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

by Robert Shearman

  And so the Doctor’s first battle with his most iconic enemies comes to an end. It’s been spooky and experimental, and yet what I love most about this story (especially when you consider that the show as it currently stands can occasionally be too knowingly iconic) is that this was all chucked together by people who had no idea what it was they’d started. To those involved, it was just a day at work, a confluence of ideas – and yet it was so successful that it’s directly responsible for Doctor Who surviving to see the vast number of Who-related events that are going on all over the world on this very day.

  The Edge of Destruction (episode one)

  R: This is utterly bonkers, isn’t it? You’d never get away with screening an episode as bizarre as this on television nowadays. I’m pretty amazed they got away with screening it then.

  Faced with a need to make two episodes on the cheap – and with no new sets and no additional actors – the production team made this quickie inside the TARDIS. With that in mind, David Whitaker – Doctor Who’s first script editor and the writer of this story – could have gone down several different routes. He might have written a story which served as some sort of intriguing mystery – and at times you feel that’s the approach he’s opting for, but the clues are too thinly drawn, and don’t point to any solution. (Besides, at the episode’s end, a whole halfway through the story, you don’t get a sense of anything really being at stake.) So instead, he could have gone for the character study, the cost-cutting option seen on many a Star Trek near the end of a series, sacrificing action and adventure for dialogue and depth. But even that isn’t happening, as the TARDIS regulars are quite purposefully drawn from scratch, and are at times quite unrecognisable from any previous episodes. Actually, it’s even odder than that – they’re even acting in completely different styles. William Russell affects a sort of zombie air for most of the proceedings, giving an eerie sing-song quality to a lot of his early dialogue; Carole Ann Ford goes flat-out playing Susan either as swaying drunk or scary psychopath. William Hartnell seems very puzzled by the whole thing, and so falls into his default “brash” persona. Thank God for Jacqueline Hill, who in spite of the odds actually mines something emotional and true out of all the weirdness, becoming wonderfully angry at the Doctor’s ingratitude and suitably distressed by his suspicion.

  It’d take a braver man than me to suggest that The Edge of Destruction actually works. (You up for that, Toby?) And yet... this is an episode so utterly ill-conceived, so entirely off the rails, that it actually impresses with its sheer chutzpah. You can tell that none of the cast have the slightest idea how to read what’s going on – and yet, rather than muttering the lines and looking embarrassed, they’re all really going for their contrasting interpretations. If the following scene contradicts what they’ve just done, they don’t worry about it, they just commit wholeheartedly to the new approach instead. (Watch Carole Ann Ford in particular, who moves from hysteric to sinister scissor-wielding nutter to troubled peacemaker within minutes – and does so with such utter gung-ho conviction, it almost joins the dots.) Had the episode been played in a uniform style, with the cast fully clear about the direction their characters should be going, this would all be rather tepid stuff. But because it’s so deliriously flying by the seat of its pants, it at times feels genuinely chilling. When even the actors don’t appear to know what to expect next, neither can we the audience, and the effect is disorientating. The camera keeps on surprising us, with actors taking up different positions off screen – the most obvious example is when Ian happens upon a Susan who’s brandishing a pair of scissors, but I honestly shuddered when Ian, having been set up as lolling unconscious in a chair, is revealed as standing up, impassively staring at Barbara in the background.

  Because this episode breaks all the rules, because we can never for a second work out what the threat is, almost everything has the potential to be creepy. It could be the smile on the Doctor’s face as he hands out drinks to all his companions, it could be the somewhat too self-conscious shrug that Ian gives when Barbara asks him why the Doctor is staring at them. There’s a wonderfully disturbing idea at the heart of this episode – that something has entered the Ship, and is hiding in one of the crew. If you can forget the depressingly prosaic explanation that’s instead offered next week, and if you can pretend that you’re watching The Edge of Destruction as viewers did in 1964, then this is unnerving stuff.

  You also have to cherish a series that can be as insane as this. Having just played out a monster serial with fights and explosions, it offers this – this strange, ugly, unwieldy thing. At a time when Doctor Who acts as if it’s one ongoing serial, the contrast between what the show has been promising its audience and what it’s now giving them is extraordinary. No, The Edge of Destruction doesn’t really work. But it’s probably the single maddest thing it’s ever attempted in its 45 years of history, and it does it only 12 weeks in.

  T: I watched this episode while unwinding after my first gig back, so I’m typing these thoughts after having taken a couple of relaxing drams... which I’m hoping in some way goes to explain what I’ve been witnessing. This is bonkers! As you say, the cast are acting each scene in a completely different manner; it’s as if they’re contestants on Whose Line Is It Anyway, and the audience is shouting for them to perform “melodrama!”, then “kitchen sink drama!”, and then – to William Russell – “drunk vicar!” Even the regulars’ dress sense seems mercurial – Barbara seems to be wearing Thal trousers (an odd present to give someone), and Susan has been reduced to floating around in a maternity dress. And now she’s got a flannel on her head! I’m half expecting her to stick two pencils up her nose and plead insanity.

  Among the genuinely weird vignettes, there are some chilling moments – the way that Jacqueline Hill’s voice cracks in a brilliant evocation of full-on fright, and the eerie manner in which Susan suggests that if an intruder has penetrated the TARDIS, it might be hiding “in one of us”. Carole Ann Ford in particular seems very much in her element with this story – she’s able to channel the spirit of An Unearthly Child, which suits her visage and the disarmingly offbeat look she can muster in her eyes. It’s especially disturbing when she becomes so demented that she produces a huge pair of scissors, has an orgasm and starts stabbing her bendy space chair (or wibbly space bed, take your pick). And is it wrong of me that, amongst all this madness, I find Susan quite sexy while she’s lolling about on the wonky space divan clutching those scissors? (I did mention that I’ve had two winter warmer whiskeys, right?)

  You’re right, though, to highlight Jacqueline Hill, who delivers a smashing retort to the Doctor’s paranoia and accusations that she and Ian have sabotaged the Ship. Not for nothing has this fantastic confrontation – where Barbara, bristling with principled and righteous anger, really sticks it to the old man – been cited by some commentators as a turning point in the Doctor’s character, and therefore in the entire series. The only downside to this smashing performance is that Hill is made to top it off by over-reacting to a melting clock, and then a wristwatch. I do feel sorry for her and Ford: they get all the rubbish stuff to do despite the occasional gems they’re thrown. People wouldn’t as fondly remember the Doctor musing “Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension?” in the first episode if he’d followed it up by immediately screaming at a bit of shrubbery and tripping over a hillock.

  Then things get even stranger when the English countryside appears on the scanner, and I react with twenty-first century aloofness at the basic technology being employed by the production. “It’s obviously just a photograph,” I think smugly to myself. “It’s just a photograph,” the Doctor says on screen. What? This is becoming metatextual in my head now. I pour the remainder of the whisky down the sink.

  And so everyone goes to bed and the Doctor is doing something crafty at the controls, the camera jauntily highlighting his nifty hand acting (he’s got very expressive digits – see, I told you this Smith bloke
has what it takes). Someone then grabs the Doctor by the throat, and as the credits roll, I can’t help but think, “What the hell was that all about?” – but I say that as a positive rather than a negative. One of the many things I love about about Doctor Who is how there’s an episode to suit me no matter what mood I’m in: action-adventure, SF epic, knockabout comedy, morality play... the series can be (and has been) all of these. And sometimes, just sometimes, I might want to watch a bunch of people being chucked in at the deep end and asked to pull off what’s possibly the oddest 25 minutes ever committed to television – and when I do, I’ll watch this.

  January 7th

  The Brink of Disaster (The Edge of Destruction episode two)

  R: On the one hand, this is much better because you feel at least that the actors have read the end of the script before coming to the set this week, and so have a reasonable idea of what to work towards. But it’s also much worse, because what they’re working to is so determinedly anticlimactic. “We must all work together,” says the Doctor, and that’s a reasonable moral – but it’s also the same one the band of travellers employed escaping from savage cavemen, or in defeating alien mutants, so it doesn’t have appreciably more dramatic value now that they’re pitting their wits against a stuck button. It’s been argued that this is the story where the regulars throw off their suspicions towards each other and through the mystery become friends – and you can see the value of doing a story like that – but in fact, the earlier two adventures have done their jobs too well and already achieved it.

  The one thing that really works, though, is in watching how William Russell, Jacqueline Hill and Carole Ann Ford all snap back into their previous personae at the story’s end, but that William Hartnell resolutely doesn’t. He takes the Doctor on an extraordinary journey in this instalment, having seemed rather bewildered by the last. He seizes upon the Doctor’s capriciousness and cruelty early on – he positively looms over Ian threateningly as he sneers at him to get up off the floor. And this is in marked contrast to his new defining of the Doctor as a cuddly grandfather by the story’s end, where he awkwardly tells Barbara how valuable and clever she is, or tells Susan that he fears he’s going round the bend. This is by way of an extraordinary monologue given while the Doctor is darkened against the central console, in which he describes the birth of a solar system – it’s melodramatic, it’s over the top, and it ends with the Doctor giggling at the cosmic implications of it all like a lunatic, but it works because it feels incredibly alien. It’s not an easy scene to watch, and I have friends who deride it as Hartnell at his hammiest, but that sequence seems like the bridge between the brusque Doctor of the early stories and the loveable old eccentric he’ll now become. Hartnell also fluffs a lot this week – most amusingly, at the episode title itself. (“We’re on the brink of... of destruction!” he says, forcing William Russell, rather charmingly, to repeat the mistake back at him.) But you can forgive that, I think, for the intelligent way that he steers himself into this new characterisation – and especially for that gorgeous moment where he admits to Ian that he’s lied to the women about how much time they all have left to live, then asks whether the schoolteacher can stand and face oblivion with him.

  T: The weirdness of this story seems to be bleeding into the real world – my TARDIS money box has, with no external stimulus or prompting, just starting randomly making stuttering sounds! I’m not kidding. This would only have been more perfect and strange had it coincided with Susan’s line that “Everything can’t be wrong!”

  Meanwhile, the approach to doomsday is very effective – the lighting gets very atmospheric, helped no end by the recurring explosions that rock the Ship. It builds a fantastic, oppressive momentum that climaxes as the camera creeps up on Hartnell as he delivers his big moment. I sympathise with your mates who mock him (especially the slightly mad hand clasp he does at the end), but he looks so magnificent, and the scene is lit with such brilliance, I think it’s churlish to criticise. The Doctor is awed by the magnificence of the birth of a solar system, so of course he’s going to get a bit hysterical.

  But what’s important about this two-parter is that the regulars all pull together – Susan does some helpful counting, and the Doctor confides the truth about the oncoming oblivion to Ian, but most importantly Barbara becomes the brains of the outfit and pieces a solution together from the clues they’ve witnessed. (Just how the hell she does this, though, I’ve no idea – when all is said and done, does the evidence actually add up the way Barbara thinks it adds up? Clearly, she’s a dab hand at cryptic crosswords, and we’re not meant to question her methodology.) Later on, Jacqueline Hill is great when the Doctor tries to apologise for his behaviour, with Hartnell suggesting that a lot of the Doctor’s jolly bluster is to cover up his embarrassment at pesky interpersonal interaction. It lays the groundwork for so much characterisation to come.

  The fact that the production team did this story at all is amazing, and it beautifully complements the previous two adventures in terms of variety: so far, each story has been markedly different to the one before it. My knowledge of sixties TV is limited, but I like to think that the people making this programme went for broke and decided they could do anything, and did it wholeheartedly. For all I know, there’s a Z-Cars episode that’s told from the point of view of one of the cars, but I very much doubt it. This isn’t a story I’ll watch again in a hurry, but the fact that it exists is proof that Doctor Who is the flexible, crazy, unformulaic show we all love it for being.

  January 8th

  The Roof of the World (Marco Polo episode one)

  R: Our first missing episode! And it’s hard, when you listen to the soundtrack of Marco Polo, and look at the telesnaps, and pore over the gorgeous colour photographs, not to feel cheated – that of all the stories to be wiped, this is Doctor Who’s first casualty. After two episodes stuck inside the TARDIS jumping at shadows, this adventure sounds sumptuous – and you want to see the pictures move. And there’s an irony of sorts, I think, in that following a story that purported to be about the TARDIS, we have here a story in which the TARDIS is the pivot around which the plot turns. The Edge of Destruction featured a TARDIS that was revealed as sentient, that was trying to communicate with its travellers, but it’s this episode that makes it seem especially magical and mysterious. It’s a flying caravan, a piece of Buddhist wonder and the key to Marco Polo’s freedom.

  And after the fairly simplistic portrait of goodies and baddies on the planet Skaro, it’s refreshing to have an episode in which the threats that the TARDIS crew confront are somewhat more ambiguous. The warlord Tegana is clearly shown to be the story’s villain – but he is an enemy purely because of cultural difference, not because he is intrinsically evil. And Derren Nesbitt plays the role so subtly – just listen to him. Swarthy Mongol with an earring he may be, but there’s nothing in his voice which marks him out as a caricature, nothing which suggests that Tegana doesn’t see himself as a heroic patriot. The scene where he encounters the Doctor and friends, and gives orders for them to be killed as evil spirits, is all the more startling because Nesbitt makes the argument sound eminently reasonable. In his discussion later with Marco Polo, you almost find yourself warming to Tegana’s point of view, until you catch yourself realising that he’s coolly advocating the murder of our heroes. In any other story, too, Marco Polo would be presented simply as an obstacle to be thwarted, but Mark Eden makes him so affable and courteous that, again, you can appreciate his reasons for stealing the TARDIS. And it’s extremely clever the way that writer John Lucarotti uses the poignant scene in which Susan talks about her not having a home, to make us sympathise more with Marco Polo’s position. He has not seen his home for 18 years, and fears he will be killed at court upon Kublai Khan’s death.

  And William Hartnell continues to be a joy. Irascible at one moment when he realises the TARDIS is broken, charming with Ping-Cho whilst eating her soup... and, best of all, overcome with delighted hysteria when he realis
es he’s lost his only means of travel through time and space, and has no idea what to do next.

  T: The TARDIS might be a space/time vessel, but it’s no sanctuary – if something simple goes wrong with the Ship, even the snowy environment in which our heroes land becomes as palpable a threat as any robot or cyborg. If they don’t do something quick, they’re going to die of hypothermia, and not even the “magical” TARDIS interior can save them.

  What’s funny is that although we know now that this story is a historical, it’s at first played as if it’s science fiction. Something as simple as a footprint is used to generate menace, and Barbara thinks that a beast or creature – which is finally revealed as a fur-dressed Marco Polo – is stalking them. The longer pace of sixties TV allows the mood and suspense to build up in a manner that wouldn’t be countenanced today. Similarly, I love the narrative device of Marco reciting his diary entries – it’s a very nice flourish that’s not seen in any other Doctor Who story, and the uniqueness of this makes me realize just how much modern shows can be bloody hidebound by format or concept. 24’s raison d’etre relies upon a “real-time” gimmick that necessitates the unlikely conceit of something dramatic happening on the cusp of every hour, and a protagonist who appears to have had a bladderectomy and owns a mobile phone with a limitless battery. Doctor Who, however, will dispense with such gimmickry in one episode, then try something new next week. It’s the only prime-time British TV show that dares do such a thing.

  Strangely enough, by the end of the episode, the biggest threat to the crew – the person who forcibly takes the TARDIS, their most prized possession, and announces his plan to trade it away to end his exile – is actually a very affable and reasonable man. This puts the audience in a strange position: after spending just 20 minutes in Marco’s company, you want him to get home, but also know that if he gets his wish, our heroes are scuppered. This is subtle, clever and brilliant character work. We love Marco’s intellect and reasoning, but at the same time must acknowledge that from the Doctor’s perspective, Marco is also something of a savage.