Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (26 page)

I accept I have personal family reasons for liking this half of the episode. The Mary Celeste segment leaves me a bit cold, though. Perhaps Toby has reasons for liking it? Maybe he has family members who used to travel around on nineteenth century sea clippers. Let’s ask him.

T:
We’re first transported back to the present day atop the Empire State Building, and it’s mainly an excuse to get a juicy comic turn from a guest actor. Fortunately, Peter Purves delivers in spades. It’s not a
hilarious
outing, because he’s not given much to work with, but he acquits himself very well. It’s easy to see why they were so keen to bring him back as a series regular, even though he’d already appeared here as a different character. And some thanks are due to my friend Peter Crocker, who pointed out to me that the way the Dalek eyestalk rotates 360 degrees as Dill goes around it is unnervingly alien as well as technically proficient. The later Daleks had a catch that prevented such motion, so I believe that this is a unique moment. And the extras all look suitably American – I especially like the fat man who gives Morton Dill a funny look, and wonder if Arne Gordon, playing the tour guide, ever tried to sue Peter Falk for his later portrayal as Columbo, because the one feels very similar to the other.

And if you’re asking about the Mary Celeste sequences... what I find most interesting about them is that once again, Barbara finds herself lusted after as soon as she arrives somewhere, and here seems an object of temptation for a bunch of “lonely” sailors. (No wonder she’s getting increasingly uptight.) But the action to follow also has some notable moments (we get the vivid image of a Dalek tumbling into the water, even if this happens because – once again – a Dalek was stupid enough to keep gliding along after it had run out of solid foundations). And it’s quite unnerving, in amongst all the comedy charging about from the superstitious and panicking sailors, to see a woman clutching a baby jump into the sea (especially as we later discover that they couldn’t have possibly survived...). At least David Blake Kelly, playing the ship captain, adds a bit of class by removing his jacket and diving into the water with dignity and authority. Nice touch, sir.

Otherwise, all I can offer about this story is a little knee-jerk response: Hartnell does his best to underline the fact that the Daleks are closing in on the travellers, but his work is to no avail as the subsequent model shot shows the Dalek time machine – what we affectionately call “the DARDIS” – going in a completely different direction!

February 7th

Journey Into Terror (The Chase episode four)

R:
The haunted house sequence is really rather fun, because it gives all the regular cast a chance to play against type a bit; after all their attempts to be brave and heroic in the face of danger, it’s funny to see them give in so easily to every bump or creak or lightning flash. Jacqueline Hill is able to look on Count Dracula with a dread that is so middle-class and polite, it’s wonderfully endearing, and Maureen O’Brien is particularly funny with her deadpan reactions to all the nightmare imagery around her. I can’t help but think that Terry Nation’s original idea to set an episode within the recesses of human thought is a lot more interesting than Verity Lambert’s compromise suggestion that this all takes place in a theme park. (Nation’s proposal is a lot more logical too; why would a robot version of Frankenstein’s Monster turn upon tourists as violently as that?) But it’s fun, for once, for the audience to be in on the joke rather than the TARDIS crew.

But the most interesting scene in the episode is the one where the Doctor, Ian and Barbara all mourn the loss of Vicki. There’s a despair about it which is very effective, especially after so much time spent running about not really taking anything seriously – and it uncannily predicts a similar conversation in the console room in Time-Flight, where the characters all argue about whether there could be any way of going back to save Adric. Vicki isn’t dead, of course – but the implication is that, with a TARDIS that has no way of returning to a previous location and which cannot be controlled, she might just as well be. Certainly, there’s no reason to believe they’ll ever see her again. Considering that within the next two weeks this crew really
will
be fractured forever, this is a wonderful little piece of foreshadowing.

T:
This is a tricky episode to talk about, because, well, I’m not seven years old, and Terry Nation clearly isn’t writing this so that future wannabe scholars such as ourselves could dissect it in minute detail. Instead, Journey Into Terror involves Nation wanting to entertain the kids for 25 minutes with as much exciting adventure as he can pack in – and what better way to do that than with the ultimate in horror icons, Dracula and Frankenstein?

To be fair, I’ve rarely found sci-fi scary – fear for me tends to revolve around the ancient, not the futuristic. And I’ve enjoyed the way those cheesy old Universal flicks are drenched in spookiness; it’s partly that they’re in black and white, and partly that I always seem to watch them with the slightly disconcerting knowledge that all the players involved are themselves long dead. So while modern eyes might view this episode as being random, tacky jeopardy, it’s excusable because I know if Doctor Who had served up a haunted house to
my
young self, I would have been terrified – and ultimately pleased that a rational explanation was used as to the presence of the horrific.

And it’s rare that the audience gets to outsmart the Doctor – he’s had nothing, even to this very day as far as we know, to tell him that visited a funfair in 1996; he seems convinced that he actually
did
have an adventure in the human mind. As with the Aridian episode, there’s some unfinished business here that’s necessitated by the chase scenario – one could dismiss this as sloppy and ill defined, but it actually seems disconcerting.

As does the comedy, but, er, not in the same way.

The Death of Doctor Who (The Chase episode five)

R:
The death of Doctor Who? Oh, come on. It’s not quite that bad...

I’ve been meaning to say this for ages, and it may as well be here. Nowadays, we expect our special effects to be impeccable. Doctor Who is a mainstream hit TV series today, and the audience who watch it are just as likely to be the same people who watch EastEnders or Top Gear. They may not even think of Doctor Who as sci-fi – not as
such.
Now, having good quality FX is in some ways a rather limiting factor. For example, back in the sixties you could visit the planet Aridius fairly easily; it was just another studio bound planet, and production team and viewers alike accepted that. Nowadays, you’d be flying to do location filming in Dubai. So Chris Eccleston never had the opportunity to visit an alien world, because for that first year of the revival, no-one could guarantee that it could be done convincingly enough not to frighten away our new audience. I remember that my Dalek story opened with an effect of an enormous face of the villain breaking in half, and revealing itself to be the ceiling of a hangar admitting a helicopter. It was in so many drafts, but was cut from the shooting script because it wouldn’t have looked good enough on the budget allowed. If it had been the 1970s, they’d probably have done it with bad CSO. If it had been in The Chase, God knows how they would have pulled it off – but they’d have done it anyway, you can be sure of that.

This is because where modern TV asks the audience to take things at face value, classic Doctor Who asks it to take things on trust. The people who made The Chase weren’t stupid. They didn’t really think that Edmund Warwick wearing a wig was a dead ringer for William Hartnell. Look at him! He’s a different height! He’s got a longer nose! Nor would they have seriously thought we’d believe that, say, the Fungoids weren’t actors shuffling about in giant toadstool costumes. But the Daleks tell each other that this robot is an exact duplicate of the Doctor, and later Vicki asserts the same thing. So the programme is inviting the viewers to fill in the gaps – to see Doctor Who not as an accurate depiction of the story, but a fictive representation of it. It’s compounded by the fact that Hartnell ends up playing the robot at certain moments of sustained drama, and as a result Warwick has to play the
real
Doctor. Nowadays, you’d make Time Crash, and find a line that explains away jokingly why Peter Davison looks so much older than he did when he played the Doctor some 20 years before. As late as the mid-eighties, though, you could dress up a middle-aged Frazer Hines in a kilt, and within the story pretend he was the same age as when he made The Ice Warriors.

And
that’s
what dates The Death of Doctor Who, because it’s the single grandest example of the series asking the kids watching at home to suspend their disbelief. We’ll laugh or smirk at the Skarasen in the Thames, or the Myrka, although it’s part and parcel of the same thing – because they’re individual
moments
when we have to pretend the special effects are decent. But to a production team who’ll use locations as varied as the Aztec city or Xeros as painted backdrops, to take an entire story concept that there is no way it can achieve on screen, and then
to do it anyway
, isn’t quite the act of folly it might appear. In the same way that any theatre production of Twelfth Night knows full well that they’ll never find two actors who can play identical brother and sister, but sticks their Viola and Sebastian in the same clothes, and assumes the audience will have the wit to understand what that’s meant to indicate.

Of course, this doesn’t excuse incompetence, laziness or both. There’s plenty of that in Doctor Who throughout its history. But when an episode like this one clearly doesn’t
care
that it can’t do the effects, and just gets on and tells its story, it seems rather churlish to blame it for what it never intended to do in the first place.

The Death of Doctor Who is not a
great
episode. But it does have two versions of the Doctor fighting each other with walking sticks. That’s the sort of thing I like. You saw Edmund Warwick and William Hartnell? Pish and tush to that.

T:
I don’t know... having Warwick double as Hartnell is one thing, but to have Warwick’s face clearly visible in long shot, and then to make him mouth Hartnell’s pre-recorded words, and
then
to cut to a close-up of the real deal is utterly bonkers. Why didn’t they just have Hartnell play the Doctor-robot, save for scenes where a body-double was unavoidable? I can try to be kind, I can try to be understanding, but the whole robot-Doctor Who section of this episode just seems terrifyingly inept. The Daleks even tell each other that they’ll follow the android... then go in a completely different direction. And you know things aren’t quite right when the normally dignified Barbara pretends to machine gun the Daleks!

Fortunately, once Edmund Warwick has received his just desserts (and the Doctor issues a parting joke about him needing a doctor!), the pace actually ramps up quite nicely. There’s a wonderfully downbeat “things aren’t too good are they?” moment between the Doctor and Ian – Hartnell is pleasingly grim in his outlook, while Russell is very stoic and brave. I’m less sure about what Dudley Simpson is doing, though – as the Daleks surge forward in force, the music decides to evoke a romp around Monte Carlo. And then Camera 5 strangely appears in the background. (My friend Peter Crocker, entertainingly enough, maintains that this is a Mechonoid probe, planted there to spy on the Gubbage Cones.)

But if nothing else, there’s a sense in this episode that as far as our heroes are cornered, the chase itself is over and the confrontation between them and the Daleks is imminent and unavoidable. As part of this, the Doctor does the right thing and, without consulting his companions, bravely (and unsuccessfully) tries to delay the Daleks by posing as the robot-Doctor. It’s a superb moment for the character, and a scene in which, without ceremony, the Doctor becomes the hero and Ian’s usefulness to the programme comes to an end.

February 8th

The Planet of Decision (The Chase episode six)

R:
This is by far the most satisfying, and the most exciting, of all the episodes in The Chase. The Mechonoids are actually rather a witty idea: a bunch of robots who have been abandoned by the colonists who designed them and have since “gone native”, and are now capturing the odd hapless human and putting him on exhibition in a zoo. (It does make you wonder what pleasure the robots can possibly derive by staring at humans, but that’s part of the fun.) There’s a terrific battle between the Daleks and these new robots, which rather bizarrely manages to look expensive (all that film!) and cheap (those cartoon explosions!) at the same time – and that, actually, sums up The Chase admirably. And Maureen O’Brien very creditably takes the part of a whimpering girl who’s scared of heights and makes her fear honest and realistic.

But it’s ironic, nevertheless, that this rather epic finale with the Daleks is upstaged entirely by the departure from the series of Ian and Barbara. The last ten minutes or so are just wonderful. That quiet realisation from Jacqueline Hill that, at last, there’s a means by which she can get home – it hadn’t even occurred to Ian, and it’s beautiful that before he decides whether he even
wants
to leave the TARDIS, he checks with Barbara what she would like to do. Once she’s committed to the idea of returning to Earth, then so is he – my God, the love he feels for her just shines through. They utterly deserve that photo montage of their messing about with pigeons at Trafalgar Square – if any two characters had a right to celebrate the joy of home comforts and the glories of being
ordinary
once more, it’s these two. And Hartnell, typically, is extraordinary in these scenes: he is so
good
at the heartfelt. He can’t bear to lose them. When the Dalek ship dematerialises, he daren’t even turn around to watch it vanish. He watches them on the Time and Space Visualiser, his face ashen and pained as he realises that, happy as they are, he’ll never see them again. “I’ll miss them,” he says. Right with you, Doctor. I’ll miss them too. They were magnificent.