Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (42 page)

March 6th

The Smugglers episode one

R:
The Doctor’s got two new companions – and for the first time, the newbies outnumber him. Which means, in wonderfully human fashion, that even though Ben and Polly by degrees have to adjust to the impossibility of the TARDIS and the fact it’s taken them from London in 1966, they still are more readily disposed to believe each other’s theories about what’s going on than listen to the man who actually knows. Some might claim this is a rather unbelievable way for them to behave – but I’ve been on package holidays to Crete, and if you’ve ever been on a tour coach where every passenger is more likely to listen to their fellow tourists than the native, then this will seem very familiar. They adapt to things by degrees. The fact they can accept that they’ve been transported in seconds to the coast at Cornwall, but still refuse to take the Doctor seriously when he suggests they’ve got back in time, and insist on looking for a train station, is delightfully funny. And Hartnell’s Doctor is by turns both frustrated and amused with their antics. Which seems only fair.

It’s a new season, and rather cleverly, we’re looking at the entire series through fresh eyes. The Doctor is on hand to explain the TARDIS, but no-one’s really listening. And so we’re plopped down into a story which any seasoned viewer is likely to find fairly familiar fare – but it’s energised by the reactions of two new time travellers who react to the whole thing rather like tourists. I especially love the way that Ben and Polly make fun of all the patrons at the inn as if they’re just amusing characters in a pageant. And that’s what makes the episode so clever. It deceives us with a deliberately slow pace, inviting us too to relax with a pretty low-key adventure – and then in the final ten minutes ignites the action. The Doctor is captured by pirates, and Ben and Polly are arrested for murder. You get the feeling that the story has suddenly sped up without warning, and turned upon the Doctor’s all too complacent new pals.

T:
The Smugglers is probably one of the least-remembered Doctor Who stories, but I actually think about its first episode quite a lot. As you know, I’m just getting used to that there London, and the Tube especially. I still get that odd feeling where some bizarre impulse tempts me too close to the platform edge – where I dare myself to tiptoe nearer and toy with danger, looking onto the track while simultaneously being terrified of falling off. The connection my mesmerising Tube experience has with this episode? Terence De Marney, who here plays the Churchwarden, died a few short years after making this story when he was accidentally knocked into the path of a Tube train. It’s a little morbid, I know, but he’s always in the back of my mind as I struggle and tussle through the anonymous throng.

Otherwise, the new TARDIS crew makes for interesting watching (or, rather, listening). Ben and Polly are gloriously game, with her deciding to “like it or lump it” and Ben appreciating the potential virtues of the pub! They’re a breath of fresh, funky air, and I adore Polly’s costume, even if it makes everyone mistake her for a boy. (Well, if
she
looks like a bloke, I’m not as firmly heterosexual as I’d hitherto thought!)

William Hartnell, sadly, isn’t entirely in command of himself – he fluffs a fair bit in this episode, and even gives up halfway though one sentence as De Marney decides to plough on regardless, rather than wait for him to finish. Indeed, at one point, in relation to a question he’s just been asked, Hartnell gives all the wrong stresses in the sentence “We don’t come from this part of the country.” But, there are still traces of what makes him such a special Doctor, such as his conflicting emotions when he muses that he’d thought he might be alone again, and contrives to sound cheery and wistful at the same time. He also picks up on the Churchwarden’s plight, gently pressing him and offering assistance – “You appear to be afraid, Sir, can we help?” That’s the Doctor in a nutshell.

For all Hartnell’s muck-ups though, De Marney commits the major one, as he gets one of the names wrong in the critical piece of plot info he gives the Doctor. (They could have revised later episodes to accommodate this, but it seems that no-one bothered.) Although the Churchwarden doesn’t survive past episode one, his character does offer a good piece of psychology: he constantly refers to his Christianity to remind himself that he’s
now
a “good” man, but his reliance on alcohol suggests someone who is haunted, deep down, by his criminal past. He gets drunk to hide his shame and fear, and it’s a quite frightening element in an episode that’s awash with ripe language and hearty villainy. We shouldn’t write off this story as a harmless historical outing; there’s a real dark undercurrent to it.

The Smugglers episode two

R:
The Doctor is clearly delighted to find out he’s caught up in a smuggling adventure – and his enthusiasm is infectious! The way he trades off the gentleman pretensions of Captain Pike, and knows what part to play in ensuring he gets a share of any buried treasure, is absolutely gorgeous. When Hartnell gets the chance to seize on a bit of comedy, there’s really no-one better, and it’s just great that here in his penultimate story, he’s given a final chance to indulge himself. Captain Pike and Cherub make a terrific double act; their mock disgust at Polly and the standards of modern-day youth is absolutely priceless.

Polly and Ben too acquit themselves well, escaping from their guard by making a voodoo doll of him. The best bit is when Ben, quite cruelly, tells the stable-hand Tom that by setting him free, he now too is an agent of Satan and “one of us”... It’s all very funny, but it does a first in Doctor Who – and that’s to assume that a character is a bit stupid simply because he comes from ye olden days and therefore doesn’t know much. It’s a somewhat disturbing sign; we’ve seen so many historical periods in the series now, and they’ve been treated in such a variety of tones – but never quite this smugly. The closest we’ve come before now was Barbara’s patronising attitude towards the Aztecs, where she felt that by virtue of her modern-day morals, she could better an entire society. And look what happened to her. Up to this point, no matter whether it was played straight or as a comedy, the history settings in the show have been something to which the TARDIS crew had to adapt – they’ve never before been able to exploit a superiority just by dint of coming from the 1960s.

What do you think of this, Mr Hadoke? There’s a whole bit in your Moths stage play where you talk about this very modern-day arrogance towards the past – did this grate on you as much as it did with me?

T:
Yes, it did, but only because I read your email prior to watching the episode, and was thus on the lookout for it. I’m not sure I would have made the connections that you did, but yes – the voodoo doll really is a terribly convoluted way of facilitating an escape, when a quick distraction and a whack on the head would have sufficed. The method they use is a bit mocking of poor old Tom, and makes Ben come across as a little cruel.

Everyone involved in this story seems to be enjoying themselves, and because they’re entertaining
us
too, it’s easy to get carried away with the fun and frolics. So far, The Smugglers is proving to be a “jolly” romp where the villains, behind their smiles, are still palpably dangerous, and the threat of violence lurks beneath all the bonhomie. It would be a stretch to call this highly innovative, and nobody is ever going to hold it up as a shining example of the series, but it does nothing wrong, trots along quite merrily, and is played with plenty of gusto by a colourful cast.

And can I digress to add that one of the cast has become unwittingly responsible for another actor-based myth about Doctor Who? David Blake Kelly, here playing the landlord Jacob Kewper, is in fact the same David Blake Kelly who appeared as the captain of the
Mary Celeste
in The Chase (hence them having exactly the same name!). He is not, however, David Kelly from Robin’s Nest and Waking Ned (hence them having slightly different names). Sadly, this isn’t what it says on Wikipedia or IMDb... where someone well versed in Internet matters (but clueless about Doctor Who and actors) has gone to great lengths to suggest that David Kelly temporarily changed his name to that of an already existing actor for four weeks, on only the one occasion in a 50 year career, purely so Doctor Who fans can claim that the bloke who played O’Reilly in The Builders episode of Fawlty Towers did a Doctor Who. By that astounding piece of logic, the Paul Whitsun-Jones who here plays The Squire isn’t at all the same Paul Whitsun-Jones who appears in The Mutants, but is actually Paul Jones from Manfred Mann.

I don’t know why I get so annoyed at stuff like this – perhaps it’s because, like the coveted Avery’s treasure, the clues are in the names. The names! Needless to say, I’ve been on IMDb to change it, and have done my little part to bring truth to the world. (Don’t all thank me at once...)

March 7th

The Smugglers episode three

R:
And now the Doctor’s up to it, escaping from the stupid pirate by predicting the future with a pack of playing cards! There’s no odder image than seeing this man of science while away his hours with a spot of tarot reading.

One of the funniest things about the comedy is the way in which this story’s writer, Brian Hayles, allows Captain Pike and Cherub to eclipse the small-time villainy of the Squire and his cohorts. You get the impression that the Squire is really rather proud of his smuggling activities; he’s probably the sort of man nowadays who’d get a vicarious thrill from speeding his car in built-up areas, or from downloading illegal videos. He
enjoys
being a bit of a rogue, cheerfully showing off where he hides his loot to the first pair of strangers who come sniffing around looking appreciative. When he realises he’s been consorting with honest-to-God actual
criminals
– the sort who’d skewer a fellow pirate then wipe the blood off with a lace handkerchief – the smile is wiped from his face. And cleverly, it means that for all their humour, the pirates come across as being genuinely quite threatening in contrast. The Squire is a hypocrite and a bureaucrat, but Captain Pike is psychotic.

This really does feel at moments like it’s reinforcing the series’ main credo for any new viewers who might be tuning into the start of the season. Ben is all for escaping in the TARDIS the first chance he can, claiming that the events here are nothing to do with them. Does that remind you of anyone from the early days? But now it’s the Doctor who insists they stay and see the story out, telling his new friends about the “moral obligation” he feels. We’ll get odd flashes of the Doctor wanting to duck out of adventures again – it happens in a couple of weeks’ time, actually – but from now on, more or less, the template for Doctor Who is clear. And William Hartnell has never had the opportunity to express it quite so baldly.

T:
With all of this story missing from the archives, I find myself drawn to the few surviving clips of it – initially cut out by the Australian censor and left in a box somewhere, then recovered in the mid-90s – and am looking at Jamaica’s death scene. We’ll probably never know why the censor objected to Pike’s “Twill be a merry night” line, as nothing scary seems to be happening at that point. But if nothing else, the bit a couple of seconds later, where Pike wipes Jamaica’s blood off his... um... pike is gruesomely effective (especially as Jamaica’s eyes coldly stare open in death). It also reminds me of the connection between Pike’s name and the old Tony Hawks joke, i.e. “What was Captain Hook’s name before he lost his hand?” And the other censor clip from this episode is Kewper’s demise, meaning our Australian cousins must have been slightly confused as the credits rolled, having been robbed of the actual cliffhanger! (Funny how censors don’t take that sort of thing into account – it wasn’t that many years ago that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story Smashed, in its pre-watershed broadcast, lost the Buffy-Spike sex scene that ends the episode.)

The irony here is that for an episode that lost some scenes for violent content, everyone
talks
about being a gentleman – a rather clever little theme Brian Hayles seems to have slipped in. The Doctor is versed in certain practices which pass as gentlemanly in the company of rogues, Pike enjoys the status and trappings of gentlemanly behaviour, and the Squire kids himself that he’s a cut above the common criminals with whom he consorts; it’s all a slyly witty comment on overblown egos and pompous villainy.

And it’s a nifty turn of events that the revenue man Blake is allowed to free Ben and Polly thanks to his own guile, as it’s refreshing that a guest character from the past doesn’t need one of our heroes to educate them (not to mention that it’s a nice contrast to the treatment of Tom last week). There’s an urgency and authority in John Ringham’s performance as Blake, and we’re very lucky to have him in a role that seems to consist mostly of dashing about on a horse. (Maybe it was the holiday in Cornwall that convinced him to take the part. We used to holiday in Cornwall when I was a kid and it was lovely; there was winkle picking on the beach, clotted cream and my refusal to swim in the sea because I’d seen Jaws and was terrified.)

Oh, and let’s gloss over the fact that the Doctor’s tarot readings all turn out to be correct, and that everyone who goes looking for Avery’s treasure winds up dead, shall we? Otherwise, you’d think it was a deliberate bit of foreshadowing on the production team’s part for what’s going to happen in the next story...