Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (62 page)

When Terrance Dicks novelised The Web of Fear for Target in 1976, I’d imagine he faced something of a dilemma. By this stage, Lethbridge-Stewart had become an icon who had survived three Doctors, and was as recognisable a part of the series as a blue police box or a pepperpot with a sink plunger. And yet, episode three here
depends
upon the idea that we don’t know who he is, and we can’t trust him. He appears out of nowhere, and even soldiers in his own platoon don’t seem to know who he is. (Logically, of course, he’s just too obvious a suspect to be guilty – but the way in which he sweeps into the base, asserts his authority and expects everyone to respect him makes him deliberately suspicious.) Dicks’ answer was not to pretend that this strange newcomer could be a traitor at all, and plays up the first meeting between him and the Doctor as being as meaningful as Stanley meeting Livingstone. And, of course, with the episode missing from the archives, it’s the warmth of the novelisation that I best remember, and that reading it as a kid made me feel such affection towards UNIT.

But, of course, what’s shocking here is that no-one making The Web of Fear has the remotest clue of the meeting’s significance. This is not, as Jean-Marc Lofficier’s Programme Guide taught me when I was 11, a “UNIT seed story”; there’s no thought here of how to give the series a new direction for Jon Pertwee, and no thought of how to make the Colonel into a character that will still be appearing in TV episodes forty-ish years later. The tension between the anarchic Doctor and this suspicious authoritarian is, as you might expect, frosty – Lethbridge-Stewart’s first act in the series appears to be to point a gun at the Doctor. And Nicholas Courtney plays the part, quite rightly, as a man cloaked in mystery, who seems blithely unbothered by the hostility he inspires – and as just another military man who at any moment might be murdered by a Yeti.

T:
Think of the achievement here: Nick Courtney signed a four-week contract for a job that ended up being part of his career for
the next 40 years
. And it’s not as if the estimable Mr Courtney just rested on his Who laurels either – he’s had a decent and lengthy acting career, during which time, he’s occasionally popped along to return as one of the most beloved characters in Doctor Who, one of the most famous television programmes ever made. The man is an institution, and it’s amazing how certain inflections and mannerisms are uncannily present already, in week one of the televisual life of Brigadier (or Colonel, as we’ll call him for now) Lethbridge-Stewart.

Yet again, this isn’t the action/adventure I imagined in my head – there’s a mounting sense of unease and paranoia, suspicion is bandied about in a very disquieting way, and the main suspects in this game of “Spot the Traitor” seem to be Chorley and the Brig (sorry, the Colonel). The model Yeti, so effective in The Abominable Snowmen, work equally well here, with the added bonus that their positioning enables the web of the Great Intelligence to infect the explosive store
inside the military base itself
, which is terrifying.

And, do you know – it’s worth noting that for all we’re meant to regard Professor Travers as an old, kindly and well-intentioned gentleman, all of this destruction is, in fact, his fault. After all,
he
reactivated the Yeti-control sphere, meaning that every single drop of blood that’s subsequently been spilt is on his hands. They lock you up for that sort of thing you know, or even execute you. If he was from America, he might have got (this is the last time I’ll mention it, promise) braunched in the electric chair.

April 9th

The Web of Fear episode four

R:
Bloody hell, I bet this one terrified the young ‘uns! I think that the scene with the trolley is one of the most honestly frightening in the show’s history. Sergeant Arnold and Corporal Lane walk bravely into the fungus... We hear their agonised screams... and Driver Evans pulls on the rope to bring out the trolley they were pushing, and Lane’s dead body is on it, covered in cobwebs. That’s horrifying, even in telesnap form. And I’m 39 years old.

It’s a brutal episode, in which a sizeable part of the guest cast are despatched swiftly and without sentiment. The image of Nicholas Courtney leading his troops into battle against an alien force, neither bullets nor grenades having any effect, is one so familiar to any Doctor Who fan it’s almost burned onto the retina. But there’s never carnage like this one; we know the names of the soldiers as they’re all killed one by one (there are a couple of extras who get named just seconds before they’re shot down, if only to make the point). And to hear Courtney crack under pressure, to bolt as the last survivor, to hear him give in to utter despair, is such a shock for that seasoned retina-scarred fan. There are three different groups within the episode, all on different missions – and all of them suffer terrible casualties. Within 25 minutes, the large speaking cast is effectively halved. As the Yeti close in on the few survivors at the cliffhanger, the series has never felt so claustrophobic. It must be gearing up for a climax – but no, we’ve still got two episodes to go.

I think this must be the first time that the guest characters start thinking of the TARDIS as a means of escape. It’s the first impulse of the frightened child watching at home, of course – why don’t they all just run away? – and up til now that’s been the province only of the regular crew. But it’s a measure of how desperate the struggle has become that the army are dying not in a battle to destroy the Yeti, but to rescue a blue police box that none of them truly believe can offer them salvation. That they’re prepared to grasp at such slender straws of survival, and that the story is prepared to countenance them doing so, shows you just how grim this all is.

T:
It’s a shame that in the grand scope of Doctor Who, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln seem to get written off with, “they created the Yeti/fell out with the producers over The Dominators”, and that’s about it. They’ve also patently cracked how to structure a Doctor Who six-parter – pressure was built to the breaking point at the end of The Abominable Snowmen episode four, and we get a similar climax here. It all ends with a scant few demoralised survivors assessing their losses, their drained authority figure despairing, and then their enemies bursting through the door. Ha! Get out of
that
! And there’s a lot of tension in the set pieces that lead to this point too – early on, Arnold sounds genuinely but stoically distressed by the death of Craftsman Weams, whilst the Colonel is so distracted that he seems unable to recognise Evans.

But all of this is possible because there’s a desperate fight with the Yeti that, as you say, butchers the cast down to size. It
sounds
like a cracking battle – we can’t be sure of its actual effectiveness, of course, but we know Douglas Camfield and stuntman Derek Ware have form for this sort of thing, and the evidence we have at our disposal (the soundtrack, the telesnaps and the promising Australian censor clips) all indicate that it’s absolute carnage (Corporal Blake’s protracted bludgeoning especially) as loads of Yeti knock off a fair few soldiers. Evaluating the visual success of the web itself is admittedly harder – it looks impressive on the telesnaps, but we can’t see it
move
, so it’s entirely possible that the realisation of this amorphous glob is about on par with the giant rat from The Talons of Weng-Chiang, or the magma beast from The Caves of Androzani. I’m not sure it matters, though – as those two surviving stories prove, you can get away with just about any botched effect if it’s reasonably brief, and the story otherwise is solid enough.

I’d like to stop and remark on two of the military men here. First, the huge fight allows Lethbridge-Stewart to be something of an action hero, whilst his pragmatic and ready acceptance of the TARDIS’ abilities will probably come as a shock to viewers who are used to the befuddled, straight-laced stooge who in the Pertwee era refuses to believe that he’s been transported off Earth, and instead must be in Cromer.

Second, it’s ironic that whereas Douglas Camfield insisted that Nicholas Courtney had the bearing of an officer despite his only having been a private in real life, Ralph Watson – here playing Captain Knight – didn’t even have those credentials, as he was a conscientious objector. I discovered this while talking with Watson – who is a chatty, amiable man – while we talked in-between sessions of doing the DVD commentary for The Monster of Peladon. I came to admire how he stuck to his guns (or rather, his preference not to handle them) in the face of what must have been great hostility, and I was very affected when he said that his grandmother – who had four sons serve in World War I – felt incredible, intractable guilt that all of her boys survived, whereas everyone else she knew had lost someone. His description of her made him choke up a bit (not demonstratively or self-consciously), and I felt privileged to hear him talk about such things. Truth to tell, I also felt a bit remorseful that such important life stories are often overlooked while we as Doctor Who fans only seem to ask people of Watson’s generation about amusing anecdotes and scary monsters. (Likewise, the publisher of this book assures me that Barry Letts’ stories about serving aboard a submarine in World War II are even more riveting than hearing him talk about Doctor Who or his television career.)

Anyway, I continue to love this story. I love the action, the suspense, the monsters and the bits of humour. And I love how this exercise of ours has reminded me of all sorts of interesting people that I’ve been privileged to meet. It’s nice to think about such things, especially whilst watching one of the very best Doctor Who adventures.

The Web of Fear episode five

R:
Not a huge amount actually
happens
this week – and that’s because for the first time Doctor Who has a go at telling an episode in real time (more or less). The Great Intelligence gives the Doctor 20 minutes before it’ll suck out his brain, and we spend those 20 minutes until the cliffhanger in a state of tension. For once nothing actually happening is really the point; the Colonel and Jamie embark upon a scheme of rescue pretty much just to fill in the time, because as Lethbridge-Stewart says, making a show of useless action is better than doing nothing. We’re back to this season’s regular theme, that of pitting passive acceptance against positive resistance – except here there’s little to be done but watch as the Doctor tinkers about with some technology.

And it’s terrific. “Nothing” has ever been not done quite so brilliantly, and the atmosphere is so thick you could keep it in a jam jar. There is no respite from the mystery of the traitor – scenes in which Evans pulls a rifle on the Colonel and Jamie, or in which Anne nervously asks the Intelligence for confirmation that her father hasn’t always been under their control, reveal that the Intelligence’s scheme is no more than a MacGuffin – what Douglas Camfield and the writers are really interested in is paranoia. Best of all, by the Intelligence revealing that its plan is to take the Doctor’s intellect, the story suddenly focuses itself entirely upon our hero and exactly what he’ll do to save mankind. Driver Evans, as always, is utterly pragmatic: if everyone’s lives will be spared in exchange for the Doctor, why not just give them the Doctor? (In the novelisation, this remark is greeted by an outburst of anger from all the other characters – it’s telling that in the televised episode, we quickly cut before we can hear what the reaction might be, and by the time we return to the fortress, no-one except Jamie seems too perturbed by it.)

I love the way too that the Intelligence doesn’t want to kill the Doctor. That would be too easy and clean, and we’re far too used to seeing him deal with threats of death. That he’s going to have his brain altered, become someone with the mind of a child, is far more horrifying – it’s the taking of something reliable and comforting and altering it beyond repair that disturbs more than its simple removal. (I’ll talk about this more, I dare say, when we hit The War Games and that cruel ending in which Jamie and Zoe are made to forget all about their adventures with the Doctor, let alone what happens to Donna Noble in Journey’s End.) To have the Doctor gently tell Jamie that should the worst come to the worst, he’ll need his companions to look after him as an infant is somehow both quite funny and utterly sickening at the same time.

Favourite moment? It’s just a little thing, and I might be misinterpreting it. But there’s almost a callous satisfaction in the way that the Doctor notes that Driver Evans is frightened by the Yeti control sphere. This is the man who’s cheerfully prepared to sacrifice the Doctor, and the Doctor hasn’t betrayed the slightest nervousness about it (even giggling with delight when he’s made the sphere work). But it only takes a little silver ball to roll across the floor, and Evans is jumping on a chair and aiming his rifle in terror. “Were you scared?” asks Troughton pointedly. Then walks out into the darkness to catch a Yeti.

T:
As if to distract us from the fact that not an awful lot is happening right now, the script this week seems to beat us over the head about the quisling element of the storyline. Indeed, the Great Intelligence should really change its name after revealing that the mesmerised Professor Travers hasn’t been co-operating with it prior to this, and boasting that it has another human agent. Camfield and his cast keep things gutsy and exciting regardless, and Jack Watling pulls off the difficult task of acting “possessed” with aplomb, but it does strike me as odd that nobody questions why the Intelligence has given the Doctor 20 minutes to co-operate. Why doesn’t it just tell him that it’ll kill Victoria if he doesn’t do as ordered
now
? Even The Average Intelligence would have worked this out, and there’s a part of me that’s tempted to reevaluate my claim that Haisman and Lincoln had mastered Doctor Who’s format. It’s as if The Great Intelligence gives the Doctor its episode-long ultimatum because it’s somehow aware that it’s in a six-parter, and that it needs to stall for time.