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

by Robert Shearman

  T: A real-life concern of mine is the power of the mob – specifically, the way the media and politicians can whip society into a rage, to hate or condemn this or that social group, nationality or celebrity. Common humanity is so easily forgotten when such a frenzy is unleashed, and so the final scene here – in which screaming hordes chase Steven down the street, baying for his blood on the scantest of evidence – is all too plausible and terrifying. I’d love to say that we’ve progressed as a society since then, but there are times when I wonder...

  Fortunately, not everyone we meet here acts like a savage – the Huguenots, despite all they face and fear, never lose their humanity and retain a dignity common to many of Lucarotti’s more sympathetic characters. On the other hand, Tavannes deals with life and death as political tools, dispensing them with little compunction. (Compare this to the supposed Protestant “zealot” Gaston – who, when confronting Steven in the previous episode, found he couldn’t kill a man who wouldn’t defend himself.) One of the most intriguing things about this story is the way a sense of honour might get you killed – with the two factions demonising each other and increasingly headed towards bloodshed, to what degree can someone in the middle of this retain their sense of decency and still survive? It’s a depressing subject (and not one Doctor Who ventures into very often), but can nobility withstand an assault of sheer ruthlessness? There are no easy answers here, which makes The Massacre such a brave and captivating story.

  But from a production point of view, what we’re again given – as I’ve cited before as the core of great drama – are great actors performing great scripts. Everyone in the cast is up to scratch here – and of especial note is Barry Justice, in one of the best one-episode Who cameos as Charles IX. Justice rationalises the seeming discrepancies about Charles into a constant characterisation – he’s a regal King who wants to do the right thing, but is easily bored and prone to fits of pique. Essentially, Charles has developed a sense of decency in spite of his upbringing, but he just isn’t strong enough to stand up to his mother or the political climate. Joan Young, playing Charles’ mother – Catherine de Medici – is similarly wonderful; she’s a beguilingly quiet presence whilst others are in attendance, and only opens up to manipulate, scold, chide and threaten Charles when she has him to herself.

  It’s telling, though, that these moments aren’t cut off from the main story like the scenes with Barass and Napoleon were in The Reign of Terror – Steven’s actions greatly impact upon the lives of those at court, and vice versa. This is a story about inexorable disaster, and the ordinary man’s powerlessness against of the whims of the dominant and the cruelty of fate. Ultimately, history is the enemy here.

  February 23rd

  Bell of Doom (The Massacre episode four)

  R: Hartnell’s soliloquy in the TARDIS – as he reflects upon his loneliness now that all his companions have abandoned him, and considers (ever so briefly, and with such regret) the possibility of his returning home – is heartbreaking. It may be the very best performance Hartnell ever gives in the series. And although we only have the audio soundtrack to rely upon, that long gap between his two “I can’t”s – as he realises that there’s to be no end to his wanderings – is enough to choke me up. It comes out of a truly startling scene in which Steven rounds upon the Doctor for his callousness in abandoning Anne Chaplet to die in the massacre, and the way that Hartnell so glumly recites the appalling statistics of the carnage that took place in France draws us up short too – here’s a story which relied upon the way that we’ve so comfortably pushed the atrocities of the distant past into obscurity. We don’t know about this civil conflict between sixteenth century Frenchmen, because – in truth – it’s not part of our history, and so we don’t much care. Woodcut drawings of the time depicting the slaughters in 1572 are graphic and shocking, and it’s only to be hoped that the ones used in the episode were too. Seeing Nicholas Muss or Gaston or the Admiral de Coligny run through with a sword on a small BBC set wouldn’t have been enough – the genuinely epic scale of the killings could only be conveyed, ironically enough, by distancing us even further from the action, and just showing us the art it inspired.

  It could perhaps be argued that the speed with which the Doctor returns to the TARDIS once he realises what the date is – thus avoiding the risk of his changing history – is at this stage of the series a little out of character. Even at his most extreme moments in Season One, the Doctor wasn’t quite as concerned with protocol as this. And it’s telling to have a Doctor Who story in which the evil isn’t rationalised by moralising, or even confronted. Joan Young and Andre Morell are horribly credible as they discuss the ensuing massacre with such dispassion – that kind of evil just wouldn’t be dramatically viable opposite a science-fiction hero’s posturing. It’s a brilliant scene, but it does beg the question – if this were a subject too grim for the Doctor to engage with, surely it was too grim for Doctor Who to engage with too? You wouldn’t set a Doctor Who story at Auschwitz; was there really much point in setting one during the Huguenot killings either?

  Don’t get me wrong. This is an extraordinary story... in every sense of the word, as there’s very little that’s ordinary about this. The brooding solemnity of the opening few minutes of this episode alone, as Steven searches for the “dead” Doctor’s clothes just to find the TARDIS key, have a cynical and despairing tone quite unlike anything the series will ever offer again. But, where do we go from here? Steven bawls the real Doctor out; the Doctor crumbles. And then... it’s as if a magic reset button has been pushed. Dodo arrives! She’s unarguably the dimmest companion of them all, whose only response to the impossibility of the TARDIS interior is to ask the Doctor if he’s a policeman. Who gets whisked away through time and space because the Doctor claims she looks a bit like Susan (well... sort of), and who’s quite happy never to see anyone from her life again because she’s an orphan and hates her aunt. The two of them are acting more like sociopaths than actual people you might meet. It’s a scene of such incredible shallowness, in such marked contrast to what we’ve just experienced, that it can surely only be deliberate. It’s as if Donald Tosh has tried his best to explore the potential of Doctor Who, both here and with The Daleks’ Master Plan, and to have shown the real implications of space and time travel: that you can achieve nothing worthwhile, and that there’s death, always death. And having brought the audience to that bleak conclusion, he acknowledges that the show is going to continue without him now – this is the last episode he’ll be contributing to – so here you go, he says, here’s your jolly little adventure serial in all its banality.

  The third season of Doctor Who is a very odd one, isn’t it? No-one seems very happy any more.

  T: I take your point about Doctor Who being a bit dour under the John Wiles-Donald Tosh regime, but if so, it’s because they’re trying to explore the potential of the show beyond the cosy romps we’ve fallen into. Just compare the characters here with the clichéd, sanitised Vikings we met in The Time Meddler – in real life, the Vikings were pretty brutal, what with all the raping and pillaging, but Sven and Ulf come across as slightly dim ballet dancers. The Massacre, by contrast, has believable historical figures who work so effectively, that we’re rightfully made to sit up and feel guilty for our ignorance concerning this monumental atrocity. And isn’t one of the points of visiting history to draw parallels with our own times and learn some lessons? If The Massacre existed in the archives, it should be required watching today – it’s a credible attempt to do a play about intolerance and fundamentalism, and how religion (which is supposed to be a moral code for guidance and spiritual goodness) can, in the wrong hands, become a weapon of cruel political expediency.

  To put it another way, Rob... deep down I’m a bit of a grumpy person, and I’m a pessimist. So I like it when Doctor Who occasionally confirms that there’s a lot of nasty darkness in the world, and that sometimes even the best of intentions fail to overcome that. You wouldn’t want Doctor Who to
be like that all the time, of course, but in taking such an approach, this show can help to educate us on why man is still cruel to man, why unfair things happen to good people, and that why – despite all the terrible, unjust and unpleasant things that happen – we must hang onto our humanity at all costs. We do it because there’s a future, and because the Doctor encourages us to work towards it; as he continues and strives onward, so must we. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s possible to draw a positive lesson from this, but it’s a positivity based on reality.

  If I have a complaint about this, it’s the way that Steven – having severed his relationship with the Doctor – abruptly changes his mind because he sees two policemen walking towards the TARDIS. Yes, we can celebrate that beautiful speech that Hartnell gives, but it’s made possible because Steven is here, despite everything we’ve seen about the character to the contrary, unbelievably fickle. And you’re not wrong to point out how the new companion is introduced in an extremely offhanded fashion. We’ve been moving away from stories such as The Rescue – which was tailor-made to introduce a new companion – for some time now, but Dodo’s arrival seems fast even compared to the way that Katarina came on board. And of course, if the Doctor will so readily accept someone as a new companion, it begs the question of why he didn’t just take Anne Chaplet along with him and Steven for her own safety. (And by the way, why does so much of the literature written about this story discuss Jackie Lane’s Cockney accent? She’s clearly doing Mancunian – indeed, she’d done seasons at The Library Theatre, just up the road from me here in Manchester. Though her accent may well have changed subsequently at the behest of the BBC, there’s not a Cockney inflection in sight – or rather, sound.)

  But, the final scene is just a sour note on an otherwise bulletproof adventure; as with The Myth Makers, this is one of the best Doctor Who stories. Allowing that John Wiles and Donald Tosh had The Daleks’ Master Plan foisted upon them (and that Tosh here parts ways with the show, and is replaced as script editor by Gerry Davis), we never really got to see the full extent of what they wanted to achieve with the series – and I, for one, think that’s a terrible loss.

  The Steel Sky (The Ark episode one)

  R: There’s an elephant! I like elephants. Director Michael Imison plays a clever trick on the viewer here. We know that Doctor Who can’t really pull off animal action – be it the cat in Planet of Giants, or the lions in The Romans, we accept that they’re stock footage. And when we first get our glimpse of Monica the elephant, we’re led to assume the same thing; we cut from the sight of her walking through a jungle to a close-up shot of Jackie Lane’s face. And it’s only then that the TARDIS crew walk over and touch it, demonstrating they really did squeeze one onto the BBC studio floor. It surprises us in a way that simply plonking the actors next to the elephant could never do; it asks us to accept the limits of Doctor Who’s resources, and then confounds us.

  There’s lots to enjoy in The Ark. It’s all terribly high concept; just a couple of seasons ago, we were invited to marvel in The Sensorites at the fact we were on a spaceship at all, and now it’s been reimagined as an entire world that’s so big, you need futuristic buggies to get around in it. The steel sky of the title rather sums up the scale of it all. And there are so many ideas we’re hit with – to suggest that all the adventures we’ve so far enjoyed have taken place within the first segment of time, and that we’ve now popped into the 57th! (It’s a good comedy number, 57. It suggests something big and imprecise, in precisely the way The Daleks’ Master Plan taking place in 4000 AD didn’t. And it’s the number of varieties of Heinz Baked Beans into the bargain.)

  We’re immediately invited to consider the rigorous capital punishment that exists on this ship, and whether being executed outright might be a more humane fate than being miniaturised and stuck on a microscopic slide for 700 years. As a result, we can’t be certain whether or not to trust these remnants of the human race. Certainly, Eric Elliott (as the commander) smiles a lot – with a wideness so disconcerting at times, I feel he’s about to take a bite out of Hartnell’s throat – but there’s something so humourless and so stylised about our descendants (all dressed in the same uniform, all making frantic sign language at the Monoids) that they’re not very likeable.

  So thank heavens for Jackie Lane. I never thought I’d say that; I’ve never liked Dodo before now. But in context of how grim the series has been recently, and in stark contrast to all these frowning humans around her taking everything so seriously, at least she’s having fun. She laughs and jokes and has all the zest of someone just starting out on her travels through time and space without having yet stumbled over a single corpse or watched the destruction of a single civilisation. We need something of her childish innocence in the show again... oh, and she brings the common cold to a society that’s long lost her immunity towards it. Oops. Looks likes those corpses might start piling up after all.

  T: You’re a bit more kind to Dodo than I am, Rob... yes, she’s enthusiastic, but Jackie Lane is only as good at acting “enthusiasm” as she is any other emotion – i.e. not very. It doesn’t help matters, of course, that she’s given such an alarmingly dim character to work with. Dodo accepts with thigh-slapping glee that a Police-Box-That’s-Bigger-on-the-Inside-Than-it-is-on-the-Outside can travel to Whipsnade, but not anywhere else in space and time. And did you notice the curious moment in the cave, where Steven grabs her close and holds his hand over her mouth and nose for what seems like an age? After what’s come before, you have to flirt with the idea that he’s actually (and understandably) suffocating her. I do like her costume though – it’s very cute.

  But this is an ideas episode, which is why I can forgive Dodo being thick, the consistently limp guest cast (Inigo Jackson is hilariously bad as Zentos, the deputy commander) and the tasselled costumes, which remind me of the similar draping between the front and back of a shop. As writer, Paul Erickson brings a new voice to the proceedings; he increases the show’s scale and template by having the audacity to confront us with the very thing that the Doctor usually has to prevent in his adventures: the complete and total destruction of Earth. The introduction of the Monoids is cleverly handled, and the concept of these two races travelling together is sold without contrivance. And then there’s Dodo’s cold – it’s an irritating bit of comic business that turns out to be the very thing on which the plot centres. It’s a cerebral notion, one that provides us with a different sort of jeopardy than we’ve seen before.

  And it’s an interesting introduction to the Guardians too, with the trial of one of their own resulting in – as punishment – his miniaturisation. Paul Erickson’s excellent novelisation of this story gives added pathos to this little subplot, and wouldn’t it have been great if this had been a speaking character, and the story had dovetailed with his revival on Refusis in episode four? It’s a very strange means of punishing someone, though – at least the condemned man will live to see Refusis, whereas the Guardians seen here are doomed to die centuries before they arrive. Why don’t they work in 20-year shifts, reviving a new bunch and putting the current lot in the drawer? Then more people can play a part in the journey, and everyone involved gets a chance to settle on Refusis. Come to think of it, why have they decided to settle on Refusis, when Zentos gives the impression that he thinks that the indigenous population of that planet are untrustworthy ne’er do wells?

  If I’m nit-picking, it’s because I so very much love the scale, ambition and originality of this story. Much of this is down to director Michael Imison’s stunning visuals – he uses crane-mounted cameras to emphasise the scale of Barry Newbery’s extremely inventive sets. Do you know, until they started to move, I genuinely didn’t notice the large number of Monoids who rise from the jungle floor to face the travellers? It’s very impressive, especially as I’ve seen this before and knew they were there!

  February 24th

  The Plague (The Ark episode two)

  R: There’s a clever bit of misdirection go
ing on here. You think this is all a story about the future of humanity catching the cold, and you begin to think of the Monoids as just a bit of alien window dressing. And then there’s that cliffhanger. And the words appear on the screen telling you the title of the next episode – and you still can’t yet see what the fuss is about, and what Dodo is reacting to – the camera begins to pan upwards... and we see that the giant statue in the Ark has a Monoid head, and realise with a real shock that we’ve taken our eye off the ball. The story was about the Monoids all the time, and we took them for granted.

  This makes you look back through the episode for clues... the way the humans casually profess the aliens to be their friends, but nevertheless treat them as court secretaries and as labourers; the way that the trial only really becomes serious once a human has died, regardless of how many Monoids perished beforehand. The only person who’s actually remotely nice to a Monoid is the Doctor, who tells the one waiting on him as a nurse that he couldn’t do without him; at the time it seems odd, like a harmless bit of Doctor eccentricity, because no-one else appears to acknowledge them as people whatsoever. Even the funeral procession – which is quite beautifully staged, with the Monoids bearing a plague victim down to the main hall to be ejected into space – has Dodo innocently commenting that they sound like a bunch of savages.