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

by Robert Shearman

  Please indulge me, though, if I bang on some more about which delegate is which, because – as anyone keeping score at home will know – we have another identity conundrum here. I previously stated that in Mission to the Unknown, Sentreal must be the black man with the space helmet. However, while Sentreal isn’t credited for this episode, it seems safe to assume that space-helmet man is present because he was in Day of Armageddon (albeit probably played by a different actor in both Mission and here, as all the non-speaking delegates are). Now, Gerry Videl was black, but he’s listed on the paperwork as Beaus. So we have yet another identity swapping delegate – probably the result of Douglas Camfield choosing his favourite costumes from Mission and discarding the others. After all, nobody in Mission is referred to by name apart from Malpha, just as none of the “extra” delegates are named specifically here.

  Or should I just drop this, and mention that Malpha now sounds like Alf Roberts from Coronation Street? Either way, this episode is good stuff, well done.

  February 21st

  The Destruction of Time (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode twelve)

  R: The effect of this episode, even just with the audio soundtrack, is like being punched in the stomach. God knows what it would be like if we had Douglas Camfield’s direction to watch as well. You know, it reminds me a bit of the sort of feeling that Russell T Davies aims for in his season finales: the sensation that everything is vast and epic, but that that’s all smoke and mirrors, and what he’s really interested in is something much more intimate – a collection of powerful moments. And that’s what we have here. After five hours or so of drama, set on half a dozen different worlds, and boasting a huge supporting cast – we’re left, really, with just four characters and a bunch of Daleks on three sets. It’s a shock that the fate of the universe is as small as this – or as devastating.

  And even here, the story refuses to offer us the climaxes we might be expecting. For all that he’s been the lead villain for the last three months of screen time, Mavic Chen has never squared off against the Doctor. To him, the Doctor has always been a nuisance, some strange thief who’s nicked his Taranium core – he’s never understood what the Doctor’s purpose could be, which leads to his frankly wonderful assertion here that all the time traveller could want is to be a bigger chum of the Daleks than he is. In his growing lunacy, Chen is reduced to a child in a playground, jealous that this newcomer might take away his friends. Kevin Stoney’s death scene is terrific; he parades fearlessly around the Dalek control room, refusing to believe that they will kill him, refusing to believe even that he can die. You know that the Dalek Supreme will take him out and shoot him sooner or later – and that the most painful thing for Chen will not be death but his humiliation. It’s not a question of whether they’re going to shoot him, just when they’re going to get fed up of his preening antics and squash him – and the whole sequence is a masterpiece of tension.

  Ultimately, this is all wonderfully simple. The Doctor defeats the Daleks by turning their universe-destroying gizmo upon them, and Sara unwittingly gets caught in the exchange. The sound effect accompanying the Time Destructor seems amusing and chirrupy at first, and gets progressively crueller as the episode goes along and it wreaks such damage. There’s a poetic justice to this, coupled with the Doctor’s pained realisation that the greater the victory over his mortal enemies, the greater too the sacrifice that will be asked of him. (Again, very new series, that – Russell can disguise the almost arbitrary way in which he wipes out the Daleks each season finale by ensuring that the Doctor loses a companion in the process.) The Doctor is left giggling at the sight of the Dalek embryos, and is brought up short by Steven’s list of all those characters who died over the course of this adventure – it’s the starkest ending we’ve yet had in Doctor Who. It’s perhaps the series’ first attempt at doing a story which feels in some ways definitive – and you feel after this that it needs to take a break, just to let the audience catch its breath back, something. And yet the screen would have read, “Next Episode: War of God.” I’m telling you, Toby, I’m exhausted of war, I’m exhausted of the whole thing.

  T: Events have finally caught up with Mavic Chen, and he’s finally lost any vague tenancy agreement he had at Reality Towers – but thanks to Kevin Stoney, it’s a well-handled descent into madness that never stretches our credulity. It also gives us the added plus of the whispering Daleks that plot to double-cross him – I love it when the Daleks are cunning, and it’s great to be in on their secret while Chen is strutting about oblivious. You’ve already mentioned the increasing tension, Rob, but here, most of it comes from the fact that the Daleks just... stop talking to Chen, and regard him as a defeated irrelevance. There’s something genuinely creepy and unsettling about those silences, and the Daleks once again seem like alien machines. When they finally drag Chen away to kill him, the Dalek Supreme doesn’t even bother to gloat – it just doesn’t want any vital equipment to be damaged when they dispose of this pest.

  But the converse is also true – with the Daleks having become so formidable and daunting, it’s fantastic that when they find the Doctor with the Time Destructor, they back off! To see them so scared and wary just confirms the device’s potential for devastation. It’s no longer a simple plot device – it’s now a harbinger of death. Although the Doctor is once again absent for loads of the episode, he’s rightly allowed to handle the brave face-off with his arch nemeses, and sends his friends packing while he remains behind to do the right thing. It’s something of a pity that Sara doesn’t achieve more when she turns back to help him (like, say, killing the Dalek Supreme, rescuing a cat or retrieving a stuffed panda) – as matters stand, she loses her life while trying to help but not actually doing so to a large degree. That her death is meaningless and avoidable is surely part of the point and makes it all the more horrifying, but one could argue that Doctor Who is supposed to have more soul than that. (Then again, the next time we see a companion die, he’ll similarly fail in his final self-appointed mission – and fandom-at-large tends to regard that story as a classic.)

  The more I think about it, the more those final few minutes seem hellish. Sara’s death is protracted and terrifying, Hartnell unleashes a most unearthly and harried screech when berating Steven for leaving the TARDIS, and the Doctor’s ensuing frailty demonstrates that he’s really been through the mill. It’s a grim denouement with Hartnell and Purves leaving the stage like shell-shocked victims, the names of the dead hanging in the air over the wasteland of the once verdant Kembel.

  With a bit more forward planning and structuring, The Daleks’ Master Plan could indeed have been the epic masterpiece those involved clearly thought it was. But it meanders in the middle and seems very muddled at points (you get the impression that the episode titles were chosen before the scripts were actually written, and nobody bothered to go back and amend them to something more suitable). And yet, I do like the adult tone it took – for all that I understand, Rob, your weariness of it – and it gave us such praiseworthy items as a karate-chopping female security agent, Dalek embryos and one of the best-ever Doctor Who villains. You can see why some fans speak of this story in such hushed tones of reverence, and why it’s such a shame that only a quarter of it is in the archives.

  War of God (The Massacre episode one)

  R: Steven is dropped right into the deep end here, at a point in history that’s simply not iconic enough to reverberate through the history books. Earlier historical adventures had the benefit of knowing that the viewing public would be fairly well grounded in the settings – but here, at last, the production team deliberately choose an event that leaves even our heroes wrongfooted. Quite simply, we don’t know who we’re supposed to treat as the goodies and who as the baddies – there’s no Marco Polo here, striding purposefully out of the school books, and nor is there a Tlotoxl, all deformed and hunchbacked. We suppose that the Huguenots might be the characters we’re supposed to side with – they do buy Steven a drink, after a
ll – but that Gaston chap seems far more concerned with intimidating the frightened girl chased by the soldiers than in reassuring her. There’s nothing for us to grasp on to. Not even a spot of incidental music, which might give us a clue what we’re supposed to be thinking or feeling. And after all the melodramatic hi-jinks of the previous few months, it feels incredibly refreshing.

  It seems like a development, too, of our last “pure” historical. The Myth Makers traded upon the Doctor’s uncertainty of what was history and what was myth, so he couldn’t be sure what the course of true events should be. In writing The Massacre, John Lucarotti is simply too good a dramatist to be dull, but there’s a deliberate obscurity to things here – and although there’s no indication of any threat to the TARDIS crew for the entire episode (which may well be a first), there’s a brooding sense of sombre menace. Whereas once Lucarotti’s joy seemed to be in dropping our heroes into a historical period and then milking all the dramatic opportunities from it, here he leaves us truly lost. It’s brave – the biggest revelation is when the word “Vassy” is dropped in conversation, but the script leaves Steven in the dark whilst all the other characters react to it with such awe. The past really is a foreign country here, and we don’t know how to read the signposts yet.

  The best bit for me, though, is that gorgeous scene where the Doctor reassures a little-known scientist that, in spite of the accusations of heresy he must endure, his work is brilliant and of great importance for the world. We’ll get a few such moments through the years – Binro told by Unstoffe that he was right in The Ribos Operation, Dickens being told in The Unquiet Dead that his work will endure – but this is one of the best. Erik Chitty (playing Charles Preslin, the scientist in question) is so clearly delighted to find someone out there who will believe in him rather than condemn him that it’s extremely touching – and gives a bit of much-needed warmth to this otherwise rather frosty episode.

  T: This is a very literate script – words such as “dogma” and “badinage” appear in the first pub scene – and the interweaving characters all make some narrative sense. Yes, we’re been dropped into a period where we don’t know much about the political landscape, but we’re fed droplets of information that designate, at the very least, who stands for and against whom. All of the characters are very well drawn – Nicholas Muss is an arbitrating, sensitive, decent man, whilst Simon Duval is an arrogant, snivelling conniver. Eric Thompson imbues Nicholas’ companion Gaston with a smooth mischievousness which is endearing, then undercuts that with a dismissive disdainful superiority. It’s clever, complex characterisation for a character who’s not even that vital, delivered strongly by a good actor.

  At this stage of the game – and especially given the shocking cliffhanger in which it’s revealed (or so it seems) that the Abbot of Amboise is the Doctor – it’s a bit hard to predict where all of this is going. But the tone of this intelligently crafted and serious-minded episode is very brooding, and it deftly portrays Steven as a hapless witness to these events. We might not yet know what type of adventure we’re watching, but we do know that the Paris where the Doctor and Steven have found themselves isn’t very safe.

  February 22nd

  The Sea Beggar (The Massacre episode two)

  R: This episode ends with a terribly clever cliffhanger, I think. Steven learns that there’s a plot to assassinate “the Sea Beggar”, but his limited knowledge of history means he has no idea who that might be. Every time he tries to find out, he’s foiled – he either gets shouted down by those high enough on the social ladder to know, or he’s met with bemusement by those lowly enough to listen. And it’s only in the closing seconds that identify the Sea Beggar as Admiral de Coligny. It’s a measure of where The Massacre is aiming for, that the climax is to give us a further piece of historical information that’s so far eluded us.

  For the first time, Peter Purves is put firmly in the spotlight, and it’s hard to imagine any other companion working as well in this story as Steven does here. Ian would be far too resourceful, somehow – as soon as Gaston drew his sword, Ian would probably have beaten him off in some trick he learned during National Service, whilst Steven’s recourse (rather charmingly) is to run away. Steven has been depicted – during The Daleks’ Master Plan in particular – as a man who just gets increasingly impatient with those around him; he’s always ready to cut through the Doctor’s concerns and tell him to get on with the action. So it’s wonderful that he’s here dropped off in as sensitive a situation as a period of religious hatred. The way that he manages to alienate his former allies so completely is quite remarkable – and yet somehow extremely human, and very well-meaning. The Massacre is a rather intellectual script, and it’s Steven Taylor who thaws it, who in his honest struggles to understand what is going on makes the confusion of the society so much more approachable. He asks at one point why on earth the Catholics would want to hurt the Huguenots, and the baffled response – because they’re Huguenots – is at once insultingly simple and terrifying. Steven has never been as sympathetic as he is here, pleading with Gaston to listen to his news, and anxiously persuading Nicholas Muss that he isn’t a spy.

  T: These days, the accepted title of this story – The Massacre – hints that matters in sixteenth century Paris probably aren’t going to end terribly well. But for anyone watching this at the time (and even allowing for the first episode being titled War of God), there’s only the threat of violence all around. People are quick to draw swords, an old woman suspects Preslin was murdered and there’s an assassin in the wings. Death seems to be lurking off screen, creeping ever closer. As a result, The Sea Beggar seems as paranoid as any modern-day conspiracy story, but is endowed with elegant dialogue, and has great actors such as Andre Morell (as Tavannes) and Leonard Sachs (as de Coligny) to give real weight, dignity and authority to these historical figures.

  You’ve already mentioned how Steven owns this episode, but the way that this happens – with Hartnell only present on film, and barely figuring into the action – is interesting. For the only time in the entire history of Doctor Who, these middle episodes lack a credit for the titular character (Hartnell was even credited as Doctor Who in Mission to the Unknown, even though he didn’t get a minute of screen time!). Even with “Doctor-lite” episodes such as Love & Monsters and Turn Left, it’s almost impossible to imagine this happening today (but might make for a fun little twist if they did).

  Oh, and did you notice how the opening scene has Gaston criticising Prince Henri of Navarre because he “refuses to take precautions”. Ha! Perhaps our Huguenot prince is more Catholic than we thought...

  Yay! This is a brilliant, intelligent story with much dramatic weight, and it’s got a fun bit of credits trivia too. I’m in Heaven (though let’s not get into that whole religion business right now – it’s clearly a can of worms).

  Priest of Death (The Massacre episode three)

  R: Every review I’ve ever read of The Massacre makes great mention of William Hartnell’s performance as the Abbot of Amboise – how it’s utterly different from his interpretation of the Doctor, and how it’s completely free of all the tics and mannerisms and fluffs. Am I missing something here? For a start, it’s a surprisingly small part – he appears in a couple of scenes, then gets murdered (shockingly swiftly) by Tavannes, the Marshall of France. And it feels pretty Doctor-ish to me; Hartnell sounds a bit posher perhaps, but there’s nothing of the radically different performances you get, say, from Peter Purves playing Morton Dill in The Chase or Jean Marsh playing Joanna in The Crusade. Surely, the whole point of the episode is that even after Steven has seen the Abbot, he still believes this must be the Doctor pretending to be someone else? The story hinges upon the ambiguity of Hartnell’s performance, not upon a reinvention of it. I think he does it very well, don’t get me wrong. But in my usual fanboy way, The Massacre was sold to me as a story about a doppelganger Doctor – when it’s actually the smallest of subplots in something else altogether.

  An
d it’s also tonally rather jarring. We’ve got this strange story about religious intolerance and medieval politics and assassination attempts – and stuck in the middle of it, there’s a bit with Hartnell playing someone else. It feels somewhat inappropriate – in the same way it might have seemed out of place, after five episodes of journeying to Cathay, to find that Jacqueline Hill was a dead ringer for Kublai Khan’s missus. There’s a reason to all of this, and it’s not a terribly pleasant one. Script editor Donald Tosh has said in interviews that the sidelining of Hartnell here was the start of a process by which they could persuade the viewers he really wasn’t that essential a part of the series any more, and so the production team could safely sack him. In The Celestial Toymaker they’ll reduce Hartnell to a mute disembodied hand; in The Savages, they’ll give his part to Frederick Jaeger. Most of the Doctors approach the end of their tenure with something like a climax – apart from Tom Baker, only Hartnell is given a slow death, and this is where it starts.

  So if the episode’s not about William Hartnell impressing us with his acting versatility, what is it? The political discussion is taken out for the bars and alleyways and put into council chambers. Barry Justice’s Charles IX is perfect, a man trying to be a good king without the strength or intelligence to maintain his authority. But good performances aside (Andre Morell and Leonard Sachs in particular), I can’t help feel that all this intelligent dialogue is taking place within a vacuum. There is a vague sense of doom – the cliffhanger, where Steven is chased by a vengeful mob from Hartnell’s corpse, is strikingly grotesque! – but little of this massacre coming to fruition. The story’s concerns are a little too lofty, perhaps – what it needs is some honest-to-God plain emotion. The streets of Paris are to be covered in blood the very next day, so at this stage, I really don’t care much about alliances with the Dutch in a war against Spain.