Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (71 page)

And there’s a claustrophobia to it all as well. There is one inspired sequence where Vaughn takes the Doctor and Jamie to another of his factories – only to present them with exactly the same office set! Vaughn’s dreams may be global, but he wants the world to be reduced to a small and tidy space he feels comfortable in. And his reliance on “uniformity and duplication” gives a clever hint to us as to just who his alien allies might be.

T:
I would agree that the use of Vaughn’s duplicated offices is clever – and it’s budget conscious too! Perhaps this is when they earmarked Sherwin for the producer’s job; after all, it’s a clever conceit that’s appropriate for the plot and nature of the menace, and also a canny use of resources. Everyone’s a winner!

Plot-wise, however, this is a bit of a disgrace. What you call “the most exciting episode since The Web of Fear,” I would call “lots of chasing up and down in a lift”. I’m grateful that Camfield, Troughton and Stoney are all doing exciting things to distract us from the drying paint (why oh
why
wasn’t Kevin Stoney better known – this is an extraordinary performance of suave menace and suppressed fury). But try as I might to see it otherwise, much of the episode seems an exercise in establishing that Vaughn’s a baddy. And having previously lauded Halliday’s unusual take on a stock character, I do think he overdoes it a little here, and gets very camp when he realises that the Doctor is responsible for the lift shenanigans.

There’s so little else to say, let me use my remaining space here to tell you about a little detective work I’ve done. No-one seemed to be able to find Gordon St Clair, who played Grun in The Curse of Peladon. Now, I recalled seeing an advert in a fan magazine of some sort from years ago, for an event in Australia boasting appearances by Katy Manning and Gordon Stoppard (sic), with the latter cited as everyone’s favourite King’s Champion. I assumed that this was a spelling mistake for Gordon
Stothard
, who was a Cyberman in The Wheel in Space, and wondered if he and St Clair were one and the same. (It was difficult to tell, or course, because he was under a Cyber outfit in Wheel, and so we don’t know what he looked like.) But sometime later, I noticed in the extras list for this story that Stothard was one of the tall men in overalls carrying caskets (the other is Miles Northover, for anyone who wants to know what a Kroton looks like). And look – there he is at the beginning of this instalment. Grun, in all his majesty! Yes, you read it here first, Gordon Stothard is Gordon St Clair. I’ve emailed this theory to my friend Peter, who has the ear of the Production Notes people on the DVDs, so I’ll be interested to see if this info is used.

April 23rd

The Invasion episode four

R:
I bet Douglas Camfield had a field day with all this! A helicopter rescue in mid-air, with guards machine gunning at it, and Jamie clinging to it by rope ladder as it flies away...! The action sequences have a scale to them utterly unlike anything we’ve seen on Doctor Who before; if I were writing a script for BBC Wales right now, with the budget and the kudos that the series now has, I’d hesitate before writing in something like this. Ambition is not necessarily something that looks good on screen in Who – but the fact that the majority of the episode is written to accommodate one glorious stunt suggests that they
must
have known they could pull it off. As it is, this looks epic enough even as a cartoon.

And after all this eye candy, at the end of the episode there’s
still
time to show the Doctor and Jamie getting back into an IE warehouse... by canoe. The effort being shown by the production team to keep this story visually fresh is remarkable.

It’s all sound and fury, and there’s not much room for the little nuances I love to pick out. But I’m very fond of that pleasingly subtle moment when Vaughn uses the phone, only to find a
human
operator on the other end. He’s so used to the system being fully automated, or to only talking to machine creatures from other worlds – and so when suddenly presented with an attractive woman he audibly double takes, and turns on the charm.

T:
The past two episodes have all been escape and capture – in fact, the past
four
episodes should really have been called Prelude to an Invasion – but it’s become clear that everyone involved, rightfully, has faith that Camfield will keep things interesting even when there’s very little substance. And while it’s true that Sherwin hasn’t given us much in the way of plot advancement, he’s more than made up for this in stark realism and character development. Between the two of them, this has become quite a grown-up and uncompromising story – it’s exactly the way my fevered childish brain imagined Doctor Who was when I read the novels. I’d have absolutely loved this had it been on telly when I was a teenager, and I have to acknowledge the great work of Cosgrove Hall in recreating these lost instalments. I stand by my previous comments that I’d rather have back an episode from a story that’s entirely absent from the archives, but it is thrilling to have the gaps of this adventure animated for viewing on DVD.

And what a truly brilliant villain Tobias Vaughn is. I initially questioned the wisdom of his guards firing on UNIT, but it becomes a plot point – he can use force against UNIT because he has Major General Rutlidge under his control, and he can boast about double-crossing his allies because he’s invented a machine that can harm them. Everyone is a pawn of Tobias Vaughn! Or I should say “prawn”, as he’s used marine metaphors twice in many episodes – he’s all sprat and mackerel this, catching with bait that. I’m so glad you didn’t notice this, Rob, because you’d probably have sensed a fish theme at work in the story, and written an essay on why Isobel is a mollusc and Sergeant Walters is a guppy. Or something.

Haddock out.

The Invasion episode five

R:
The big mystery of the episode: whatever happened to Major General Rutlidge? In the novelisation there’s no doubt. Rutlidge is murdered, and vomits a stream of blood as he does so (probably the nastiest example of overkill in any Target novelisation). On the television screen it’s a lot more oblique than that. Vaughn senses that control over his puppet is weakening, so summons him to his office in London. There Rutlidge gives all the information he can. Packer asks what will be done with him, and Vaughn idly replies, “Leave him to me” – and then promptly turns his back on him, and goes to have a chat with Cyber-control instead. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was an error, that there’s a missed scene – but Camfield focuses upon Rutlidge’s face during this, picking out the beads of sweat, and a growing horror that he’s in some way party to the invasion being discussed. We expect a moment of rebellion. Nothing. He’s never seen again.

What’s brilliant about it is Vaughn’s very dismissiveness of Rutlidge. It only dawns on us as the episode continues that the Rutlidge story has ended. He was never meant to leave Vaughn’s office alive – and it didn’t need to be a big melodramatic gesture, Vaughn had the man killed so matter-of-factly, he did it after more pressing business
off screen.
It’s subtly one of the most powerful deaths we’ve witnessed in Doctor Who for ages, and precisely because we
don’t
witness it. Vaughn is that powerful. That he intends to kill Rutlidge is clear enough, and that he has him in his mercy is established. We don’t need any more. The man is dead. It’s chilling – and, of course, it succeeds so well because it can only be chilling in retrospect. This poor hypnotised man, made to be a traitor against his will, is nothing more than a loose end that doesn’t need tying.

The power Vaughn shows this episode is so great that it almost overwhelms everything else. The scene where he attacks a Cyberman with emotions – reviving it “just enough to wean it out of its cocoon” to experiment on it – is so callously done that you actually feel sorry for the newborn monster. That’s what’s bizarre: the Cybermen have never looked so good or imposing, and you expect this to be the point in the story (as in Tomb) where they’ll take over from their human ally. On the contrary – Vaughn is no idiot like Eric Klieg, and knows full well that his allies will dispose of him the moment they’re able to. The Cybermen’s voices are even odder here than in The Wheel in Space – but Derrick Sherwin has taken the best elements of that story, and cast them here as the sinister mute giants skulking in the shadows.

Isobel Watkins, though. Dear oh dear. The scene in which she turns on the Brigadier for being anti-feminist simply because he’s unwilling to let her encounter alien killers of superhuman strength in a sewer is so irritating that it makes my teeth smart. The programme can’t have it both ways; Isobel can’t be a freethinking woman with attitude one moment, and then be bemoaning the fact that the soldier she’s chatting up isn’t stinking rich the next. Here begins the long ugly take on feminism that characterises so much of Doctor Who in the seventies. A lot of bewildered male writers begin to recognise that women out there are starting to make a lot of noise about equal rights – and stick it into the show in such a caricatured fashion that any character caught banging on about Women’s Lib looks like an idiot. When the Cybermen advance on those “crazy kids” in the sewer at the cliffhanger, you’re left hoping that at least the annoying blonde one with the telephoto lens will cop it.

T:
I have to say, these are my favourite variant of Cybermen. They’re the first ones I saw, I think – they stared out at me from the cover of Doctor Who and the Cybermen (the novelisation of The Moonbase), and also featured heavily in that A-Z of Monsters book that I previously mentioned. Their face masks are simple; they’re impassive, but also solid and unsilly. Their lace-up boots and zip don’t detract from this more streamlined look, with stiff, solid looking support joints. Okay, they
sound
like Donald Duck, but that’s not to fault the efforts of costume designer Bobi Bartlett. These Cybermen
look
fantastic, gleaming as they do in the sewers, and casting ominous shadows on the walls. It was such a great idea to have them skulking about in the underbelly of the capital, and it brings out the best in Camfield’s direction.

There’s much to like about this: the Doctor’s distorted face in the magnifying glass, Ian Fairbairn’s turn as the rather unkempt and downtrodden scientist Gregory, Jamie’s cheeky grin when he tells the girls that man’s superiority is a fact. In the end, though, Stoney once again is head and shoulders above everything else. His best line is when an underling worries that anyone meeting the rampaging Cyberman they’ve loosed in the sewers could be killed, and he responds, “Good, anyone fool enough to be down those sewers deserves to die...”

By the way, Happy Shakespeare Day. And RIP William Hartnell, who left us on this day back in 1975.

April 24th

The Invasion episode six

R:
There’s an energy to the direction we’re simply not used to on Doctor Who, even from Douglas Camfield. Look at that quick sequence where a UNIT soldier beats a Cyberman down the manhole with the end of his rifle – he puts such passion into it that his cap flies off, and filmed from the Cyberman’s point of view, it hits the screen with a real force. When there’s the time or money for action scenes, Camfield frames them brilliantly – the scenes in the sewer, with Cybermen being bombed and scared soldiers being gunned down, is told with great economy that makes them very tense. And the sequence at the end of the episode, where we see Cybermen marching in front of St Paul’s – their heads first appearing over the picture postcard image, then confidently taking full possession of it – is about as iconic and as epic as Doctor Who ever gets.

And the brilliance of Camfield is that when the time or money run out, he manages to make hastily scripted filler scenes just as effective. The rescue of Professor Watkins couldn’t be shot as scripted – so instead we have a sequence in which a desperate Gregory tells Vaughn all about the action sequence, and is calmly sentenced to death as a consequence. It’s shocking, and abrupt, and
cheap
, yes – but it’s also so much more dramatic than another stunt set piece with the military. His extraordinary talent is being able to flip between scenes of large-scale action, with moments of dangerous intimacy. For my money, the best part of the whole episode is where Vaughn goads Professor Watkins to take his gun and shoot him. There’s awful resignation on Watkins’ face as he closes his eyes and waits for death, as Vaughn aims his revolver at his head – followed by bemused horror as he realises that Vaughn is telling him to make something of his principles and take the opportunity to kill him. When Vaughn knocks him to the ground in impatience, it’s done with real violence – and the way he laughs when the best Watkins can do is produce three smoking holes in his chest is the mark of a psychopath. The whole sequence is just beautifully staged for maximum tension, Camfield concentrating on extreme close-ups of Edward Burnham’s face as we’re asked to consider whether we too would have the courage to make a stand against evil.

T:
Let me offer a fresh perspective on the Watkins-shooting-Vaughn scene. When I first watched this episode all those years ago, when the universe was less than half its present size, my sister stuck her head around the door. She was slightly confused by the scene, thinking that – thanks to the close-up on Watkins’ face as he pulls the trigger, and lingers there as his head slowly falls back and he faints – that the gun had been rigged to fire backwards or something, killing him. So, I’m not sure if that particular moment is as 100% successful as we’d like to think. It’s a
hell
of a sequence, though, with Vaughn goading Watkins and slapping him with enormous force. (I’m told that Edward Burnham wasn’t too fond of Kevin Stoney – and perhaps that hefty whack in the chops had something to do with it!) Those smoking holes in Vaughn’s chest are impressive too, and it’s really quite an adult scene. The last story had a bunch of posh kids besting the Doctor with the old Adam, Eve and Pinch-Me chestnut; this adventure entails one man challenging his opponent’s morality by demanding that he shoot him at point-blank range. Brr.