demonising the other, it’s a jolt to realise this is the first scene they share on screen together.

  I think Brian Hayles’ script is so clever and thoughtful too – it’s a story about the dangers of inaction (rather like the Yeti story was a month ago), but that it makes passivity so exciting is really rather an achievement. The Ice Warriors is a bit like The Moonbase, but with greater exploration of the themes it raises. Like the Cyberman story, it’s all focussed around a weather-controlling device being threatened by a bunch of monsters – and how, in the end, turning the device upon those monsters will win the day. But whereas the only dilemma The Moonbase offers is in the practical difficulty of how to play the Gravitron upon the lunar surface (done in the end by pressing a button they’d forgotten – phew, that’s okay then), with only lip service paid to the environmental dangers that might cause, The Ice Warriors is all about being given the solution to the problem and then not having the guts to implement it. In that way, the familiarity of the setting and the predictability of the plot are being acknowledged and discussed. This is The Moonbase rewritten with brains.

  It’s not all furrowed brows, though. Troughton at last gets to act off the big reptile monsters – and his first instinct upon seeing the giants, to run in the other direction, is very funny. And the scene he plays with Deborah Watling, plotting the use of a stink bomb as Victoria pretends to cry and he blows his nose, is a perfect bit of comedy.

  T: Well, thanks for doing your job so well... you haven’t left me with an awful lot to say, have you? So, all right, let’s talk about the Ice Warrior costumes. They’re imposingly bulky yet manoeuvrable, very sturdy looking and convincingly alien. It’s a conundrum, though, as to where the armour stops and the warrior begins. Their outer shells look like genuine reptilian outer casings, but the helmets do seem to be just that – helmets. They’re wired up for starters, and we can see the mouth below. So unless the only thing they wear is a hat, surely their main carapaces must be armour too? And yet, the armour seems hairy at the top – who wears hairy armour? And their hands must be gloves, as they have
a laser gun attached. So is everything we see armour, apart from the space for their mouths? It must be, in which case, we’ve got to ask by what quirk of Martian culture they made their armour to look reptilian. (Human armour, after all, usually doesn’t try to pretend to be skin.) Or (I’m getting an idea here), maybe they augmented themselves and are effectively cyber-reptiles, with technology grafted onto their heads and a gun onto their hands. Unless the new series revisits the warriors, we might never get a proper answer to these questions, but either way – it’s a stunning and iconic design, isn’t it?

  Otherwise, the plot continues to give us an expertly crafted dilemma. It’s a brilliant damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario where the central dilemma boils down to “Act against the aggressors and you might die; don’t act and... well, you’ll probably die.” It allows all the characters involved to flourish, and the scene between Clent and Penley is especially marvellous – Barkworth aims certain barbs directly at Sallis, then opens out the argument and uses as a propaganda speech to underline his authority and undermine Penley’s position. This man would be brilliant in the boardroom (playing some form of, I dunno, Power Game perhaps). Miss Garrett is interesting too – the admiration that she displays for the central computer contains such reverence that it borders on the worshipful, and makes her seem automaton-like.

  One character that’s usually overlooked, though, is the cynical Walters, whose regional accent is quite rare at this point in the series. When Clent suggests that Walters didn’t expect he’d be dealing with ice monsters when he volunteered for his job, Walters’ response – that he didn’t volunteer actually, but was drafted – echoes a similar exchange in the M.A.S.H. movie, so acclaimed for its satire. And yet, little old Doctor Who had already done it three years earlier.

  April 4th

  The Ice Warriors episode six

  R: It’s an episode of tough decisions. Penley operating the Ioniser, and risking a huge explosion, echoes the Doctor firing the sonic cannon and risking the death of Jamie and the other humans. And if inevitably the fact that we only get the best-case scenario is something of an anticlimax, there’s enough honest angsting over the dilemmas to disguise that. We’ve had so many stories since Innes Lloyd has become producer about the superiority of man over machine, whether that’s been facing down Cyberman or WOTAN. And it’s nowhere better articulated than here, as Penley calmly takes responsibility for a decision that only Man can feel qualified to take. When asked to take a risk, Roy Skelton’s computer voice goes a little doolally, and sounds a bit like a child crumbling under the pressure of pretending to be an adult. However abrupt the conclusion might be, it’s satisfying and life-affirming.

  It’s interesting too that in the final act it’s Penley who takes the lead – the Doctor surrogate rather than the Doctor. We’ve had to get used to that a lot in the latter Hartnell stories, where the production team sidelined the Doctor altogether; it was a sign of no confidence in their leading man. Here it’s exactly the opposite. Troughton’s Doctor is so assured now that the plot doesn’t need to assert him unnecessarily – he can stand back for the good of the story without compromising himself. Indeed, it offers a conclusion in which we don’t even get to see the Doctor making an exit round, either saying goodbye or sidling away. As Penley and Clent put their differences to one side, the regulars are already off set, their jobs done, ready to embark on another adventure – and we hear the sound of the TARDIS (impossibly) over the scene as if to suggest they’re already impatient to move on. (I’d like to pretend that the end credits coming on too early, poised to start rolling, is another sign of that. But that’d be pushing it a bit.)

  T: What’s most interesting about this final instalment is the way the script allows Bernard Bresslaw to fully morph Varga from being an imposing alligator person into a fully formed character. He isn’t just ruthless, he’s snidely superior during his face-off with Clent, responding as he does to the man’s brinkmanship with a blunt and dismissive: “I will tell you what I want, and you will give it to me.” Then things really get engaged as Clent appeals to the Martian’s better nature – saying the humans within the base will soon perish if the warriors leave it without power as planned – whereupon Varga starkly replies, “Whereas we would not.” And there’s even a bit of Martian black humour when Clent says Varga will regret what he’s doing, and Varga says, “At least I will live to regret it...” It’s marvellous how this intense confrontation boils down to a hobbling base-leader who has to deal with the intruders with finesse lest they decide he’s expendable and shoot him, and a tall green reptile played by a whispering actor sweating under a mask.

  All in all, Martinus’ direction has been typically strong – the quick cross-fading as the Martians and humans writhe in agony from the Doctor’s sonic-cannon attack is a typically impressive flourish, and it’s also quite shocking and grim when Walters dies with his eyes open. (That’s a change from the book, incidentally, in which he isn’t first stunned by Miss Garrett. Instead, the Ice Warriors walk in as Walters is attacking the computer and gun him down, sparing him the indignity of being shot twice.)

  What an excellent adventure – I wholeheartedly applaud its message about humanity winning through over technology, but did have a chuckle at the line “The computer says no.” (Thanks to Little Britain, this sticks out a bit more that it once would have.) And it’s not lost on me that I’m writing these words about Man triumphing over machine as I’m watching this story on a portable laptop that contains entire seasons of Doctor Who, during a train journey (London to Manchester in two hours and eight minutes) and then will send these words for editing and review to my friend Rob – who is in a different city – in a matter of seconds, thanks to an information superway of linked computers. Yeah, bloody machines. Who needs ‘em?

  The Enemy of the World episode one

  R: “Och,” says Jamie, in irritation, “does he think we’re children?” The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS, is delighted to find he’s on a beach, and wants to go paddling and build sandcastles. And within minutes, he finds out he’s not in a children’s TV serial after all, but something much grittier, with helicopters exploding and men firing guns at them from hovercrafts. It’s so nasty and so paranoid, and it feels like it’s a world apart from the cheerful sci-fi show which tries to send kids hiding behind sofas from the big, bad monsters. It’s telling that the Doctor has a very different attitude here than he would in most of his adventures, slyly refusing to trust Astrid Ferrier even after she’s saved them from certain death, getting angry and demanding to know what she expects in return. It’s quite clear that David Whitaker has plunged us into an adventure in which no-one acts just for the common good and there’s no such thing as a good Samaritan; there’s a world leader who’s trying to save people from starvation, but that instantly suggests it can only be because he’s a dictator in the making. There’s such a contrast here between the happy-go-lucky Doctor who behaves like an infant wanting a swim in the sea, and the suspicious Doctor who instantly sniffs out the darker self-interest of everyone he meets. In a normal adventure he’d accept the fears of Giles Kent – a discredited security officer – on trust, or get the same sort of prickling sensation on his skin he feels around Daleks. Here evil is rather more nebulous – and, indeed, of all the characters we encounter, it’s Kent who’s immediately the most duplicitous, contacting his successor Donald Bruce to force the Doctor to adopt the identity of Salamander (a statesman and would-be saviour of the world, who might have aims of being a dictator) early on.

  So this is all very different to what we’ve seen before. We get a helicopter, and we get a hovercraft – it is the directorial debut of Barry Letts, after all! – and in style it’s closest to the first season of Pertwee, and in particular to Whitaker’s own swan song, The Ambassadors of Death. And though Letts provides a hugely enjoyable action episode, with lots of shooting and running and falling over, you get the sense that all the energy he’s putting in is partly to conceal t
he fact that this whole thing is really rather out of sync with where Doctor Who has been heading – the odd mention of ice and Ionisers are there not just as pieces of continuity, but as reminders to the audience that this is the same programme.

  As a sort of James Bond pastiche, this is rather successful. The sequence in which Giles Kent shows the Doctor a series of slides of Salamander’s victims is surprisingly chilling (one photograph shows a man backing away from an assailant in very real fear). There is an atmosphere of real world menace here; Donald Bruce’s bullying of Giles Kent, as he asks him to refer to him by the security position he has taken away from him, is just one example of subtle writing. The cliffhanger is smashing, and indicative of the episode’s tone as a whole – Bruce confronts the Doctor as he attempts a hasty impersonation of Salamander, and we’re on the edge of our seats, waiting to see where the lies within lies will take us next. There’s no real threat, but gripping suspense.

  T: It’s certainly different, I’ll give you that. Really, it’s an episode of two halves: the opening is an all-location extravaganza with loads of action but little plot, the second is a mass info-dump in a room. Whatever Letts might have done with the initial action sequences, however, it’s a bit spoiled by the fact that Astrid and the thugs Rod, Curly and Anton are all working for Giles Kent, but they’re trying to kill her as well as the Doctor’s party. No explanation is given for this (are they so overzealous to assassinate Salamander that they don’t stop to think that Astrid might be taking him into custody, or do they think she’s switched sides – what, exactly?), and I know that if I have a difference of opinion with a work colleague, we tend to stop short of shooting one another. Still, it’s hard to argue with the action-packed kick-off, which entails some impressive hardware (there’s a great telesnap of the hovercraft in action, with Rod lying on the side firing his gun), and some aerial shots which demonstrate a cunning use of the helicopter, both on and off screen.