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

by Robert Shearman

  This isn’t a production that shirks away from the horrors of the time – as is highlighted in the Doctor’s lines, and the swift brutality of our heroes’ condemnation – but what comes across even more strongly is everyone’s ability to keep their basic decency in the midst of bloody madness. Yes, Rob, it’s right and proper of you to point out the disconnect between the military personnel acting warm and personable while being callous where murder is concerned, which only goes to emphasise the sheer horror of war and what it makes people do. Apart from the gruesome, leering General Smythe (Noel Coleman has an air of superior military bearing, whilst being terrifyingly repugnant at the same time – he’s terrific), everyone here is inherently a good egg. Lady Jennifer offers to look after Zoe rather than subject her to a night in the cells, and the barking sergeant-major offers the condemned Doctor some food. Even the northern sergeant who chastises the Doctor’s party in the trenches issues a courteous, “You too M’am, if you don’t mind...” to Zoe as needed. War will always be hell, and sometimes, the best that those involved can do is guarantee that chivalry and compassion have a place there also.

  As this is Doctor Who’s first venture into one of the two World Wars, it’s perhaps not surprising that the morality on display here is trickier than on other occasions, when there are Daleks or Cybermen that need killing. In fact, so far, The War Games is notable because there isn’t really much action either – the sequence of events that ultimately put the Doctor in front of a firing squad isn’t an exercise in dodging bullets so much as it’s about the TARDIS crew finding themselves (as was the case for a lot of real-life people in wartime, I’m sure) in a degenerating situation that they can’t control. Moreover, it’s a condemnation of the depressing reliance on military protocol – as if doing everything “properly” somehow excuses the destruction and butchery that abound – as is emphasised during the sham trial when the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are made to march less than ten feet away, wait a couple of minutes, then turn around and march back. It illustrates a lunatic adherence to procedure, even when justice has just gone out the window.

  I can’t quite believe that I’m saying this, but after The Space Pirates, we’ve been thrust into an episode which is damn-near perfect. The script gives us jeopardy, character and mystery, and rollocks along from one interesting set-piece to another. The realisation of the period and ad-hoc dwelling places is effectively rendered in Roger Cheveley’s excellent design work, and even the grainy location photography is stark and terribly atmospheric. If this is Doctor Who’s last black-and-white adventure, it should be celebrated as such – there’s a certain breed of fan who thinks that the 60s stories would improve if they were colourised, but The War Games, and the grim period of history that it depicts, is manifestly at home in all its black and white majesty.

  May 4th

  The War Games episode two

  R: A round of applause for Hubert Rees. His performance as the amiable Captain Ransom is an absolute joy – a pipe-smoking pencil pusher whose method of chatting up an attractive woman is to tell her all about his admin duties. The look of relieved delight whenever General Smythe hypnotises away any of his doubts is like a puppy dog being given a bone; here is a man who doesn’t want to think for himself, and takes comfort in following orders. And that’s what makes Ransom such a terrific comic character, but so sad and dangerous a figure as well – he’s the exact epitome of conformity, of the plucky Tommy who’ll die for his country without question. He’s Hugh Laurie from Blackadder. The awful tragedy of it is that when he dies, it won’t be for his country at all – it won’t even be for his planet. This is a man who’ll only moan about the cost of the Great War in terms of the number of shovels he has lost – he won’t (or can’t) bring himself to think about the loss of human life. Thoroughly likeable, and thoroughly dismaying, Rees gives the most interesting comic performance in the series since Barrie Ingham came over all Wodehouse back in The Myth Makers.

  There’s so much to enjoy here. The way that Jamie the Highlander is able to form a brief friendship with the Redcoat soldier is really rather touching – the two enemies coming together because they have more in common with each other than anyone else they could meet. That the Redcoat is so abruptly shot (albeit in the leg) takes the fantasy that two foes can find peace so easily and gives it a harsh twist – the reality of the war we see here is a lot grimmer than that. And I love the way that Troughton has the audacity to infiltrate the prison so bombastically and bully the staff. When he says that he is the examiner, his lie throws us right back to his very first story – and reminds us that this is what the second Doctor used to be like, the sly chameleon who’ll take on any persona at will. In barking orders at the military and making them run around in small circles for him, it’s as if, in his final adventure, Troughton is getting the chance to revisit the glory moments that established him. I’m just grateful he doesn’t start admiring everybody’s hats.

  And for a truly magical moment – how about that sequence where the ambulance suddenly fades into thin air? At this stage we’ve no idea what that can mean. When it reappears before a set of Roman soldiers, it’s as if Doctor Who has abandoned its police box, and replaced it with a time-travelling ambulance. It’s as bizarre an image as – say – a London bus in a desert, and I think it’s quite wonderful.

  T: Troughton’s turn as the barking prison-inspector while he and Zoe try to rescue Jamie is brilliant – just look at how he bristles with indignation and gets testy at the impertinence of someone having the audacity to query him. It’s an act of desperation, of course – blustering chutzpah to cover the most fragile of disguises. Troughton emphasises this with a tremor in his voice that flits between quivering rage and desperate improvisation, and the way he storms about frustrating Richard Steele’s delightfully stuffy Commandant is a joy. Steele first makes us laugh at him for being such a pompous twit, but ultimately engenders our grudging admiration as he snaps and refuses to be brow-beaten any further (even if this threatens to undo the Doctor’s plan!). And then Zoe hits him over the head with a vase. You could argue that much of this is filler, but it’s filler of the highest order. (Is it just me, though, or does Steele remind you of Richard Mathews’ turn as Rassilon in The Five Doctors? Listen to his line about the inspector having to wait while he has his tea – the delivery is identical.)

  So far, this has been a pretty sumptuous production, with plenty of location filming and impressive-looking sets. There’s attention to visual detail – they’ve gone to the trouble of including broken glass in the windows of the chateau. And let me add that Pat Gorman – one of the unsung stalwarts of Doctor Who, a perennial extra who was stuffed into all manner of monster outfits – finally gets a line, and a credit, and we actually see his face and everything! He sometimes gets one of those, but he’s not yet had all three at once. It’s all justly deserved, as he’s logged so many hours with Doctor Who but so rarely gets any notice.

  And let me not only echo your praise for Hubert Rees, but also use him to echo some of the points I made about episode one. Smythe orders the “creeping barrage” (two words that Coleman positively devours), and it’s Ransom who reminds him that his target is, in fact, an ambulance with two women on board. Even in war, there are rules. In the mouth of madness, we still create a structure, a moral framework, which under actual scrutiny makes no real sense. That’s the madness of human conflict – we allow ourselves to commit the foulest of crimes so long as we follow protocol, and obey the rules. War games indeed.

  The War Games episode three

  R: You could argue, I suppose, that the bit with the Doctor being interrogated by the German lieutenant as a spy is a bit repetitive. But of course it is. That’s the nature of this war game – that for all their different accents, the soldiers on the front line are exactly the same stooges as each other, and will respond to the same events accordingly. The joke of it is made all the clearer when Smythe’s counterpart, Captain von Weich, turns up and takes his lieutenant outs
ide for a spot of hypnotism. Very rarely for the series, the whole sequence plays out in German, without subtitles – and we know exactly what’s being said, the way that the naïve young soldier is being turned back into a simple automaton, because we’ve heard it so often already. The fact that David Garfield wears a monocle, rather than Noel Coleman’s pebble glasses, feels like rather a witty difference – as if he’s chosen another form of eyewear simply so he can show off his natty scar.

  The best of this episode plays as a black comedy. We pass into three different time zones in 25 minutes, and all we get is the same pointless conflicts – it’s hard not to get blasé about them. And just as we begin to relax a little too much, and watch Lieutenant Carstairs gun down nineteenth-century Americans with impunity, we’re pulled up short by that brilliant scene where Smythe and Von Weich so callously discuss future battle plans as if they’re playing chess. The more death and war we see, the more we behave like them – indeed, most of the episode plays upon the excitement of driving through a whole series of zones in which people massacre each other as if they were nothing more than pit stops. It’s why the moment when Lady Jennifer realises that Carstairs has sacrificed himself (or so she thinks) to allow the ambulance to escape has such quiet power. There’s no outcry, no grief – just a look down and a mumbled “Oh dear”, the ultimate repression of emotion. That’s what you do in times of war. That’s how you get through – it’s the “proper” way to behave.

  T: The War Games is an infamously long story, it hasn’t yet – for my money – shown signs of treading water. The script keeps feeding us tantalising clues with enough regularity to keep us interested, and it hasn’t needed to reveal the answers quite yet. And it helps that we’re benefitting from the presence of some great characters – Jennifer and Carstairs are delightful, wonderfully played allies, and there’s an unflappable bravery to Carstairs as he stays put and tells her to drive on. It clearly demonstrates the duality of war; we get to simultaneously witness the best and worst of mankind.

  David Maloney orchestrates the action like a maestro, using simple but very effective tricks to suggest that a vast number of troops are present. His film work is impressively staged (even if one of the Roman soldiers looks rather comical as he stares at where the lorry once was, his mouth wide open in shock), and his approach to that excellent scene between von Weich and Smythe is inspired, as he films them from underneath a table mapping out the battlefield.

  Troughton is clearly giving his all to this – he obviously relishes the idea of blowing up the safe, and grabs one of the braids on Jamie’s sporran – much to the surprise of his co-star! – when looking for a fuse. Let me also give a quick nod to Gregg Palmer, who gives a sweet little cameo as a German lieutenant, even if he’s a harbinger of doom for our leading men. (The only other occasion he popped up in Doctor Who was in The Tenth Planet, and you know what that meant for Hartnell!) And hooray for Lt Crane, the jolly toff – amidst all the fear and jeopardy, he’s an opponent who impedes our heroes because of his polite, chummy desire to have a chat!

  May 5th

  The War Games episode four

  R: Those funny little cardboard visors that all the alien students wear, with little black crosses for the eyeholes, ought to look rubbish. But actually when Troughton and Padbury put them on, it does somehow manage to dehumanise them. And I know Toby probably thinks I’m pretentious about such things, but I think it’s honestly because they are a bit rubbish. It’s like the strange swirly lined Batman sets, or the guards dressed in PVC – in any other story, if this were the alien world we were being presented, it’d be laughable. But it works here precisely because it provides such a contrast with the realism of the World War I set, or the striking normality of the barn in the American Civil War zone. It’s as if from scene to scene we’re jumping back and forth between period drama and cod sci-fi – and the effect is genuinely disconcerting. I love this strange alien world, of sudden hysterical alarms and background warbling mood sound, of overbright lighting and white walls. It feels artificial. And yet it’s the reality of the story – whereas all that looks sturdy and designed to the nth degree, all the historical settings we visit are as fake as a three-pound note. It does clever things to our perception of the story, that, and what we regard as real and what we regard as fantasy – and over this long story it subtly destabilises what we’re used to seeing around us, so that when co-writers Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke drop their big surprises about the Doctor’s background, we’re in a mood receptive to accept it.

  And talking of big surprises – we don’t know yet what the importance of the War Chief could be, but the sequence where Edward Brayshaw and Patrick Troughton first see each other across a crowded room, and (my God!) recognise each other, makes me shiver. There’s that one moment of horrified realisation (in which they’re clearly both panicked by the encounter), there’s that little pause – and then the alarms sound, the Doctor flees, the War Chief loses his composure for the first time, and all Hell breaks loose. You know that this is something big, and it’s achieved in the subtlest of ways – purely through the right use of silence and noise, and through eye contact. It’s brilliant.

  So’s the cliffhanger. David Savile has played a very likeable Carstairs. And so when he holds Zoe at gunpoint and begins talking so gently – dreamily as if he’s stoned, even – that he’s going to kill her, it’s quite unnerving. (He doesn’t do it half so well when they film the same moment as the reprise for next week – but that’s because by that point, the script requires him to obsessed and vengeful, not as here the creepy man who has lost all his personality.)

  T: I agree with you 100% on this – the alien set designs and costumes need to be outlandish (complete with groovy sets, bonkers specs and funky beards) to contrast the dirty, realistic and unflashy Earth conflicts. No other Doctor Who story looks like this – but then, no other story could get away with it.

  Meanwhile, this adventure is one of the most consistently well-cast stories we’ve had yet. Edward Brayshaw has now come to the forefront as the War Chief, and he has such poise and elegance, coupled with an underlying glacial darkness. He looks magnificent, striding about as he does like a tall homosexual lion with his impressive mane, massive medallion and penchant for eye shadow. Such a performance would be too big for mundane hospital dramas, but it’s pitched perfectly for slightly heightened sci-fi; it’s impressive and Shakespearean, and not remotely silly. And the moment where he and the Doctor see each other really is a momentous occasion. We’re used to seeing the Doctor arriving and becoming someone’s nuisance or a nemesis, but here, he’s faced with someone who is immediately afeared, shocked and desperate just from clapping eyes on him. With a jolt, we’re reminded that the Doctor has a past.

  Vernon Dobtcheff is also superb as the unnamed Scientist. Actually, Dobtcheff is something of a legend amongst the acting profession – he makes it his business to attend every single major opening night, and if he can’t, he sends cards. He features marvellously in Rupert Everett’s autobiography, and pops up all over the world to such an extent – seemingly conspiring to enter different actors’ lives on different continents at the same time – that there’s a jokey rumour that there are a vast number of Vernon Dobtcheffs. Sadly, I don’t think he’s on the forthcoming DVD of The War Games; it’s a missed opportunity to talk with such a celebrated figure. (That said, he’s never been out of work since his stint on Doctor Who, and might remember nothing about it.)

  And beyond the casting concerns, the scale of this story continues to be impressive – no fewer than three factions encounter Jamie and Jennifer in the barn – and the developments keep us guessing. I’d like to tip my hat to the fact that it’s the black character who is impossible to hypnotise, and displays bravery and defiance, and to say what a shock it is when von Weich turns up with a different accent but equal malevolence. And to cap it all off, we get that brilliant but disturbing shot of the frozen, upright soldiers awaiting deployment from inside the
SIDRAT. They’re erect cadavers, grotesque parodies of humanity waiting to be reactivated, then sent to kill or die. It’s a gruesome image – intriguing, alien and unsettling – and it encapsulates this entire story in one shot.

  The War Games episode five

  R: What I love about The War Games is that it brings out so many really terrific performances. I’d argue that the Troughton stories as a whole have traded largely in stereotypes, and there have been fewer opportunities for guest stars to do as much with the parts as we saw in the days of Hartnell. But The War Games is making up for it. And what makes this story so wonderful is that the scope of the parts is large enough to encompass completely different styles of acting. You’re right; Vernon Dobtcheff’s Scientist is great – and hilarious, precisely because he’s so downplayed. The scene where he allows Troughton to run rings around him as he experiments with his mind-wiping machine is brilliant, never quite sure whether to be irritated or impressed by this strangely-clothed student who’s so much cleverer than him. Whereas James Bree’s Security Chief is so very stylised, walking as if the movement of limbs is a concept he’s not used to and takes no pleasure in, his every word clearly enunciated but just flat enough to feel inhuman. With Edward Brayshaw going the whole hog as a rather cavalier villain, displaying his golden medallion out to all and sundry, this collision of styles ought to be a complete mess. But for The War Games it works wonderfully, because the story is all about a collision of styles.

  It’s why there’s such pleasure to be taken in those scenes where the rebels are together, this ragbag of different accents and different costumes. They all look as if they’re from different adventures, all coming together incongruously in the BBC canteen. (I’m very sorry that Rudolph Walker bites the bullet so early, though – he gives one of the richest of the performances as Harper, one of the resistance members, and I’d have liked to have seen more of him.)