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

by Robert Shearman

  That’s a point, actually – oddly enough, The Krotons is one of the few stories from this era in which most of the principal guest cast are still alive. Indeed, you have to get quite near the bottom of the list (i.e. voice actor Patrick Tull, who had a decent career in the USA after this) to find someone who is no longer with us. I have to plead ignorance regarding the Kroton operators and some of the cast (Madeleine Mills, Maurice Selwyn and Bronson Shaw), but the potential here for interviews and such is better than it is with some stories. I’ve been knocking wood lately regarding some of our more venerable actors – even since we started this quest, we’ve lost Laurence Payne and John Cater. At least Payne got an obituary in The Guardian; Cater hasn’t, yet. A few years ago, I’d have done it myself, but – it shames me to say – I no longer have the time to do as good a job on such things as I’d like.

  [Toby’s addendum: Shortly after this entry was written, Cater got a very good obituary in The Guardian. Sadly, the cast of The Krotons was latterly depleted when James Cairncross died in December 2009. Please excuse that Rob didn’t know this when he wrote the next entry about Beta living on borrowed time...]

  April 27th

  The Krotons episode four

  R: There’s one truly delightful scene in which Beta demonstrates a gorgeous disregard for life and limb as he throws himself into experimenting at chemistry with gusto. It’s not just that James Cairncross reveals a gift for comic underplay that you’d never have guessed from The Reign of Terror – although it’s really lovely – but more that this is all actually about something. The joy of a scientist actually allowed at last to do scientific stuff, that this is what revolution means to people who’ve had their intellects quashed by the powers that be, is wholly infectious. (I mean, bless his heart, I don’t think Beta’s going to live much longer. Give him a week and he’ll be exploded all over the wasteland. But at least he’ll die smiling.)

  This has all the hallmarks of a final episode from a writer who hasn’t yet worked out how to do endings properly. Even the Doctor looks a bit embarrassed at the simple way in which he defeats the Krotons. But it’d be unfair to carp, when this is a story that feels quite deliberately as if it’s playing about with awkward aftermaths and the messiness of loose ends. On paper Eelek is an out-and-out villain, the one who happily sells out the Doctor and leaves him to die in the Dynotrope. In any ordinary adventure, he’d get a lethal comeuppance – but Holmes leaves him alive, someone that Thara will have to fight against if he’s going to gain any authority over the Gonds. I’ve not yet mentioned how good Philip Madoc is, but he takes a character that’s fundamentally a bit of a caricature and turns him into a real politician. In the space of one scene, he shifts the aims of his campaign twice: at first he rails against Selris for taking action against the Krotons (and cleverly uncovers a dead body in disgust at the waste of human life), then within a minute is rallying his troops to take action against the Krotons! Then out come the Krotons and Eelek changes tack again, becoming their collaborator. The brilliance of Madoc is that what could merely look like inconsistent characterisation seems instead like cunning opportunism. The only false note about him is that in the previous episode it’s said that nobody likes him – Madoc is so smooth and beguiling, I’d vote for him.

  T: Everyone I know is moaning about the value of their homes right now, so it’s appropriate that this gives us an indication of the value of Holmes. No, he’s not the finished article yet, but he based this storyline on an inventive premise, and he’s shown a flair for bending language and giving it an alien logic and consistency (“High Brains”, “dispersed”, “exhausted”) without it seeming hammy or ludicrous. The Krotons even refer to the Gonds’ organic shells (meaning their bodies!) as “waste matter”, a by-product to be disposed of once the energy has been sucked from their minds. That’s horrible! And yet, the Krotons aren’t being particularly mean, they’re just dispassionate in their desire to survive – I’d be much the same, I suppose, if I was stranded and starving after a plane crash, and happened upon a passing rabbit. Holmes also enjoys writing the eccentric, and James Cairncross is positively liberated by the barmy boffin lines he’s given here. He’s very funny in these scenes, even if his profound staring at the melting Dynotrope in his final shot is a little desperate and unconvincing.

  And like Holmes, David Maloney is in his salad days here – he hasn’t quite got to grips with seamlessly fitting all the technical stuff into a logical narrative. Nor has he got his eye on the other departments (quite why they felt the need to give Vana’s trousers an outer thong to accentuate her femininity is anyone’s guess). But the main complaint here is the lack of connection between the model shots and the live action – we saw the tiniest glimpse of the honeycomb of the Dynotrope in relation to the Gond city in a rubbish model shot in episode one, but nothing really substantial until the confusing close-ups of it melting now.

  So you could say that Holmes and Maloney are works in progress – much like this story, actually. But if The Krotons has been far from perfect, neither has it been a terrible calamity. It’s not been without a sense of fun, it’s had plenty of good ideas and it introduced us to Philip Madoc to boot! It’s much, much more worthy than the “received wisdom” suggests, so all hail The Krotons! (Besides, it tickles me that all these years later, I have a professional, financial relationship with the actors from this story. One might say that I’m entwined in the claws of Axus.)

  The Seeds of Death episode one

  R: This is clever stuff. Broadcast just a few months before the moon landings, when the world is full of hopes about the wonders of space exploration, Doctor Who returns to the moon. But only to reveal a society in which the moon has become nothing more than a glorified post office depot, and where people’s interest in travel to the stars dissipated years ago. In that way, it seems eerily to predict exactly what happened to NASA only a few years later. We’ve got futuristic people in futuristic clothes popping off in futuristic telemats – but they’re doing boring jobs to crippling deadlines for humourless bosses. And carry briefcases! That’s the image I most like – it’s of Harry Towb (as the station overseer Osgood) arriving for work, materialising out of thin air, with his commuter briefcase in his hands.

  Michael Ferguson smartly contrasts the sterility of the space age life with all the glorious artefacts found in Eldred’s museum. The charm and magic of reaching out for the stars has been taken away, and we can see with pictures of Gagarin and models of rockets exactly how the future has taken all our dreams and rubbed the shine off them. Ferguson’s camera work is rather tricksy: he’ll give us close-ups on actors’ faces whilst the ones who are speaking are lost out of focus, he’ll film a sequence with technical expert Gia Kelly talking where she’s entirely distorted behind a see-through panel. It so easily sounds like clumsiness, but it’s clearly intentional – these people are all a bit vague and out of focus, and the camera gives them what they deserve. The story suggests from the get go that Osgood will be a hero; he’s the only one who can make a joke, the only one who has any life to him. And the cruelty of that is that when he stands up to the aliens, he gets shot down instantly. The look on Towb’s face is priceless – it’s that of a man who thought he was going to be the hero too, and just lives long enough to be disillusioned.

  T: Like The Krotons, it’s very difficult for me to be objective about this one. The Seeds of Death was the first Doctor Who video I ever bought (from John Fitton Books and Magazines, as featured in Doctor Who Magazine, no less) – £48 it was, an absolute fortune. I devoured a preview in Doctor Who Magazine as I waited for the postman to deliver the tape – this was considerate enough to tell us pretty much how everyone died apart from crewman Phipps, I think. (Even this was helpfully spoiled, when someone later asked Matrix Data Bank for the episode endings, and so Phipps’ fate at the climax to episode four was revealed.) So, I knew a lot about this story even before it arrived. And while it was pricey, I just about got my money’s worth because as I watc
hed it over and over again. I can almost talk along to this (including Frazer Hines’ line “Look at the size of this one...” and Troughton’s murmured rejoinder, “Yes, it’s very large...”), so familiar is the dialogue. I even have the old BBC Video music playing in my head.

  But familiarity with this episode – as you can probably tell – hasn’t bred contempt, and I do think that much of it is clever and wonderful. Harry Towb was a bit of a name at the time, so you’d be within your rights to think that he’d spend the story being the grumpy base commander who locks horns with the Doctor – so it’s quite a shock when he gets wibbled to death! (It’s less jolting when Harvey, an unspeaking extra, gets the same treatment – when you’re played by Alan Chuntz, you should expect to get shot dead, and possibly to fall off something in the process.)

  In terms of the story overall, this works very well. Brian Hayles starts off with a concept, then asks himself what his story is about and grafts an adventure serial into it. To put it another way, he uses the fact that Doctor Who can posit different futures and technological advances, and creates jeopardy within that framework. And what a brilliant idea to show the contemporary, brave new world of the late 60s as being quaint and obsolete by the time of this adventure.

  Finally, I should mention that episode one as it stands on the DVD is far superior to the washed-out vagueness of the compilation video (you could tell when episode two arrived on the VHS, as the quality noticeably improved). I’m still not sure, however, if the images on the TARDIS scanner are meant to represent exhibits in Professor Eldred’s museum, or if the obvious pictures are just that: pictures. (We don’t see them, after all, when we eventually enter Eldred’s gaff.) Either way, the Doctor seems very excited about being in a Space Museum – he’s clearly forgotten what happened last time.

  April 28th

  The Seeds of Death episode two

  R: Earth society may have lost its interest in space travel, but the production team haven’t! This is mostly great, the first time that the Doctor becomes a hero just because he’s prepared to become an astronaut and fly in a rocket. I love the way that it’s very quickly established that the TARDIS just doesn’t fit into this world view of space exploration – that at this stage of the series it’s not a craft you can navigate, it’s just the wardrobe that can fling you into any number of random Narnias. So for the very first time in a programme which is all about visiting alien planets, we subject the regular cast to the real-life rigours and risks of outer space. It all looks perhaps a bit quaint nowadays, and very long-winded; but again, this is an adventure broadcast in the very same decade of Gagarin, and before Neil Armstrong set his giant step for mankind – if the episode hadn’t made the journey as painstaking as possible, they’d have been squandering it completely. We see the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe react to G-force, we see their lives threatened by homing beacon faults and communication problems – it’s the very first time since the TARDIS took off in An Unearthly Child that we see space travel as something remarkable and hazardous. Last week it was a couple of hissing Martians that caused all the story’s tension – this time there’s nothing more dramatic than the slow countdown to the launch, the numbers from the computer playing in reverse over Gia Kelly’s face, and the TARDIS crew inside the rocket looking cramped and scared.

  The Ice Warrior storyline is, as a result, comparatively filler this week. Michael Ferguson films some scenes from the floor, giving the Martians extra height and menace. And it’s quite a revelation that the slow lumbering Ice Warriors we met last year were clearly just the grunt soldiers – Slaar is much more elegant and mobile, and his skin wonderfully repulsive. The sequence where Christopher Coll (as Phipps) hides from one of the warriors by squeezing against a filing cabinet in full view is more than a little awkward – but I love it anyway, principally because after the warrior has left the room, Coll nips out and closes the door tidily behind him! That can’t help but make me chuckle, and turns a truly clumsy scene into something almost majestically silly.

  For all this, though, my favourite moment of the episode is that single portrait of Terry Scully as Fewsham, sitting glumly by the T-Mat reception, arms hanging limply. He’s a coward waiting miserably for the people he’s allowed to walk into a trap. It just says so much about his desperate fear, and his self-loathing knowledge that he wants to survive whatever the cost.

  T: I’d like to expand upon your point about the TARDIS, as I think it’s vitally important that it can’t help in these situations. For all the amazing properties it has, the Doctor’s Ship is essentially ramshackle; Jamie even remarks, when the rocket starts going haywire, that it’s as bad as the TARDIS. I like that about this series – it mocks its own icons and is wonderfully un-self important. I’ve lost count of the American shows where they set out in a spaceship that’s the most remarkable/up-to-date/best in the fleet vessel that’s available. The TARDIS needs to be a slightly temperamental, bodged, rather battered machine that never quite gets you where you need to go. (Unless, of course, plot expedience requires that it does – in which case it should, straight away, and with the minimum of fuss. Hey, I never said I was consistent.) So it’s well and proper that the Doctor’s party has to go to the moon via rocket. For that matter, I love Zoe’s stern reprimand as Earth control nags them for an answer when they’re trying to turn on the gravity, and Troughton’s frantic wafting of the ominous black smoke emerging from the panels.

  All of that said, the rocket plotline ran the risk of being desperately dull – so it’s fortunate that Ferguson keeps coming up with nifty visual tricks to keep all the jargon lively. The man loves quick cut close-ups and superimposition, and places his actors carefully. There’s a great shot of Slaar and an Ice Warrior in profile as Miss Kelly gets to work repairing T-Mat in the background, and the Warrior’s death benefits from an expert synthesis of camera wrangling and vision mixing. An odd lapse occurs, though, when Phipps hides behind what looks like a cooker – he doesn’t even bother to crouch or put the solar kettle thing on his head as a Warrior apparently stares right at him. It’s the worst hiding-in-plain-sight moment we’ve had since The Keys of Marinus. (Mind you, perhaps the Warrior did see him, and just thought it was looking at a storeroom for waxworks of British character actors.)

  And while I do appreciate that Eldred and Commander Radnor’s ideological differences give Brian Hayles scope for scientific debate, the script does need something of a polish where logic is concerned. For a start, Earth’s over-reliance on T-Mat – to the point that vast areas will starve if it breaks – is just painfully stupid. Worse, Radnor tells Kelly that she’s the only one who understands T-Mat. How can this be? T-Mat, on which the planet depends, is only a heartbeat away from being completely unserviceable? Really, the only thing that makes sense about this is that Radnor is in charge of the whole project, but isn’t actually certain how it works – he’s akin to an ex-banker drafted in by the government to run the rail network on an enormous salary despite never having been on a train in his life, a situation I find all too plausible.

  Oh, one last thing: how does Miss Kelly not realise that Fewsham’s story doesn’t hold water? He tells her, after all, that Osgood killed Locke – even though Locke informed them over the monitor that Osgood had died. And she doesn’t even bother asking what happened to Harvey. (It’s tough being an extra, no-one cares about you...)

  The Seeds of Death episode three

  R: There are these seeds. And they’re of death! It’s only in the final few minutes of this third episode that the title has any relevance at all, which is surely the longest the audience has ever had to wait to make sense of what the story’s called. This isn’t a criticism of that, by the way – I think it’s actually very clever. One of my favourite movies is Miller’s Crossing, directed by the Coen Brothers, and the importance of what Miller’s Crossing is doesn’t become clear until the second half of the movie – so that the first time it’s referenced in dialogue, it has an effect that’s electric. The same thing is true
here. We’ve had threats of rockets and Ice Warriors and weird mirrored corridors – and it’s only as the Doctor is caught trying to find out what’s inside the containers being sent to Earth that the story proper seems to begin. Slaar orders the Doctor to open up the box; inside we see the seeds; and for three weeks, what’s been hidden in full view in its specially designed title sequence is shown on screen. Imagine not knowing the story as a seasoned fan – it’s a sudden moment of connection, and we know something the Doctor can’t, that he’s in tremendous danger. The Doctor stoops to pick one of the seeds up, puzzled and complacent – and the tension is terrific, because we’ve suddenly understood that he should be frightened, that what he’s touching is deadly enough that it’s the title of this entire adventure. It swells up in his hand, explodes, and leaves him for dead – no warning, no explanation, just as abrupt as that. It’s rather brilliant.

  T: Setting aside for the moment that it would probably have been more accurate, but far less dramatic, if they’d called this story The Balloons of Death...

  I’m continuing to have flashbacks to life in the 80s with my VHS of The Seeds of Death (it was the fourth-ever Doctor Who story released on video, right after three Tom Baker adventures). As I acquired more commercially released tapes and had more off-air recordings, I fell into the, er, curious (but, also, I hope some readers will find, endearing) habit of keeping various Doctor Who videos on standby, paused at an exciting moment, in the TV room at home. Then, if I heard someone coming, I’d press play so that they would walk in, see an amazing sequence, and – at last! – admit that they’d been foolish to mock Doctor Who. They’d then understand that it was, after all, the greatest thing ever. (It’d be a bonus if I could then show them other episodes and regale them with behind-the-scenes info and cast lists, but their simply validating the series’ worth would have been a good place to start.) See, it wasn’t enough for me to like Doctor Who – I needed everyone else to as well. I didn’t relish being the lone lover of the programme, so it was vital I converted first family, then friends, then ultimately the entire world (bwa-hah-hah-haaaah!!) to the cause of celebrating the show’s brilliance. And as you might expect, I failed more often than not, usually for reasons I found incomprehensible.