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

by Robert Shearman

  And then, just as the episode can test that viewer’s patience no longer, at last a Dalek appears. It hasn’t even emerged from the water before the end credits roll. Almost tauntingly, the screen reads: “Next Episode: The Daleks.”

  T: It really does start well, with that horrible, grisly self-inflicted death. But then – as if to prove that director Richard Martin is only at his best when using film – we cut to a TARDIS scene where the framing is cack-handedly sloppy, and the camerawork poor. On some occasions, the character we’re supposed to be looking at (say, the Doctor) disappears from shot altogether. It’s an ugly piece of work, although it does at least emphasise how good the outside images are. At the episode’s climax, the iconic image of the Dalek rising from the Thames isn’t helped by the jarring cut from studio to film – it looks curiously detached from events occurring in what’s supposedly the same scene and location, and the action doesn’t flow at all seamlessly. That said, it’s the climax to a grim, moody episode; plague is mentioned, floating bodies are seen, London has been desolated. You can see why Terry Nation liked an apocalypse; it really helps to drench everything in a morbid atmosphere.

  William Russell keeps getting the job of telling the audience how serious the situation is, and he does it well. He has a different kind of authority to Hartnell, but an equally important one. “Intelligent”, the Doctor tells Ian approvingly – the old man’s starting to respect the schoolteachers. And just as he despaired that they all split up in the previous story, Ian now berates the absent girls for their tendency to wander off (and into danger). He’s aware of what the clichés are.

  I also really like the bit where Ian falls though the door-leading-to-nowhere – stunt-arranger Peter Diamond often gets overlooked because people interested in such things tend to focus on the work Havoc did on 70s Who, but Diamond was a damn good stuntman who later choreographed one of the best swordfights in cinema ever (for The Princess Bride) and worked on a number of motion pictures, Star Wars included.

  Oh, and a special mention should go to Susan spraining her ankle – something cited as a cliché of Doctor Who, but which doesn’t actually happen very often. I wonder if Carole Ann Ford was revelling in the knowledge that she’s been made to trip over clumsily for the very last time, not realising that she’ll have to do it again, 19 years down the road, in The Five Doctors. (If only the Doctor had installed a Wii in the TARDIS, so she could have sorted out her co-ordination!)

  Had I seen the first broadcast of this as a kid, I’d have been really looking forward to the return of the Daleks – and been pissed off when the credits rolled and promised them next week. I’m sure I would have cursed the Radio Times and its cover-spoilers (that revealed the creature that appears in the cliffhanger) – thank goodness that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

  January 24th

  The Daleks (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode two)

  R: We’ve never had a story on this scale before – and in a way, we never will again. As we get ever further into Doctor Who (and, tellingly, ever further away from the Second World War and a genuine fear of Nazi occupation), alien invasions are the sort of everyday thing that the Doctor prevents from happening. On the odd occasion when there’s a tale that tries something similar – to show an Earth already subjugated by alien aggressors – it’ll be as in Day of the Daleks, something that can be handily rewritten from history owing to some helpful time paradox. But there’s nothing so reassuring in this story – Doctor Who is here doing an adventure in which (technically) contemporary Earth is destroyed. (I know that this adventure is set in the twenty-second century, but that’s just a storytelling necessity – in every part of the design, in every part of the plotting, there’s no attempt to suggest that what all this represents is anything more than the world that the TV viewers intimately know being wiped out. Terry Nation likes this sort of modern doomsday thing – if he’d written Survivors as a Doctor Who adventure, he’d have had to knock it into a so-called “twenty-second century” too.)

  The ambition of this instalment is tremendous, which makes its awkward moments and clumsy beats forgiveable. Nation is not the most elegant of writers, but it’s actually that very bluntness of his which makes this episode so strong. No, there’s nothing especially subtle about the scenes of Dalek propaganda over the radio, or the way they’re leading prisoners into work camps – but there’s a satirical anger to it all that would make subtlety look lily-livered. “Daleks offer you life,” indeed. The epic nature of what Nation is attempting here all but dwarfs the regular cast. Never before have the TARDIS crew been so companion clichéd – Susan twists her ankle, Barbara busies herself with the cooking, Ian’s only on hand to ask questions and look confused. But with the scale of Doctor Who changed, it’s apt that only the Doctor is now big enough a character that he remains imposing and unaffected; it’s the Doctor who gets to give the big speech about the futility of the Daleks’ victory, it’s the Doctor who gets to shine as a genius. The brilliance of this episode is that it finally accomplishes what the last few stories have been edging towards – it turns the Doctor into the star. This is the moment he gets defined.

  And can I just say how much I love the Robomen too? They might look like a bunch of extras with metal helmets, but, actually, that’s the point. No snug fitting black PVC costumes as is in the Aaru film, just a group of captured prisoners automated in whatever rags they happened to be wearing at the time. The body horror that’s suggested by this – that they’re really the walking dead, with all identity and hope removed – anticipates the Cybermen two years early.

  T: You have to wonder if Terry Nation ever set foot in a BBC studio, because he’s demanding a hell of a lot from the production team. (For instance, I’ve just realised that the brilliant warehouse set in World’s End was a one-week wonder, never to make an appearance in the five remaining episodes.) So it’s perhaps understandable that some of the action here is pretty messy, and the slightly bewildering way that the cliffhanger is shot suggests either that the camera has magically moved through a wall, or that the Dalek Robo-machine – which the baddies start to lower onto the Doctor – is situated on a bench in the lobby of their spaceship.

  (Okay, I have to admit it... I’m trying to cut Richard Martin some slack here, given the requirements for this production, but I worry that I’m only half-succeeding. To his credit, there’s a curious illustrative scene that takes place outside the Dalek saucer, in which a pretty blonde girl waits to get karate chopped by a Roboman – it’s an offbeat choice, directorially, but it works. But then we get the rather stupid way the Supreme Dalek clears his throat before making an announcement, which just makes me want to give Martin a hard slap.)

  But, most importantly for this episode, Nation has worked out what kids want – it’s as if he wrote this story from a checklist of things that would seem cool or intriguing to an 11 year old, then found a way to bung them in. Examples so far include a man with a Germanic name in a wheelchair, zombies with whips and a bloke chucking himself into a river. At times, though, this proves interesting for the adults as well – as you say, the concept of the Robomen is indeed horrific, and David Campbell’s claim that they smash their heads against walls or jump off buildings when they malfunction is deeply unpleasant stuff.

  All right, so this looks a bit slapdash in places, but there is lots going on, and so I’m eager to see the next episode...

  Day of Reckoning (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode three)

  R: In the first season, the attack upon the Dalek city by the Thals was more than a little perfunctory, but they won through anyway; the moral seemed to be that so long as you confronted your demons, you could beat them. Here we have a restaging of that attack, this time on the spacecraft standing on the heliport: it’s much more dramatic, and it’s much better directed. The human resistance put lots of welly into it – but it’s a complete and utter disaster for them. There’s never been a better demonstration of just how powerful the Daleks are, nor how
brutal or callous. There’s that poor extra who gets blasted into negative just as he thinks he’s reached the safety of a trapdoor; there’s Baker, who only has to say goodbye to the Doctor and wish him luck before unluckily running into a Dalek patrol and being exterminated without even a farewell speech. But my favourite of all is the death that we hear off-camera – that of a panicked man pleading for his life and being killed regardless, the horror of it all being played out on Susan and David’s faces as they hide, unable to help.

  What a very brutal episode this is – there’s the realisation that the Roboman that Ian confronts is none other than the same chap who shared a cell (and lots of exposition) with him only the week before. Then, more horrifyingly, there’s the very dispassionate way that after the Roboman is electrocuted, Ian tips his corpse down a service duct without sparing him sympathy. Or the cruelty of the scene in which the wheelchair-bound Dortmun tests his bombs against the Daleks himself, not wanting to accept that his own failure got most of his followers killed already, not wanting to give into his disability. It should be a powerful image of hope and victory, the brave man rising to his feet and stumbling towards the invaders – and his death is for nothing, because the bombs don’t work. I love the way that the shot is framed, the wheelchair rolling away from him once it’s abandoned. If there’s ever a scene that proves the lie to the simple optimism that was offered by the Dalek defeat on Skaro, it’s this one.

  The sequences in which the Daleks parade around London, riding over Westminster Bridge, hobnobbing under Nelson’s Column, are justly famous. It’s not that they look especially impressive, really – indeed, they seem a bit like tourists out to see the sights, and they look dwarved by the lions in Trafalgar Square. But it’s the very wrongness of the image that makes it work, these strange looking pepperpots from last year’s children’s TV serial holding their own against the city backdrop. Remembering that this episode is long before the Daleks became icons in their own right, what we’ve got here is surreal and silly, and just a bit unnerving.

  I also love the anger David Campbell shows when Susan suggests they escape together in the TARDIS. It’s quite clear now that there’s a moral purpose to these adventures we’re watching – a duty in righting wrongs, not just selfish survival and hopping off to the next planet when things turn ugly.

  And to lower the tone a moment, is it wrong of me to find Dortmun’s helper Jenny so fetching when she’s wearing that little balaclava of hers? That’s Richard Briers’ wife, you know.

  T: At this point in the series, we’re so used to seeing Doctor Who done “as live” that the actors getting from one set to another is often witnessed in laborious detail. So here, it’s curious how one minute we have the rebel Tyler telling Baker to help the Doctor and then – bang – he’s opening a cell door and freeing prisoners, with no scene to bridge the gap. Mind you, the Dalek ship is clearly a very efficient place – since the rebels infiltrated it, the baddies have found the time to repaint the Supreme Dalek and robotise Craddock.

  But the film sequences are again impressive, and the music helps them trot along nicely. Inside the museum, though, those annoying “Vetoed” signs (which the resistance members use to communicate with each other, sort of) again draw attention to themselves. I believe this started out a gag on Martin’s part (tellingly, they aren’t mentioned in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of this story) because he’d wanted to do something and been, er, vetoed – but unless you’re aware of this, the “joke” simply becomes an intrusion. It’s a shame, as other little touches like the Dalek graffiti are rather fun – putting an insignia on an invaded country’s monuments is the sort of thing petty dictators do.

  You’re right, though: Baker is (or rather, was) a nice chap, isn’t he? There are so many little touches of humanity here – David gives Baker a hip flask, Baker tells the Doctor he hopes he finds his friends, etc. – that you can’t help but warm to the character despite his limited screen time. And then my stomach lurched when he surrendered and the Daleks shot him anyway! Dialogue and characterization haven’t always been Nation’s strong suits, but – as with the Thal being dragged under the water at the end of The Daleks episode five – he’s often very good at writing horrifying vignettes.

  Unlike some people, by the way, I don’t mind the bit where the Dalek talks to a dummy and mistakes it for a real person – it’s a quite alien thing to do, I suppose, in a way that the Dalek leader clearing his throat really wasn’t.

  January 25th

  The End of Tomorrow (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode four)

  R: I know the actor who’s inside the Slyther! That’s dear old Nick Evans, who does charity work with Janie. Once in a while, he tells me proudly of his days spent inside a Dalek casing. He never shows off about being inside a Slyther, though. But, do you know, watching it now, I think the Slyther is actually rather good! It’s clearly just a bag with a bit of a claw poking out of it, but it’s so misshapen, so expressionless, that I actually find it rather disgusting. Maybe it’s the effect of watching all the episodes in order, but I’m actually adjusting to expectations of the time. Or maybe I’m just getting soft in the head. What do you think?

  One other thing that really oughtn’t to work is the absence of William Hartnell. He’s ill this week, having injured himself in a fall on set, so a hasty bit of rewriting means we only see the back of Edmund Warwick’s head doubling for the Doctor after he’s inexplicably fainted. But actually it does a lot of good to the story. David Campbell is given a lot of the Doctor’s lines, and a certain genius in disabling ticking bombs – and suddenly, there’s a chance of rapport between him and Susan, and a more credible reason why she might be attracted to an also-ran character and want to settle down with him. It’s a curious episode because besides not featuring the Doctor, it doesn’t feature a lot of Daleks either – I’m quite sure that if there was an episode that the production team would have chosen Hartnell to be injured during, it wouldn’t have been this one.

  But again, mainly by accident, it works because it shifts the emphasis upon human villains instead. Up to now, the only human characters we’ve met are either resistance members or the poor souls who had been forcibly converted into mind-controlled slaves. Now, Terry Nation gives us the chance to see the uglier consequences of totalitarian occupation and plague disaster: the human race doesn’t necessarily just bond together as one, but also produces scavengers and black marketeers. Once again, it’s a depth you don’t usually get with Doctor Who alien-invasion stories; yes, you get the odd misguided traitor here and there, but not those who are amorally taking advantage of the situation. After an episode in which we’ve seen the human race portrayed as something which is heroic and proud, where men seem to queue up to display their willingness to die for the greater good, the likes of the black marketer Ashton leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. And that there are Ashtons about only makes the memory of Dortmun’s sacrifice all the more powerful.

  T: It’s worth going over again – the leading actor is unexpectedly absent, so as everyone prepares for the next episode, they have to rewrite and re-jig the whole bloody thing! And so they do, because there’s so little time between recording and broadcast, and they’ve no choice. Modern producers would sob into their lattes and have an extra line of coke before finding out who to blame for the episode not being completed, but these young turks just got on with it. By the way, I’ve met Nick Evans too – he’s a lovely chap. Do you think the other blokes inside the Daleks were jealous of him getting to play the Slyther as well?

  But oh, if only Richard Martin had been able to do everything on film – I love the shots of the Robomen atop the wagons, whipping and cajoling suitably grimy (and plentiful!) extras. And look, they’ve had to pay Alan Judd for an extra week, just to get that shot of Jenny emerging from the museum with Dortmun’s corpse in the frame. It’s a great shot, but the money might have been better spent on using something other than a still picture of a paper plate to represent the Dalek sauce
r. Or some footage of an alligator that doesn’t look about three inches long (although the shot of Tyler framed in the hatchway, firing his gun at the little creature, is so good it almost sells the sequence).

  The Waking Ally (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode five)

  R: What’s this “waking ally” mentioned in the title, then? Did I miss this?

  The women in the wood who give Barbara and Jenny up to the Daleks change the tone of the story completely; they look like something out of a Grimm fairy tale. In the one concession we ever get to the twenty-second century, we get the older of the two nostalgically remembering the moving walkways and the astronaut fair – which makes it all seem unreal, as she and her partner look as if they’d be better suited to joining the Tribe of Gum than the space-age future that Nation has dreamed up. The younger woman is almost positively feral! I think it’s so clever, this, that the moment we get an allusion to the utopian ideal of 200 years hence, it’s from the mouths of those who have been brought so low that they’ve become Dalek collaborators – and can easily justify their actions, rummaging through a grocery bag for sugar like kids opening a Christmas present, and reasoning that the women they’ve betrayed would have been captured anyway.

  No, it’s not a good week for Barbara or Jenny – they’re caught like Hansel and Gretel and bundled off to the mines. It’s not a good week for Ian’s friend Larry Madison either. Amidst all the epic plotting, and the attention given to the national implications of an invasion, there’s been this little background storyline of a man searching for his missing brother. In some ways, it foreshadows Abby’s search for her son in Nation’s later Survivors series – but it’s not overplayed here, it only surfaces in the way that Larry can’t resist referring to what his brother Phil says and believes; it’s clear that Larry idolises him. There’s a certain grim inevitability that nothing good will have come to Phil – but Larry’s discovery that he’s become a Roboman, his desperate pleas to make Phil remember his wife Angela, and the determined way in which he chooses to die alongside him are the most touching moments yet in a story which has rather forgotten gentler feelings of love and affection.