Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (29 page)

February 11th

R:
And here we are in the States! What an extraordinary thing this is. I’ve just been in your hotel room, Toby, sharing a couple of episodes of Galaxy Four. There’s nothing much to look at, just a strange soundtrack of lots of Chumbley noises, really. And here I am, typing my diary entry to you by email, even though I can clearly see you sitting on a rather nice-looking sofa not a hundred yards away drinking an even nicer-looking glass of wine.

The flight over was long but comfortable. On the entertainment system, they had a Doctor Who episode to watch – The Doctor’s Daughter, dated 2008. But I didn’t watch it, because annoyingly enough, they
weren’t
showing Four Hundred Dawns, dated 1965. (It’d have been great if they had been, though, wouldn’t it? Missing episodes have been found in Mormon churches and behind BBC filing cabinets, so it would have been so amusing to find another on a British Airways Airbus.)

Four Hundred Dawns (Galaxy Four episode one)

We’ve been spoiled. So much of the first two seasons of Hartnell’s tenure survives intact in the archives, we’re only now hitting the wastelands. There are no telesnaps of Galaxy Four, only a few pictures. There’s a strange six-minute excerpt, and a complete soundtrack. These require concentration to get through, because, to be completely honest, this episode of Doctor Who does not boast the most quotable dialogue, the most riveting set pieces – or, for that matter, an awful lot of drama period.

What it
does
have is Brian Hodgson’s sound effects. The man was a genius. There’s something so full of character about the Chumblies – the robotic servants of the unseen Rills – from all the different whirrs and beeps and strange background purrs; there are ambient albums you can get on iTunes which sound like this. And shorn of the visuals, you really do appreciate just how ahead of its time the BBC Radiophonic workshop really was – what you hear in the show is so distinctively
different
. There’s not an awful lot going on on this new planet, and the Doctor’s comparisons to Xeros frankly make it sound rather cheap and nasty. But Hodgson has still managed to make it alien and exotic.

I love the way that William Hartnell’s Doctor can only take the politest of interests in this new adventure – hearing the Drahvins (the alien females in conflict with the Rills) speak of their war, he seems to tut with the concern due if he’d hear them tell how they’d stubbed a toe. He’s done all this before – if you want to impress the Doctor in his third season, you’ve got to try harder than that. He gets most excited about his (frankly rather hasty) theory that because it’s quiet and he can’t see anybody, the whole planet must be lifeless. Maureen O’Brien has a jolly time cutting Steven’s hair and naming cute robots. And once Peter Purves realises that his chat-up lines aren’t working on the Drahvins, he spends the rest of the episode being rather snotty with them.

T:
You had The Doctor’s Daughter on the plane? You lucky bastard – I had High School Musical 3, and a cup of tea that was of a colour no tea has ever been before. Sorry that K was comatose in the hotel room when you stopped by – she decided to utilise a traditional method, handed down through generations of shamen, to combat flight stress: six diazepam and a bottle of vodka.

Anyway, this is William Emms’ sole contribution to the series, and his voice is at odds with much of what we’ve heard before. And yet, there’s some offbeat and archaic phraseology that gives the story a curious verbal landscape – I love the substitution of “dawns” for “days”, and little touches like “metal mesh”. And it’s rather thrilling that after ten minutes of listening to the soundtrack, we suddenly get a bit of movement, courtesy of that hefty video clip recovered back in the 1990s. It gives some indication that Derek Martinus is as effective with the camera as Douglas Camfield; his framing of the characters shows he’s taken care with the visual makeup of the picture. And I really like what we see of Stephanie Bidmead as Maaga, the Drahvin leader – beneath her clipped formality and posturing, there’s a weariness that suggests she’s tired of both war and hanging around with staccato clones.

I don’t know what to make of the title, though. “Four hundred dawns”? Where, exactly? We’re told that the Drahvins left their homeworld 400 dawns ago, but the action of this episode revolves around an anticipated planetary explosion in 14 dawns; at the climax, that’s shortened down to a scant two dawns. So, why refer to “four hundred” in the title at all? It’s like calling Underworld episode one Departure From Minyos. And we’re not actually in Galaxy Four either – it’s where the Drahvins are from. So to review: we’re in a story named after where it isn’t set, and the opening episode has a title depicting a time span that isn’t relevant. It’s most peculiar.

And it’s also hard to deduce just how much Emms expected the audience to be fooled by the old “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” switcheroo concerning the beautiful Drahvins and the “evil” Rills, or if he thought they’d know the score from the very start. After all, Steven has already deduced that the Rills’ offer to help the Drahvins escape the dying planet might be genuine, and Vicki senses that Maaga would enjoy killing them. Even the Doctor mistrusts the Drahvins from their very first encounter, which suggests that any story-twist where the Drahvins are concerned might not have quite the same impact as the one in The Sixth Sense.

Even so, I
do
think the premise of two spaceships marooned on a doomed planet is a novel one, whatever the script’s bizarre desire to spoon-feed us. And isn’t it interesting that if the new series wants to do a race against time, the Doctor and company only have 42 minutes to prevent total disaster? Here, the shocking cliffhanger is they’ve only got
a day
!

Trap of Steel (Galaxy Four episode two)

R:
There’s a lovely moment where the Doctor searches inside his pockets for... a screwdriver. Not a sonic screwdriver. Not yet. But we’ll get there.

It seems to sum up this episode rather well. Galaxy Four feels like an interim story between two different styles. It’s not the adventure series we were promised by Dennis Spooner’s time as story editor, nor is it the more experimental drama we’ll be getting when his successor Donald Tosh gets to work with incoming producer John Wiles. This is the fag end of Verity Lambert’s time on the show, and it feels like as everyone swaps their work overalls they’ve taken their eye off the conveyor belt. William Emms’ story feels as if it’s been written by someone who has a vague idea of what Doctor Who is like – and, because it’s a script which has a lot of the tropes (weird robots, people getting captured, ugly monsters) but absolutely none of the heart, it’s absolutely
not
like anything we’ve ever seen before. There’s not much going on in Galaxy Four. But as with the screwdriver, the elements are in place – and we’ll get there.

There’s still stuff to enjoy. Hartnell and O’Brien sparkle together nicely, and make the most of a script which has some witty lines. (The bit where Vicki works out how to best a Chumbley is really very funny: “I noted, observed, collated, concluded, and then I threw a rock.”) And Peter Purves’ attempts to introduce a Drahvin drone to the concept of equality are really rather delightful.

T:
I’m sorry to be so fixated on the episode titles, but they’re getting increasingly enigmatic.
Is
there a “trap of steel” in this episode, or is William Emms just mucking about with us? I suppose the Drahvin’s broken spaceship could be one, in a way, sort of, but otherwise I just don’t know what it means.

Like you, Rob, I can mine some good points from this. The episode starts out with some strong dramatic dialogue – the Doctor’s comment that “Tomorrow is the last day this planet will ever see” sets up the tempo very effectively at the start, and for a time the audience feels as if the heat is on. There’s a good, foreboding moment where Vicki notes the size of the Chumbley corridor, and then looks at the Rill corridor and gets a bit freaked out – this sets us up nicely for the cliffhanger, which has Vicki screaming at her first sight of the Rills, and cuts into an otherwise cutesy scene. The regulars are on good form, and the Chumblies wibble sweetly enough.

But really, what strikes me most about this episode is that for all it promises a fight for survival on a dying planet, not a lot actually happens, does it? The Doctor and Steven get stuck in the TARDIS for a bit, then they walk from the TARDIS to the Drahvins. Then the Doctor and Vicki walk over to the Rills. Steven argues with a Drahvin, then Maaga. The Doctor and Vicki continue walking, and we learn that the Rills are ugly. The End.

I wouldn’t so much mind the slower pace if the story seemed to be going somewhere interesting, but I’m not feeling very confident about this. In fact, the scene with Steven and the Drahvin – although an effective demonstration of
his
intelligence – if anything just demonstrates that the clones Maaga commands are thick as two short planks. It’s hard to feel intrigued by what’s coming next when the baddies we’ve seen so far amount to a gun-wielding harridan and her posse of the dimmest aliens in the galaxy. I know, I know... we’re supposed to stay positive here, but I need
something
to work with!

February 12th

Air Lock (Galaxy Four episode three)

R:
It’s okay, I’m beginning to find my way into Galaxy Four now. I had a bit of a shaky start, partly because it wasn’t the story I
imagined
it to be. I’d always had this idea it was a simple moral tale about how the ugly Rills were (shock!) nice, and the beautiful Drahvins were (no, what?) evil. But it’s clear right from the beginning of episode one that Maaga is about as affable as a driving instructor, and I was floored. I find I rather like the Drahvins now. There’s a certain world weariness to Stephanie Bidmead which is very appealing – and I love the way she pulls out from that to describe with such enthusiasm how the Rills and the TARDIS regulars will die horribly on an exploding planet. Because her Drahvin soldiers are just drones, it comes across a bit like she’s telling a gruesome fairy tale to infants – only to give up, and get bored with her audience, because they haven’t the imagination to appreciate horrific deaths they can’t see for themselves. It’s all rather wonderful. There’s a downside to being the most evil person in the army, and that’s when your subordinates haven’t got a clue just how nasty you’re actually being.

The Rills, in contrast, are a bit humourless and dry. But it’s very funny that they use the Chumblies to be the voiceboxes for the alien voices – Robert Cartland is so solemn and sonorous, it’s a bit like imagining the Quarks suddenly voiced by James Earl Jones.

T:
Hooray, as the episode title promises, there’s an airlock in this episode! Okay, it’s probably not the most dramatic or riveting of story-elements, but it is as advertised!

I too appreciate Stephanie Bidmead – it’s so novel to have a commander whose frustration with her underlings is understandable because they’ve been
created
as grunts, as opposed to their just happening to be rather ineffective and hapless. Drahvin high command has evidently issued an edict requiring that a creature with brains, emotions and imagination serve as the leader of each task force, whilst the other members are expendable labour. It makes sense up to a point, and results in a terrific scene where Maaga berates her troops for lacking the imagination to picture and savour the destruction of her enemies. All of this makes the Drahvins more interesting than episode one suggested.

But really, my attention keeps being drawn to the Rills – who for a time were widely regarded by fandom as the only Doctor Who monsters for whom no visual representation existed. (Remember that in those days, we’d never
heard
of Celation, an alien from The Daleks’ Master Plan who was for a while only represented by nothing, and then only a tiny, rare photo, and finally was revealed when episode two of that story was found.) Now there’s... what? One, maybe two surviving photos of the Rill that the Doctor and company meet? The lack of moving pictures means that we’ll never know how effective the Rills were on screen – something that I fear is the case with a lot of this story. We know from elsewhere that Derek Martinus is a director who can keep things flowing and looking good, so it’s incredibly frustrating that much of what we glean from this is guesswork. It’s a neat idea, for instance, that the creatures are dependent upon ammonia and thus obscured by gas – I would like to think that this was rendered in an interesting way, but there’s no way to find out.

It’s not a shot in the dark to say, however, that this episode is fundamentally about contact – or rather a discourse – between the Doctor and the Rill, who to look at them are two very different creatures. When the Doctor asks where a Chumbley is off to, the Rill – in Robert Cartland’s dignified tones – gently admonishes him by pointing out that it’s off to repair the damage he has caused. Hartnell then gets very flustered and embarrassed, and it’s a lovely bit of interaction between them. What’s more telling, though, is when the Doctor gives the Rills’ embarrassment about their appearance very short shrift: “We’re not children,” he sagely points out. We could, if we wished, mock this story because this core message – judging by appearances is just immature – is overly simple, but it’s one that society is still struggling to learn, even 40 years after this was made.