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

by Robert Shearman

  Outside of the regulars, we have a story that’s trying to establish itself. The unrealistic nature of the sets is for once a bonus, especially as they depict such a wonderful idea as the Forest of Words. I applaud the design of the Toy Soldiers too – they have the visual flair and comforting solidity of a Dinky toy, augmented with a menacing expression and an inexorable and frighteningly stiff gait. And the human-looking characters that we meet in this strange land are slightly offbeat to the point that it’s hard to read them. You can’t help but raise an eyebrow when the children say that the Doctor might be “suitable” (for what we don’t know, but it’s presumably a job for which the chief qualification is to solve a simple world puzzle after much prompting from a bunch of precocious kids). Emrys Jones (as the shadowy Master of the Land) seems to be channel the spirit of Wolfe Morris as he alternates between soft, benign sounding utterances and evil, whispered commands. And hooray for Bernard Horsfall, who besides being instantly trustworthy gives the impression at times that he’s getting instructions or information inside his head. He’s likeable enough, but we can’t be sure yet whether he’s an actual person, an android, or something altogether different.

  Incidentally, you’re wrong in that Horsfall is credited as “A Stranger” rather than “The Stranger”. I like the “A” – it seems an altogether more literary denomination, and shows that a bit of thought has gone into the credits.

  April 20th

  The Mind Robber episode three

  R: After the barrage of new ideas thrown at us over the last two weeks, it’s a bit of a shock to find that in this episode there’s really... only the one. And it’s a clever idea, and potentially turns the entire series on its head. When Jamie finds a machine spewing out tickertape that is chronicling the Doctor’s adventures, the suggestion is made that as our heroes walk around this Land of Fiction, they’re just fictional themselves. In a way, why not? From the vantage point of 2009, when Doctor Who has now become a childhood hero that has inspired generations, that shares not only the time slot of Robin Hood and Merlin but much of its iconic appeal, this all makes perfect sense. I’m reminded of that moment (that so incensed fans without a sense of humour) in Steven Moffat’s 1999 Comic Relief story, The Curse of Fatal Death. In that, when presented with the idea that the Doctor is finally dead, the companion Emma pleads for him to survive: “You’re like Father Christmas! The Wizard of Oz! Scooby Doo!” And in The Mind Robber too, we’ve got the concept suddenly of the Doctor adventuring through time and space being of the same make-up as Sir Lancelot and D’Artagnan. He’s not just a character of children’s fiction any more, he’s one of children’s fiction’s giants. The unease that Troughton feels as he edges deeper into the labyrinth – why exactly does the Master want him so badly? – is surely that deep down, there’s that sensation that the Doctor isn’t actually real.

  If you had to end the series – and let’s face it, at this stage it’s on the cards – how might it have played out? That instead of revealing that the Doctor is on the run from a race called the Time Lords (about whom we’ve never heard mention of before), there’s the suggestion that he’s a beloved and unforgettable character of family television. To quote the back cover of many an early Target novelisation, he’s the children’s own hero that adults adore. The series makes the decision in what may be its final gasp to push outwards into science fiction, and answer the mysteries of Doctor Who in a pretty prosaic way. (To be fair, it did ensure the programme’s survival!) But at this stage, when everything’s still up for grabs, before the Master becomes a psychopath with a beard from the Doctor’s own race and is instead a strange magical storyteller directing the Doctor’s adventures, there’s something very persuasive about the weird turn into surrealism that’s being presented here. It is, after all, the same sort of solution given to TV series as diverse as The Prisoner or Life on Mars – that all we’ve taken for granted is but a fictional construct. It’s the story of a man who can change his face and personality travelling through time and space in a police box fighting monsters – it’s no less fantastical than any other character the Doctor is now meeting, and there’s so much sense to the idea that this is a fantasy too. The failure of The Mind Robber is that this isn’t the end – that it’s just another serial in an ongoing series – but I’d suggest that to contemporary viewers that sequence where Jamie finds out that the Doctor’s adventures are coming from a writing machine is revolutionary. “It doesn’t exist!” the Doctor will say to the unicorn, and then to the minotaur, and now to Medusa. What would happen to the Doctor, I wonder, if Medusa said it to him?

  T: Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap... “Rob sent Toby a very clever treatise on Doctor Who’s contemporary position as a classic children’s fictional icon. As Toby tried to think of something witty and clever to write back, Jeremy Kyle’s voice blared through the thin walls of his terraced house, as Toby’s hard-of-hearing neighbour regularly whiled away the lonely hours with such drivel. No matter. Toby was watching The Mind Robber episode three, an entirely different kind of fictional construct.” Tap-tap-tap...

  Tap-tap-tap... “Toby wondered, with a sigh, quite why Christine Pirie – here playing Rapunzel – never did anything after this, as she was sweet and pretty and was bang on in pitching her performance like someone reading a children’s book. Toby was also very impressed by the stop-motion snakes on Medusa, the continued inventiveness of David Maloney’s direction, and the convincingly evocative fairytale nature of the location filming.” Tap-tap-tap...

  Tap-tap-tap... “Toby could not, however, escape the troubling feeling that once an original premise such as The Land of Fiction had been established, there didn’t seem an awful lot to do with it. The regulars had previously dismissed a menace by saying it didn’t exist – so, surely, that’s how they were going to escape from this latest one? Would every adversary the heroes encountered be overcome by the simple act of them marshalling their courage and pluck? Nonetheless, Toby revelled in this story’s originality, and mused on the [deep breath] concepts of fiction presenting fiction as fiction within a fact which the viewer knew was fictional.” Tap-tap-tap...

  Tap-tap-tap... “As Toby typed the words – which would go on to form a bestselling book which would be garlanded with awards and tremendous sales – he sank back in his chair as the entire Jeremy Kyle audience stood up as one, and, with a screeching caterwaul, hoisted the posturing weasel aloft and impaled him on his own microphone. He wept for mercy and apologised to his guests, the nation and the whole of British television before expiring in front of a record-breaking audience...”

  Tap-tap-tap... “Toby then sent this portion of the text to his friend Robert Shearman, who had just received postal notice from Buckingham Palace of their intentions to knight him for services to literature.”

  [Send]

  The Mind Robber episode four

  R: Emrys Jones gives a lovely performance as the Master, at one point fawning over the Doctor in a gentle elderly voice as if he’s a long admiring fan – then becoming harsh and alien when issuing orders. It’s rather clever, and does, as you’ve somewhat suggested, feel like a deliberate parody of Padmasambhava from The Abominable Snowmen, with a schizophrenic being controlled by an unnamed Intelligence. The Doctor may be concerned that his fate is to become fiction, but it seems that the production team are already taking familiar elements from his adventures and using them against him. (And there’s more of that to come next week!) The wonderful cleaned-up version on the DVD also reveals that there’s a strange white piece of thick spittle hanging at the corner of Emrys Jones’ mouth; at first I thought it was accidental, but it’s always there, and I think it’s a subtle indication that there’s something rather repellent about what’s happened to the poor writer whose imagination is being siphoned off, as if for all his good manners he’s something like a zombie.

  But Toby has pointed out many, many times that I read things into these episodes that aren’t intended. I can’t wait to see whether somebody in the make-u
p department has taken a tissue to Emrys Jones by next week’s instalment, and wiped away the hanging gobbet of phlegm. If it’s gone, I’ll concede I’m a pretentious git, and buy Toby a doughnut.

  Wendy Padbury gets her best moment of the series yet, when she so cheerfully bests the Karkus with a lot of judo. Zoe is clearly having the time of her life tackling a cartoon character she’s enjoyed from her childhood, and Padbury at last has the opportunity to make Zoe a little more human and likeable. The whole scene is a joy – especially when the Doctor tries to get in on the action, but, failing to recognise the Karkus as fictional, is simply flung to one side. She also gets her worst moment of the series yet, walking through an alarmed door she’s only minutes before been warned about, and getting everybody captured. But you see, I might argue that by doing so she’s merely being part of the parody of Doctor Who, and that it’s really rather a clever comment on Peter Ling’s part upon the cliché of the clumsy companion. That’s the problem with The Mind Robber – you can’t be sure whether the sloppiness may not just be part of the point. (It all rests upon that spittle coming out of Emrys Jones’ mouth. If it’s there, the whole thing is intentional. If it’s not, I’ll shrug and admit defeat.)

  The Master has been captured because, in 25 years, he produced half a million words. What a lightweight! The way things are going, Toby and I will turn out about three times that number with this diary alone – and we’ve only got the end of the year to finish it!

  T: I’m on Weight Watchers again, so could I have a rice cake instead of a doughnut? The diet is my own choice entirely, in a “go on Weight Watchers or I won’t marry you” kind of way (weigh?). Regardless, your ability to read things into episodes that weren’t intended has gone loopy even by your standards – that isn’t a deliberate glob on Jones, it’s stray spittle without subtext. It’s quite distracting, and makes me want to invent time travel just so I can go back and give him a hanky.

  What is a deliberate policy of non-realism, however, is the excellent set design of Evan Hercules (and isn’t that a fantastic name?). It conjures up pages of fiction and children’s toyboxes with a deliberate, clunky hyper-unrealism – I particularly love the overly creaky door, which draws attention to itself as the ultimate cliché in creepy literature. Conversely, I’m afraid I found the fight with the Karkus less convincing than you did – it’s very clumsily staged, and entails Wendy Padbury, in-between throws, shoehorning in references to which “move” she’s using.

  It doesn’t really matter, though, because The Mind Robber continues to have such a dazzling premise, I can forgive so many of its shortcomings. It tells the story at quite a lick (“My, what short episodes you have...”), and there’s a verve about the production from cast and camera alike. And what an incredible episode ending, as two beloved characters – Jamie and Zoe – are backed into an overgrown book that shuts on them. It’s an image that’s magnificent, exciting, terrifying and utterly bonkers all at once – in short, it’s everything Doctor Who is supposed to be.

  I hope Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert were watching this. They’ll have approved – and that’s a fact.

  April 21st

  The Mind Robber episode five

  R: Okay. I owe you a rice cake.

  But, do you know, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s accidental or not – there’s still something disturbing about episode four’s Master foaming at the mouth. Just as all the things that people often criticise this final instalment for (the way it reverts to being just another Earth invasion story, and that it’s only got about 16 minutes’ worth of action) also seem to me to be saying something rather clever, even if it wasn’t the production team’s intention.

  Let’s take that plot first. Last week, I thought there was a parody of The Abominable Snowmen going on. And this week, it’s everything else! We’ve got a Jamie and a Zoe who are fictionalised – but behave (and are treated by the Doctor) as if they’re merely possessed. We’ve seen so much possession in Troughton’s run of stories that it seems apt to have it pop up again, but this time it’s eerier because it’s so skewed; the look of childish mischief on Hines and Padbury’s faces as they rub their hands with glee and bend double like little kids is so much more sinister in this fairytale form. (And as a result, the pathos of Troughton realising that his best friends have become nothing more than two-dimensional stereotypes – who parrot nothing but the same lines over and over – is all the more moving too.) The Master Brain’s cunning plan, to turn all mankind into a uniform race without individuality, is exactly the modus operandi of the generic Troughton monster, the Cybermen – and, of course, the villains waiting in the wings of the very next story. And the way that the Doctor is put inside a machine that’ll feed off his brain, and the way he turns that against it, is a replay of The Web of Fear. We’re being shown Doctor Who, sixties style, in cartoon format. And the brilliance of it all is that it doesn’t come across as either funny or a bit cynical, but genuinely disconcerting. The story ends with a riff from The Evil of the Daleks, as the robots destroy their own world – and it’s so utterly chaotic that it feels like a strange nightmare take on what the viewers have come to expect from Doctor Who. Even the abruptness of all this, and that the story finishes nearly ten minutes early, seems like a comment upon the way these Doctor Who adventures play out. At the end of the day, when the Doctor meets the villain, it’ll always be about some sort of attempt to enslave the Earth, and how the Doctor wins through in the nick of time. We know the procedure, The Mind Robber tells us. Here it is, in sped-up form, without all the pretence this is anything you’ve not seen before. If this is all a dream that the Doctor and his friends are having, then what else would they be dreaming about?

  I adore the way that Emrys Jones so gently pleads with the machine-intelligence speaking through his own voice not to destroy the Doctor – who is his only way out of writing’s drudgery. (I worked on Crossroads too, you know, so I understand where Peter Ling’s little fable about the way soap opera drains your imagination is coming from. And I was only on it for a couple of weeks!) I love that image of the Doctor lured into the TARDIS, only for the front side to fall away as a prop, revealing him (impossibly) already imprisoned – I love the cruelty of the children watching his misadventure laughing at the funny little man in peril and pressing their noses against the glass. It’s all about the way that you keep on trying to feed the audience, and that there’s never an end to it – Doctor Who going on, story after story, for years and years. For the first and only time, after the credits have ended, and the director’s name has come up, we get a caption saying, “Next Week: The Invasion.” That it’s just “the invasion” without any more description than that – so blunt, so unadorned – seems almost part of this story’s joke.

  T: The final battle between the Doctor and the Master of the Land helps to fulfill, just a little, Sydney Newman’s educational remit by having all sorts of fictional characters scrapping. (And it’s a good swordfight too – fight-arranger John Greenwood was pretty highly thought of in his field, so well done to Maloney for securing his services.) It’s all very charming and delightful, and if there’s a shame about this closing episode, it’s only that Peter Ling felt compelled to abandon surreal whimsy and resort to the old Earth invasion cliché. This might have worked if it had been a clever comment on the nature of fiction within the Doctor Who format, but the implication seems to be that a world of ideas isn’t enough – a more tangible threat is required. It’s not all that bad, though, because the threat to bring humanity into the Land means that we get to hear Troughton talk about how mankind would become “a string of sausages”.

  What a beguiling and strange adventure this has been. It’s a testament to the skill of everyone involved that this story isn’t a heap of childish twaddle, but actually has weight and requisite levels of jeopardy. If the idea behind this story is ridiculous, nobody is behaving ridiculously. Troughton is magnificent as usual, and Emrys Jones is convincing as both the sweet, rather char
ming old writer and the direct, powerful voice of the Master Brain. And it’s an adorable touch that he’s been carrying around a copy of the Ensign in his pocket for all these years, just in case he needs a visual representation of his achievements. (Go on, Rob, tell me you have a copy of The Chimes of Midnight secreted about your person, to flourish on social occasions!)

  And it’s all capped off by such a peculiar, abrupt ending. Was it a dream? Who knows? Lesser works of fiction have used a dream to over-ride an entire swath of stories, so why not this one? Let’s hope they stop short of having someone wake up tomorrow, only to find a very much alive William Hartnell in the shower...

  The Invasion episode one

  R: We’re out of The Land of Fiction – but suddenly everything’s animated!

  Obviously, I know the fact that The Invasion was released on DVD with its two missing episodes in cartoon form wasn’t a deliberate follow-on from The Mind Robber. But rather like the Sherwin-written intro to the last story helps the audience adjust from the ho-hum clichés of The Dominators to the fairytale chaos of The Land of Fiction, so the cartoon helps us find a gradual way into a gritty urban thriller. To viewers in 1968, they’ll have jumped straight into an episode that’s more brutal than they’d have been acclimatised to – the casual murder of the lorry driver, even as animation, is rather shocking. Cosgrove Hall have done a great job with their reconstruction – the way they’ve stylised the Doctor, for example, all sharp angles and eyebrows, doesn’t try to hide the fact that this is only an interpretation of what’s been missing from the archives, not an attempt to copy it.

  And I realise it’s probably heretical to say so – but I think I prefer it this way. On its own terms episode one of The Invasion is rather plodding. Our regulars hitch-hike their way into London, and the Doctor decides to check out his old friend Professor Travers to see if he’s up to fixing the TARDIS circuits. Zoe isn’t too bothered by this rather run-of-the-mill quest of his, so puts on a feather boa for the first airheaded photographer she meets – and the Doctor and Jamie run into some very slight bother with bureaucracy. But the animation makes all of this seem odd. What looked routine on the page now seems skewed. The long sequences with the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe in the back of a lorry are now very tense, their big eyes looking out at us in confusion. The Doctor’s tirade against an answering phone service no longer feels like a bit of padding; in cartoon form, it feels broader and funnier, as it’s become a pixie-like image of anarchy getting frustrated beyond measure with the inconveniences of everyday life. And Tobias Vaughn (the electronics tycoon working with unseen allies towards the conquest of Earth) and his henchman Packer are more sinister – the smile that Packer gives in anticipation of violence much more deliberate when it’s been a choice made by the animators, the twinkle in Vaughn’s eye as he reveals his alien ally hiding in his cupboard much more triumphant than anything recorded in a sixties studio could have given us.