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

by Robert Shearman

  All this gives space for Hartnell and Butterworth to spar off each other delightfully. This isn’t the battle of wits that the title would suggest, but instead a lot of amusing banter – and yet, the rapport between both actors fairly crackles. There’s lots of nice throwaway jokes from both: the way that Butterworth gets into monk character, relaxing his “naughty” face into something much more cherubic, even before calling out to Wulnoth in another room altogether; the way that Hartnell so delightfully thanks the Viking he’s just knocked unconscious for coming into the room, because he thought he’d be waiting for the chance to attack him for ages. And out of this tale which is as light and amiable as can be, there’s a chance for a real shock – that Steven and Vicki discover the Monk has his very own TARDIS is another moment in which the series just flips over, and you wonder what the rules can be any longer. Only a few weeks ago, in The Chase, the Doctor was talking about how he built his TARDIS – now it’s suggested that it’s one of an assembly line.

  T: For an episode entitled A Battle of Wits, one might more correctly say that it’s full of wit. There’s a brilliant moment where Vicki postulates that the Doctor’s cell must contain a secret passage – as if, of course, the presence of such a thing were an everyday occurrence. Steven is immediately scornful about the idea, but Vicki knows better because she’s already bought into the clichés of an adventure serial and he just hasn’t yet. The end result is Doctor Who at its most metatextual – we’re being dared to buy into the mores of a daft and bonkers adventure, then to get over ourselves and just join in the nonsense. It’s so easy to criticise sci-fi adventures for being ridiculous and unbelievable, but there are times when Doctor Who embraces the ridiculousness with glee, pointing out that if you’re inclined to be churlish, you’ll be missing out on a whole heap of fun.

  And fun is what’s largely on display here: Hartnell is remarkably funny with the way he prods the Monk with a stick and assumes the demeanour of a 1930s gangster. (You almost expect to him drawl, “No funny business or the Monk gets it.”) The way that the Doctor and the Monk independently brain the stupid Vikings is a hoot – one might almost call it a battle with twits. And despite the mass-murder implications, the idea of the Monk using a bazooka to wipe out the Viking fleet is hilarious – the word is in itself funny, and even more so when the weapon in question has been placed on an eleventh century clifftop by a cherubic nuisance with a comedy checklist.

  Back in the village, Edith is up and about remarkably quickly after her violation last episode – evidently, mediaeval crones such as her are made of stern stuff. Wulnoth even deems her fit enough to be a nursemaid for the wounded Eldred. Yes, Edith may be traumatised, but it seems that whatever her problems (oh, do I dare say it?... ), Eldred must live. But what’s most interesting about the village scenes is the way that the Doctor talks about the Battle of Hastings before muttering to himself, “At least, that’s what the history books said happened...”, as if history all of a sudden isn’t this unalterable certainty. It’s funny how everyone fixates on the game-changing revelation that the Doctor’s TARDIS isn’t unique, when this Dennis Spooner chap has also managed – in terms of what the travellers can and can’t do in relation to their adventures – to change the whole ethos of the show monumentally. And all for the sake of facilitating a story that’s in so many ways a charming romp.

  And amidst all this low-key silliness, Spooner slips into the biggest gear-change imaginable: there’s another TARDIS! It’s like the Doctor revealing that he’s Rassilon in the middle of Delta and the Bannermen.

  February 10th

  R: It’s my birthday! And, just like you, Toby, I didn’t get a Dalek cigarette lighter. In my case, though, that was just as well, since I don’t smoke. (I never have. At school I was never one of the cool kids behind the bike sheds – I was with all the other nerds who hid near the portaloos, discussing how much we liked Adric.)

  No, my best present this year is getting to the end of the second season of Doctor Who. That’s rather good timing, isn’t it? It seems that Verity Lambert arranged it deliberately. And tomorrow, I’m up early in the morning, and getting to Heathrow Airport for a flight to Los Angeles and the Gallifrey convention... you are bringing your laptop, aren’t you, with a DVD drive? And I’ll be bringing Season Three (at least, what exists of it). What fun! Whilst everybody else will be in the bar drinking beer, we can hide in our hotel rooms listening to Hartnell soundtracks. Lovely.

  Checkmate (The Time Meddler episode four)

  So amiable is this story’s conclusion, and so perfunctory the plotting (and all the more so in the version that survives today, in which the Viking deaths have been neatly censored from the prints), that you can happily enjoy this rather light adventure and barely notice that a large part of the series’ credo has just crumbled away. All the way through the second season, script editor Dennis Spooner has been nagging away at the show format he inherited from David Whitaker. Whitaker perceived the series as something by which the Doctor and his crew became unwilling adventurers, running away from crises and only intervening in situations in order to better facilitate their escape later. Spooner clearly saw this as dramatically rather sterile and also – more importantly – less fun. And here, we have the Monk say as much to the Doctor – that it’s more fun his way. The Monk represents the way that Doctor Who could have been, something of a romp in which he travels about all of space and time having adventures merely for the sake of it. And although Hartnell clearly rejects the idea and foils the Monk’s scheme, it must be said, he doesn’t foil the scheme very well. Indeed, the Doctor’s basic solution to dealing with a time meddler wishing to interfere in the backwaters of Earth’s history... is to leave him stranded in the backwaters of Earth’s history, where he may well turn his hand to a bit of meddling. It’s almost as if Spooner sides with the Monk, because he refuses to give the Doctor a particularly good argument against why the Monk shouldn’t change past events – and it’s telling that when the Doctor comments at story’s end on how history can now run its natural course, Vicki chimes in with him, as if he’s a boring old windbag who keeps on trotting out the same old killjoy phrases.

  The Doctor may have won this battle, but he’s actually lost the war. It’s hard now to hear of the Monk trying to influence Leonardo da Vinci without thinking of how the Doctor does the very same thing himself in City of Death. From this point on, and aside from a few hiccups where the idea of preserving history is paid some sort of lip-service, Doctor Who becomes a series where more or less everything is up for grabs. That’s Dennis Spooner’s legacy. And that lovely final image, where the TARDIS crew’s faces play against a star background, seems to suggest that the whole universe is now theirs for the taking.

  T: Happy birthday, Rob! I’m sorry I didn’t call, but I was packing and panicking for Gallifrey. I can’t wait – we’re soon going to cross the Atlantic, and what’s the first thing we’re going to do? Yep, that’s right – watch (or, rather, hear) Galaxy Four!

  I wrote last episode about how Dennis Spooner has altered more of the series’ foundations than he’s usually given credit for; he’s reversed course on Whitaker’s assertion that the travellers can’t change history (all together now: “not one line!”), and yet when Spooner’s name comes up, it’s usually in relation to his use of comedy. This isn’t without good reason, and it’s here in abundance. The Monk putting money in a bank and then using time-travel to claim a fortune in compound interest is funny and smart. And the idea that he used a gravity lift to aid the ancient Britons in building Stonehenge is a pleasingly cheeky deflation of any pretensions to earnestness the show might have.

  But all of these historical/temporal shenanigans are just part and parcel of the way that Spooner has completely opened up the potential of the programme, and deployed the idea that time-travellers can change things rather than just observe them passively. In many ways, The Time Meddler is the culmination, Rob, of what you were talking about in The Reign of Terror: actual histor
ical figures are sidelined (certainly, we don’t meet any in 1066), and there will be a greater expectation of the regulars getting involved. The Monk here wants to change history just because “it’s more fun his way,” but what’s notable is that after this story, there’s no escaping the idea that you can change history – you can get your hands dirty in it, even – whatever the Doctor’s previous protests about it.

  While this paradigm-shift will give Doctor Who a new and extended lease on life, it will also, in effect, sound what will be the slow death-knell of the pure historical. No longer will the machinations of a particular time period be interesting in themselves; future production teams will go out of their way to bung outer-space elements into pseudo-historicals just to spice things up. Spooner himself made this approach work, and it’s certainly a decent way of keeping a series going for decades.

  As for The Time Meddler itself... well, I found so much of it to be terribly endearing, but I do think I preferred the previous historicals. The design and direction here are excellent, yes, and Butterworth and the regulars are fab. But there’s just not enough colour (so to speak) for my taste, the supporting characters are all pretty dreary and much of the fun stuff was mentioned, not shown. And yet, no matter how unassuming this story is, no matter how much I have the suspicion that it underperforms a bit, I can’t deny the seismic effect it will have on the series to come.

  Dr. Who and the Daleks

  R: And yet, in a funny way, this is what changed everything.

  Between Season Two and Season Three, Doctor Who was suddenly on the big screen, and in colour! Just weeks after we’ve said goodbye to Ian and Barbara, and the original TARDIS crew we loved so dearly, here they all are again... but not in a way we’ve ever seen before. Ian is now an accident prone boyfriend, “Susie” (as the Susan character is called) is a rather humourless little wunderkind who reads enormous physics text books, Barbara is... well, it’s rather hard to say what Barbara is, actually, because the script doesn’t do anything with her, and actress Jennie Linden looks a trifle bored by the whole thing.

  And Doctor Who is... Peter Cushing. And that’s what’s so revolutionary about this. Cushing is a brilliant actor, and it’s something of a shame that he doesn’t seize the part and make it his own – it’s not his fault, but you can see that he’s trying a mid-tenure Hartnell performance of loveable old granddad, with some of the same quirks and added winking. (It’s particularly odd seeing the sort of Hartnell Doctor who appears in The Time Meddler and having him transposed into one of his earlier adventures, where we expect him to be much spikier and dangerous. It’s a great illustration of just how much the Doctor has changed over the last two years.) But the fact that someone else is playing Doctor Who is enough. In the third season, as Hartnell’s relationship ever sours with new production teams, they’ll have been shown a successful crowd-pleasing truth: that you can replace the man in the lead role, and the audience will accept it.

  What’s so striking is just how much more childish the feature film is compared to the TV serial it was adapted from. As director, Gordon Flemyng downplays moments of tension, and so needs something else to fill the void – and he opts for strange humorous set pieces, such as Ian’s frustrated attempts to get through a motion-detector door. The sets may be larger and more colourful, but the world of Skaro seems much smaller this time round. And, understandably, the film producers want to simplify everything. You can accept that Doctor Who is an eccentric inventor, but what has repercussions is how they also simplify the Daleks. The faltering attempts to characterise them individually in The Chase may not have been wholly successful, but it was at least well-intentioned – the Daleks shouldn’t necessarily come across as comic-book villains with no depth to them at all. That’s what we get here, and it’s so impressive – the voices are harsher than on the TV show, the costumes are sturdier and filmed from more flattering angles – that from this point on, that basic stereotype will become the template for how they’re depicted. The scene in which a Dalek leads a room full of his fellows in a triumphant chant is quite brilliant. But it also sheds any ambiguity from the creature.

  The best bits of the movie are those which deviate from the original series. The sequence where the Doctor leads the Thals to turn mirrors upon the Dalek sensors looks stunning – and the way that the Daleks react, by pulling apart the entire mountain rockface like James Bond supervillains, is audacious and exciting. And that final battle in the control room seems at last to be climactic – and gives Ian a chance to be a hero, as he makes the Daleks destroy their own countdown by firing at him. That’s very neat and clever. But it also keeps sticking to old bits of the original for no particular reason. In the TV version, the only dramatic justification for cowardly Antodus falling down the chasm was so that he could come good and sacrifice himself – to keep the moment in the motion picture, but save his life anyway, is unintentionally hilarious. And I didn’t ever think I’d say this, but... seeing the movie Thals makes me appreciate how much I preferred the ones from the telly. This movie bunch act better. But they’re a bunch of sarcastic unlikeable thugs, really – it’s astonishing how, after the Doctor teaches them the evils of pacifism, just how sarcastic and sulky they become.

  Ultimately, that’s the best reason to love Dr Who and the Daleks. I’m glad it exists, if only to show me how much I prefer the subtlety and charm of the original.

  T: I remember when the BBC once showed this movie on a Saturday afternoon – but I only realised too late that I’d missed it, and was inconsolable. In the days before videos, DVDs and iPlayer, Doctor Who wasn’t available much, and so I had a massive tantrum upon missing a rare opportunity to immerse myself in even an ersatz version of the programme – knowing that there was little chance of it being repeated for least a couple of years. I vividly remember the pain I experienced to this very day, even though when I did finally get to watch Dr Who and the Daleks... well, let’s just say that I wasn’t massively impressed.

  The introductory scene demonstrates how the producers have misunderstood the essential ingredients of Doctor Who: instead of this dealing with mysterious goings-on at a school, or even a car accident in Barnes Common, what we get is Roy Castle (whom I loved in Record Breakers, but who is so deeply irritating here, he’s immensely punchable) sitting on a box of chocolates and doing comedy double takes. The movie’s production team also seem to believe that the central character’s name is “Doctor Who” (although to be fair, the TV show itself will make that mistake), and as for the Thals... sorry, but what nightclub have they just come from? The Thals on TV were lisping posturers with holes in their trousers, but in the movie, they’re skipping, false eyelash-wearing mimsies with waxed chests. In so many ways, this all looks like a distorted image of the TV serial upon which it’s based – it’s told with more economy, but in doing so they seem to have ejected all the layers and edginess. The movie version seems very squarely aimed at kids, and unlike the parent show doesn’t make an attempt to give adults in the audience much to get their heads around.

  There are some positives, though. The movie’s larger sets are very impressive and allow for much more streamlined action sequences, and the lighting in the jungle is terrific. Some of the special effects are impressive – there’s a great moment in a lift where a Dalek shoots upwards and the floor fizzes and blows out, forcing our heroes to leap back. The score in general is quite groovy and catchy, and fits the tone of the whole film. And I too like Peter Cushing – he’s not remotely dark or cranky like Hartnell, but it’s a good performance, full of neat little touches.

  I’m sorry, Rob – as I watch this, I’m unable to say much that you haven’t expressed already. But if this review is a bit like a watered down, slightly less effective echo of yours – well, under the circumstances, I can’t help but feel that it’s somewhat appropriate.

  February 11th

  R: And here we are in the States! What an extraordinary thing this is. I’ve just been in your hotel room, Toby, sharing a co
uple of episodes of Galaxy Four. There’s nothing much to look at, just a strange soundtrack of lots of Chumbley noises, really. And here I am, typing my diary entry to you by email, even though I can clearly see you sitting on a rather nice-looking sofa not a hundred yards away drinking an even nicer-looking glass of wine.

  The flight over was long but comfortable. On the entertainment system, they had a Doctor Who episode to watch – The Doctor’s Daughter, dated 2008. But I didn’t watch it, because annoyingly enough, they weren’t showing Four Hundred Dawns, dated 1965. (It’d have been great if they had been, though, wouldn’t it? Missing episodes have been found in Mormon churches and behind BBC filing cabinets, so it would have been so amusing to find another on a British Airways Airbus.)

  Four Hundred Dawns (Galaxy Four episode one)

  We’ve been spoiled. So much of the first two seasons of Hartnell’s tenure survives intact in the archives, we’re only now hitting the wastelands. There are no telesnaps of Galaxy Four, only a few pictures. There’s a strange six-minute excerpt, and a complete soundtrack. These require concentration to get through, because, to be completely honest, this episode of Doctor Who does not boast the most quotable dialogue, the most riveting set pieces – or, for that matter, an awful lot of drama period.

  What it does have is Brian Hodgson’s sound effects. The man was a genius. There’s something so full of character about the Chumblies – the robotic servants of the unseen Rills – from all the different whirrs and beeps and strange background purrs; there are ambient albums you can get on iTunes which sound like this. And shorn of the visuals, you really do appreciate just how ahead of its time the BBC Radiophonic workshop really was – what you hear in the show is so distinctively different. There’s not an awful lot going on on this new planet, and the Doctor’s comparisons to Xeros frankly make it sound rather cheap and nasty. But Hodgson has still managed to make it alien and exotic.