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

by Robert Shearman

  I rather like the design of the Sensorites. They’re cheap, certainly, and the disc-shaped feet are probably a bad idea – the actors don’t seem to realise when they’re standing on each other. But the faces are lovely, and – again, rarely for a Who monster – individually distinctive. Besides, the thinner of the two Sensorites bears an uncanny similarity to a maths teacher I had when I was 14.

  Stephen Dartnell continues to give a great performance as John; I love the way that he tries to resist the aliens’ mind-control, turning to camera and pleading as if the audience at home are the ones tormenting him.

  T: I’m watching this on a grotty old VHS tape (not the commercial BBC one, but a multi-generational copy). So I’m denied the crystal-clear images of The Aztecs, where I could pick up every nuance in an actor’s face, and here I’m seeing fuzzy, blobby shades of grey, populated by aliens who appear to be talking through a sock. But, I rather like it. As a kid, I was always fascinated by the 60s stories because they were on before I was born; they were ancient, fusty, awe-inspiring pieces of history. The cold light of day (and the VidFIRE restoration process) can make these episodes appear less antique, but I actually like the metaphorical cobwebs. It also makes me look forward to the eventual release of The Sensorites on DVD, as within the doubtless sharpened pictures and crystal-clear sound, I will discover this story all over again.

  This time around, though, the lack of clarity in the picture makes those little Sensorite eyes look really interesting and alien. In fact, even though they’re just men in body stockings with plates on their feet, I think the design of the Sensorites is unfairly maligned. I find them convincing, and the simple trick of the actors husking their voices up a bit sells me on their alien qualities. I also like the spaceship set, and even though much of this episode consists of people just walking very slowly, the languid camerawork and Kay’s music (though basically a retread of The Keys of Marinus) make it all seem very spooky. The scene with Ian and Barbara creeping towards their confrontation with the Sensorites, in fact, has no dialogue for ages (yes, it’s true: this episode is the Doctor Who equivalent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Hush), and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

  William Hartnell again proves that he’s so much better at the haughty or resigned one-liner than at giggling, as the Doctor – when Captain Maitland explains John’s condition by saying his hair tuned completely white – delivers a bluff “There’s nothing wrong with that” as a riposte. It’s worth noting too, that even though the Doctor Who Annuals of this era refer to the Doctor as an Earthman, Ian explicitly tells him that, “On Earth, we have a saying...” It’s interesting that whilst taken as read, the Doctor’s being an alien isn’t an issue.

  Stephen Dartnell is still the best thing on offer here, though (facially and physically, he bears a striking resemblance to David Tennant – have you noticed that?), though Carole Ann Ford gives him a run for his money when she’s allowed to channel her inner unearthly child, and delivers a moody and effective cliffhanger where Susan says she must go with the Sensorites to their homeworld or all of her friends will die.

  January 17th

  Hidden Danger (The Sensorites episode three)

  R: Do you know, I really love it when we stumble upon things that simply wouldn’t work the way television is made today, but can still have surprised and wrongfooted the contemporary audience. Take the cliffhanger, for example. The Doctor, Ian and Susan are having a meal with the Sensorite leader, and William Russell coughs during one of his lines. He clears his throat, throws in a “sorry”, and we think nothing of it – we’ve been watching Hartnell stumble his way through the script many a time, and we’re used to the fact that the BBC can’t afford many retakes, so seeing an actor get a fly in his throat is nothing. Then the camera gives its attention to Hartnell when he gives a speech, and we can hear Russell once again give a little cough. Then he keels over unconscious. The coughing was scripted. The man’s dying! Now, there’s no way that could work in the new series, or even for much of the seventies onwards. If a character starts coughing, and it’s left for broadcast, it must be significant. A director can’t hide surprise moments like that from the audience any more; the slickness of television nowadays would rob it of any ambiguity.

  The highlight of the episode, though, comes early on. Susan’s little rebellion against her grandfather is beautifully played by Carole Ann Ford, who clearly seizes the chance to give the character a little more welly. The lines she has to say – insisting that she’s no longer a child, and has opinions of her own – could almost have been written by the actress herself. It’s a nice development from the stance she took in The Aztecs against her arranged marriage, stating boldly that she has the right to her own choice. How right it feels, then, that she reacts so strongly against the Doctor when he suggests here that she has no right to exercise her judgment around him either.

  There’s a laudable attempt to give all these Sensorites individual characters – and it’s the first time in the series this has happened, as all alien races before this acted as one. The actors do their best, but they’re rather defeated by the masks and the longwinded bits of dialogue that feel more like speeches than conversation (and have wonderful bits of exposition, with the Sensorites telling each other things about their own anatomy!). That said, you get the feeling that the performers are trying to get more humanity into the parts despite the lines being a mouthful; there’s a lovely bit where the Second Elder takes the firing key from the Administrator and gives him the deathly warning, “Take care lest my doubts are become realities” – and then, as he’s leaving, he turns in the doorway and gives the Administrator an admonishing look as if to a naughty schoolboy, which makes everything light and natural again.

  At least the effort is there, and I like the idea of a society that has good reason to fear and dislike the humans. The Administrator himself isn’t evil; he’s merely arguing a point of view that is opposed to the First Elder’s policy of appeasement. He’s no Tegana, and no Tlotoxl (there’s none of that depth), but in theory the character should have a dignity to him. That’s all rather threatened by the fact that John’s mania seems to have given him the ability to be moral arbiter of everyone he meets, and to categorise them as “good” and “bad”. It’s touching when, on the spaceship, he calls his fiancée “good” – which makes Carol turn away in distress, realising that that childish simplicity is all the complexity he can give her. It’s less effective on the planet when John identifies the First Elder in the same way, partly because there’s good reason to believe the Elder won’t have any greater character complexity for John to miss, and also because John does it straight to camera as an aside. It does feel a bit like he’s trying to help out any audience members who may have lost their way.

  T: And two episodes in, we finally meet the serial’s main guest star. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Peter Glaze! At the time, I suspect that this was a casting coup equivalent to getting the Chuckle Brothers to play Nazis in the new series. I just can imagine, though, Glaze being pleased to hear his agent say that he’s going to be playing the lead villain – and then being rather nonplussed to discover he’s credited under the illustrious name of “Third”! Especially as he’s always referred to as the City Administrator in the script. It seems a rather sloppy way of going about things; Arthur Newall’s character is called “Engineer”, but is credited as “Fourth”. This will get even more confusing later in, when the First and Second Sensorites disappear, and so top Sensorite billing goes, oddly, to the Third! Was it too much of a stretch of the writer’s imagination to give these characters names?

  In the same vein, the caste system of the Sensorites feels like a vague attempt to give them a discernibly different culture, but it’s all a bit lazy. The Sensorite warriors fight... what, exactly? Each other? They must do, as the Sensorites are a peaceful race who have no contact with anyone else. The Fourth Sensorite asks the Third if humans’ hearts are “in the centre, like ours”, which is a bit like me sa
ying to you, “Fish breathe with gills, not with lungs – you know, like we humans have in our chests.”

  Am I straying from this book’s brief and being overly critical, you might ask? No, because The Sensorites is showing me that Doctor Who could have been written like this every week! We’re being given unsophisticated, two-dimensional aliens who don’t have individual names, and live in a simplistically sketched societal hierarchy. Clues to each mystery are set out in such proximity to one another, it seems intended to make the children watching at home think they’ve been very clever when they work them out. Not that there’s anything wrong with this approach per se – it’s just that when one considers the programme’s timeslot and central premise, we probably wouldn’t be writing about it 40-odd years later had the production team not opted for more sophistication from subsequent scripts.

  Oh, and I promise not to use a Doctor Who book to make too many cheap political gags. Otherwise, I’d point out that the actor playing the creepy, xenophobic, self-interested, dishonest Fourth Sensorite quit acting after this and became a Tory Councillor for Enfield.

  A Race Against Death (The Sensorites episode four)

  R: To be fair, it’s not so much a “race” against death as a gentle trot. There’s a very funny montage sequence of the Doctor testing various samples of water for poison – alongside the First Elder painstakingly writing “negative” against each one and shaking his head sadly at Susan – only at last for a positive result to come up, and the Doctor to confirm what he’d already worked out five minutes beforehand. Meanwhile, William Russell plays someone dying from contamination the way a man plays having a head cold and phoning up his boss to get off work for the day – he makes his voice a bit weak and raspy.

  There’s a much-mocked scene in which Carol suggests to the Administrator that were he to change his clothing, his physical similarity to all the other Sensorites means that no-one could recognise him. “I’d never thought of that!” says our evil egg in the Sensorite regime, as if he’s a seventeenth century man just hearing Newton’s take on gravity. But, really, why should he have thought of it? If you’re part of a culture where everyone is identical, and your badges of your office identify you, it takes a radical mind to make the leap to question that and see it from an outsider’s perspective. You can see this being a really witty idea – say, if a sudden genius grunt in the ranks of the cloned Sontaran realises that he could be commander if he only put on a different helmet. It only falls down here because the Sensorites manifestly aren’t identical – Peter Glaze in particular looks nothing like any of the others. And since they’re all facially dissimilar, the little differences between the Sensorites would be all the more obvious. All of this smacks a little bit like an Englishman who believes that all the Chinese look the same, and actually expects that the Chinese can’t tell each other apart either.

  T: Yes, in the days when I’d read about The Sensorites but not actually seen it, I was thrilled to read that different masks had been designed to give each Sensorite a unique character. It’s cheaper to lift every visage from the same mould, which explains why Doctor Who monsters tend to all look exactly the same, even though this isn’t altogether believable. So it’s typical of this daft series that I adore, that the only two species who are cited in the scripts as being identical – the Sensorites and the Sontarans – resolutely aren’t!

  And while the Doctor’s laborious gathering of evidence wouldn’t have detained Sherlock Holmes for even a minute, I like the cross-cutting and fading from the stricken Ian, to the Doctor, to the test tubes. When director Graeme Harper does this in 20 years’ time, we’ll be lauding him. There are a couple of fluffs, though – the First Elder says, “Give my Doctor the compliments,” whilst the Doctor talks of “the First Elder... err, Scientist.” But to be fair, Peter R Newman (or the Fourth Writer, as he shall be known from now on) hasn’t exactly made it easy for everyone.

  And did you notice, with regards the way the Doctor is more and more becoming the series’ central character, that the First Elder refers to him as the “commander” of the TARDIS crew? Perhaps he’s just reciprocating a bit of courtesy – the Doctor here is far more respectful of court ritual and authority than he was whilst hooting like a maniac in front of Kublai Khan.

  Finally, let me point out that when John says “evil”, we get another socking great musical sting, just as we did with Ian’s declaration of “dead” in episode one. Subtlety has taken a holiday, alongside the absent and much-missed Jacqueline Hill.

  January 18th

  Kidnap (The Sensorites episode five)

  R: Well, the “kidnap” of the title takes place – ooh, I’d say, five whole seconds before the end of this week’s instalment. Things are coming to a pretty pass when the selling point of the episode is only at the cliffhanger. It’s strange, watching this, how all that wonderful tension evoked in Strangers in Space has now ebbed away. There’s the odd attempt at it – I love how Hartnell has mastered the act of “silent acting whilst the credits play over your face”, getting suspicion and fear into a single and slightly affected hand movement to the chest. (Peter Purves once said in an interview that Hartnell’s film experience taught him to keep his hands in shot during close-ups because they’re so expressive – it’s mannered and unnatural, but it really does work well.) And Norman Kay is working overtime with his musical stings, trying to make the action here more melodramatic than it really is.

  But to be honest, Kidnap is rather on the dry side; when Ian tells Susan that he wishes they were all in the TARDIS and away from the Sense-Sphere, he says it just a little too feelingly. And it’s peculiar that the cast are so much looking forward to Jacqueline Hill being back from her holiday next week, they mention it on no less than four separate occasions – you can always tell there’s a problem with the pacing of a story when it keeps on stopping so all the characters can anticipate the thrills they can expect next week.

  It’s a funny affair, this episode. The best scenes are the ones where the Administrator and the Second Elder argue about a policy of appeasement towards the humans. It’s interesting in part because Peter Glaze’s fervent attack on the pacifism of his brothers is really just the flipside of Ian’s discussion with the Thals – only this time, the TARDIS crew are on the receiving end of the aggression. Although Glaze is clearly portrayed as the story’s villain, without a shred of ambiguity to it, it’s easy to sympathise with his stance – especially when Susan openly laughs at the way the Sensorites run, or John and Carol treat them as if they’re tardy waiters. There’s still a clever twist or two up this story’s sleeve (thank God), but watching it now is a faintly uncomfortable experience, as the amiable racism of the humans (and the way Doctor continues to shout at the Sensorites, even though he knows it causes them pain) isn’t challenged by the episode at all, and the distrust the Sensorites show in response is labelled purely as evil. It’s all a bit too simplistic – we’ve seen during this first season how Doctor Who keeps on trying to find a tone to play off, and at this point it’s clearly Children’s Television. But not in the way that John Lucarotti interpreted it, with subtle instruction and shades of depth. No, here the Administrator is rumbled as a baddie primarily because he was a bit abrupt with Ian and Susan once he’d been put in a position of power. Because that’s right, kids – evil people give themselves away because they’re rude.

  Pah. I’m grumbling too much. I’m supposed to be pointing out what’s good and worth celebrating. Peter Glaze, then. They’ve stuck him behind a mask, they’ve given him the broadest of characters to play – but the funny little feller from Crackerjack is really going for it, blowing the cobwebs off the staid Sensorite society. He’s worth the admission price alone – the regular cast are going through the motions a bit, but Glaze mines the most out of every scene he’s in, a single tilt of the head suggesting pride at his elevation, or haughty disdain to the humans he so despises.

  T: We get one of the biggest and most obvious fluffs in the entire series
: “I heard them over... er... t-talking.” And yet, William Hartnell isn’t to blame. Stand forth (or Fourth), Arthur Newall, your place in history is assured!

  Some of the Sensorites’ attributes continue to raise questions – we’re told that loud noise hurts them, but when Third shouts at the Second Elder, the latter is caused pain while the perpetrator of said noise feels nothing. So, it seems that a Sensorite could charge about shouting and banging, giving everyone around him tinnitus, but would be perfectly fine and oblivious to it himself. (Actually, I know a busker like that in Manchester City Centre.)

  Good on the Third Sensorite, though, for releasing the Fourth to help instead of doing that ridiculous and boring strategy employed by villains on 24: killing their useful ally for incompetence. Oh, and note how the cliffhanger – in which Carol is kidnapped – is the first instance of a non-regular in peril being used to entice us back next week.

  A Desperate Venture (The Sensorites episode six)

  R: John Bailey does a wonderful turn as the Earth commander, who’s been hiding in the aqueducts poisoning water for years, and yet still believes he’s fighting an honourable war. His soldiers wear long beards and carry pointed sticks, but he still has the hearty bonhomie of a colonel who believes in the well-ordered discipline of the drill. It’s a lovely performance because it’s very funny – here is a man who genuinely cannot see to what a ragged state his xenophobia has brought him – but it’s dangerous too, teetering on the edge of paranoia. He rails against the Doctor and Ian with threats of courts martial, and is only reassured when he’s promised all the attention of a welcome committee. Subtlest of all, though, is the way that Bailey clearly feels disappointed that the war is over – his underlings emerge into the sunlight with such relief on their faces, they almost don’t mind that they’re captured by the Sensorites, but this is a soldier who, in supposed victory, has lost all his life’s purpose. He’s only on screen for a few minutes, and yet he plays the part with such energy, and with such thought, that it livens up the entire episode and reminds you how long we’ve had to do without performances of this calibre. Hartnell and Russell clearly perk up too as a response.