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

by Robert Shearman

  As far as the episode’s main plot goes... hmm, well, Peter Purves does his best to be grumpily affronted that he’s having to engage in such childish flim-flam, but as Clara and Joey’s terrifying machinations include such horrors as squirting you in the face with water and popping a balloon behind your back, we’re not exactly left on the edge of our seats. The Blind Man’s Bluff game is pure nonsense, with the level of villainy exhibited by the clowns being that, er, they’re cheats. And when they’re rumbled, the game simply has to be played again. This is hardly the stuff of high drama, is it? It really needed to be a ghoulish abstraction of child’s nursery, not just an oversized recreation of one. It only flirts with the nightmarish when Joey is coldly forced to play the game properly – Dodo’s “he’s not funny anymore” is the best line in the whole episode.

  Then everything gets wrapped up with a very limp cliff-hanger in which some dolls come to life because Dodo asks them to, although I will admit that flashing the words of the riddle on screen gives the pleasing suggestion that the adventure has been lifted from the pages of a book.

  So, this isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared, Rob... there are some interesting moments, and a definite atmosphere in places. Dudley Simpson’s rattling wooden percussion is a cannily conceived musical conceit, and I very much like the way the Toymaker refers to the Doctor as an undefeated enemy of old, because it gives our hero an air of epic grandeur. And isn’t it doubly a shame that this episode hasn’t shown up somewhere, as it features clips from similarly missing instalments of The Daleks’ Master Plan and The Massacre? I’ve reassessed my preconceptions before, Mr Shearman, so who knows? Let’s see if I continue to warm to this story...

  February 26th

  The Hall of Dolls (The Celestial Toymaker episode two)

  R: I think more than any other episode we’ve yet heard, this one all depends on what it actually looked like. There’s an interesting vein running through the dialogue about whether the Heart family are real people or not. Certainly, they act like comic caricatures – the Queen is by turns Lady Bracknell and Queen Victoria, and poor foolish King Henry is any hand-me-down old duffer. But that all may be just what happens to you if you get trapped in this realm forever and become toys – you lose your identity a bit, you go insane. Amongst all the bizarre jokes, the only thing that pulls them up short is the notion that they’re not actually human beings – and you get the sense that this strange game of deadly chairs is their last gamble to hang onto the scrap of humanity they have left. This is what Steven and Dodo will end up like.

  And that’s all fine and good, but therefore the threat of the chairs has to be real. All the dialogue and sound effects suggest that the dolls look like real people too – the same height, the same weight. And that means that whatever devices the chairs use to despatch their victims, it should always be made clear that these could be used against a human body – just like those disturbing ads we had in the seventies, with crash test dummies going through windscreens of cars. The first chair that we see turn on its victim shakes it to death. When we return to the scene a bit later, it’s still shaking – and it’s clear that by now the doll’s head has come off. That’s a disturbing image. And we get an episode where Steven and Dodo, as real people, are playing against people who are only half real (and whom, by implication, they wish to die instead of them), using dolls which just look like people. That’s creepy stuff. All done to heightened comic dialogue, and the sort of japery where the King amusingly tries to persuade both his son and his fool to take one of the Russian roulette bullets for him.

  It really depends on how it looks, though. If the dolls’ destruction is violent and grotesque, then this is wonderful. One gets cut in half with a knife, for God’s sake! But if the production holds back and plays it too safe, then this would be entirely pointless. As pointless, one might argue, as listening to the soundtrack and imagining it as eerie as I want. But hey. Them’s the breaks.

  William Hartnell literally phones in his performance this week, doesn’t he? His one voiceover part is clearly delivered with absolutely no understanding of what the context of the lines could be. “It’s chair number,” he says, as if that were a complete line in itself, not a revelation that gets interrupted.

  T: I’m trying to be charitable to this episode, but too many things are niggling at me. First off, I’m finding it very odd that the programme-makers went to the expense of hiring an actor as talented as Michael Gough, only to consign him to being stuck in a room, playing a tedious game with a recording of the leading man’s voice. Second, and as I mentioned last week, the Toymaker’s minions cheat. So, what’s the bloody point of playing the games at all, then? If the Toymaker doesn’t take doesn’t take joy in the game-mechanics – if he doesn’t delight in the fun of playing the games – why go through all the rigmarole? He could spare us an episode of British Bulldog With Spikes or Hunt the Exploding Thimble and just turn the Doctor, Steven and Dodo into his playthings and have done with it. You can only really justify such an odd and potentially silly set-up if it takes you into the realms of dark surrealism, but this doesn’t, instead offering us overblown whimsy at best.

  And isn’t this getting a trifle repetitive? We get almost exactly the same cliffhanger as last week, and Dodo’s enthusiasm here simply exposes her weakness as a character, completely failing to sell the idea that any of this is in any way threatening. Tellingly, Steven has to keep saying the same things to Dodo over and over again to remind us that this is supposed to be scary. Also, the way that even the Doctor’s voice is taken away makes me a bit angry on Hartnell’s behalf – he may as well trip over on his way back to work, thus adding injury to the litany of insults he’s being dealt.

  (Right, things are getting a bit negative, and I need to adjust my perspective here. Go to your happy place, Toby... go to your happy place...)

  On the plus side, I do like the way the Hearts mention their desire for liberty, and that the King and Queen sit on the final, deadly chair together – both moments give a touching hint of their latent humanity. It’s rather fun that each chair kills in a different way, and the music remains suitably childish and plinky-plonky (that’s a technical term). I also like the groovy robot with a TV screen on its chest – it’s like a cross between a Dinky toy and a Tellytubby.

  See, Rob? I’ve just reproved the rule that Doctor Who is such a fantastic show, you can milk a few compliments even out of a story you normally can’t abide. Unlike the Toymaker’s underlings, I’m at least trying to play by the rules we set out for this book...

  The Dancing Floor (The Celestial Toymaker episode three)

  R: Crazed Toymaker apologist as I am, I have to admit this episode tests my patience a bit too. I’m enjoying seeing Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera pop up each week in a different guise – the Toymaker’s realm is a bit like an impoverished theatre repertory company – and they both banter very well as Sergeant Rugg and Mrs Wiggs the cook. But who cares? – their current guises have none of the immediacy of clowns or playing cards, and are utterly unrecognisable figures. And the games that Steven and Dodo play against them this week are paltry fare, neither “hunt the key” nor “avoid the annoying ballerinas” having any of the macabre edge seen in the previous two weeks. There’s pleasure to be derived from watching Dodo try to seduce a tin soldier, I suppose, and there are actually some good witty lines to be had between Rugg and Wiggs – but there are so many lines between them that this does get a bit wearisome.

  Things do pick up, though, with the arrival of Billy Bunter. (Sorry, “Cyril” – no copyright problems there, then.) It’s not that the image of a fat jolly schoolboy is so very odd, it’s more that they’ve got a middle-aged man playing him. The best bit of the episode is Steven’s reaction to Cyril telling him that he’s one of his heroes, and that when he grows up he wants to be just like him: “You seem pretty grown up already!” There is some relief to be had when the next episode is announced as being the final test.

  T: The d
ramatic high point of this episode is when a character who doesn’t really exist threatens a pie. That should tell you all you need to know.

  With the best of will, the majority of this episode is very stupid, and one can only hope – given that this episode is missing from the archives – that the impassive ballerinas looked spooky and jerky, and that the dance was macabre rather than lamely unconvincing. That Dudley Simpson seems to have popped a few happy pills before scoring this doesn’t exactly fill me with hope, I’m afraid to say. And do you know, I was joking earlier when I said they’d be playing Hunt the Thimble – I’d forgotten that that’s precisely what they do. Oh yes, and Sergeant Rugg proves he’s up there with the vase-tossing Monoid Two in the palpable threat stakes – smashing, as he does, a number of plates. (I can’t wait to till the epic end-of-season finale where some dastardly fiend threatens a whole cabinet of Wedgwood.) So much of what Rugg and Mrs Wiggs do is pointless banter; I know they’re supposed to be deliberately annoying, so as to distract Steven and Dodo – but they’re still annoying! I’m sure I could come up with a character whose speech sounded like nails on a blackboard, but I don’t think the audience would be terribly grateful.

  I should be nice, though... none of this is to criticize Campbell Singer and Carmen Silvera, whose versatility and commitment throughout these three episodes has been admirable. They’ve given very distinct and utterly different performances in each of their roles. I’m assuming they were hired to play George and Margaret in the original, Donald Tosh-edited version of the script, and I’d love for that version to be uncovered. Whilst the George and Margaret idea might not have hit home with the kids or stood the test of time, I know in my bones that Tosh would have ensured that proceedings were beguiling, strange and offbeat.

  And while the ballerinas may have been scary – much like the clowns are in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy – I really, really love the doll’s house set. That’s what Doctor Who is all about – making our childhood staples into nightmarish, distorted (and in this case, oversized) mirror images. And as ever, Peter Purves admirably carries the proceedings while Hartnell is away; Steven keeps us rooted in reality and is surprisingly harsh and single-minded – he’s prepared to accept the fate of his opponents if it gets him closer to his goal.

  The programme-makers really do seem to be flirting with a trademark violation when Cyril says that he’s known to his friends as Billy. No wonder Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter, was annoyed. What next, putting Bertie Bassett on screen with an alias? That would never happen! Oh, and look... Tutte Lemkow’s name is in the credits. If that’s not going to get your episode marked for destruction, nothing will.

  February 27th

  The Final Test (The Celestial Toymaker episode four)

  R: Hmm. Oh, bugger it, I’m finally coming round to your point of view, Toby. This really isn’t very good. Graham Williams once said, after watching this one surviving episode to research his abortive Nightmare Fair script for Colin Baker, that he was amazed the audience in the 60s put up with watching a game of hopscotch for half an hour. It’s not that the hopscotch in itself is the problem, I think – and look, they’ve made the floor electrified, so at least unlike last week’s games, there is an iota of jeopardy! – but the way everyone reacts to it. Dodo says at one point that she thinks she’s going to enjoy this game – as if she hasn’t yet twigged that if she loses, she’s going to be turned into a Barbie accessory – and Steven is sulky and bored. Those would be fine reactions if this were episode one, but it’s episode bloody four, and although we’re reaching some crisis point, no-one seems to feel any urgency whatsoever. There are the elements of a good episode here, I think, in spite of the fact that, yes, it really is watching three people play hopscotch for half an hour. Peter Stephens is rather brilliant as Cyril, and it’s his sudden swings from jolly schoolboy to something much more scheming and spiteful and then back again that gives the proceedings an edge; his performance, frankly, also suggests the way the tone of this whole thing might have been played. But if there were only the sense that Steven and Dodo realised what was now at stake, and played the game in as deadly earnest as their Bunterish opponent, this might be rather exciting. As it is... it just isn’t.

  And so the story rather dribbles to a halt. And though there’s the hint that there might be a twist to all this – that even having won the games that the Doctor has lost the war – it’s resolved in such a contrived manner (the Doctor just happening to give a perfect imitation of Michael Gough’s voice) that you wish the hint hadn’t been made in the first place. It’s a niggling problem that’s effected a lot of Doctor Who lately: the raising of an Interesting and Difficult Dilemma, which is minutes later solved so haphazardly as to make it redundant. This isn’t as bad as that whole sequence in Volcano where the Monk destroys the TARDIS lock just so the Doctor can magically restore it two minutes later – but it comes close.

  At the end, you only get glimpses of the macabre story in my head that I cherished as a kid, the best example being the charred doll of Cyril after he’s been electrocuted. It’s really rather gruesome. I’ll hang onto that image, and pretend the rest of the episode was that nasty.

  T: Peter Stephens is magnificent isn’t he? In previous instalments, when we were robbed of his facial and physical presence, he came across like Christopher Biggins – but here, the audience can see how he switches with consummate ease from the smug, smiling faux schoolboy into the terrifying grotesque we know he is underneath. He does all the “Yaa-boo” sucks stuff excellently, but is also creepy and threatening. The production as a whole could have done with a bit more of this duality. Good though Silvera and Singer were, there was never a psychotic undertone to their japery as there is with Stephens; oddly enough, he’s the only thing that hints at what this story is renowned for being – a nightmarish, dark spin on the nursery.

  Michael Gough is also a great actor, but as the Toymaker, he doesn’t get to do much except order big bits of Toblerone to move about. Still, he does look great in that splendid costume, and he exudes a polite, feline menace – but it has to be said, he’s not the most memorable villain, and there have been more impressive performances thus far in the series from lesser-known actors. I’ll grant you that he has some nice moments – I like the way his hand stiffens in anticipation as Hartnell goes to make his last move, and the way he vanishes from the robot’s telly tummy to appear behind Steven is very effective – but at the end of the day, he’s the villainous equivalent of someone who challenges you to a game of cards you’ve never played before, and keeps bringing up new rules that coincidentally play to his favour and against yours.

  I’d probably be over the line of this book’s parameters to comment upon the way that Dodo is written as possibly the stupidest person in the history of time (she is, though – when she falls for Cyril’s “hurt foot” trick, despite his having demonstrated a number of times that his key characteristic is duplicity, she loses all dignity). But it might be fair of me to mention that for all of this story’s good intentions, its main fault is that everything is just a bit too literal. In trying to invoke the sort of episodic jeopardy of other Doctor Who stories, Gerry Davis has removed everything that was unusual and therefore remarkable about it; thanks to the constant rewrites, it seems to have lost its raison d’etre. I’m not saying Tosh’s version would necessarily have worked, and I’m aware that I’m talking as an adult (if the Davis version was suitably entertaining for the kids in the audience, good for him), but I suspect that it would at lest have been interesting. And I’m not sure this is.

  I actually feel a bit bad that with The Chase, I was able to admit that rewatching it made me reconsider my lowly expectations of it – but The Celestial Toymaker really hasn’t, and even the surviving episode four doesn’t desperately convince me that this story is badly in need of re-evaluation. But, we can only try to look for what’s positive in each story we encounter on this journey – and you can’t win them all, can you?


  A Holiday For the Doctor (The Gunfighters episode one)

  R: Fan reputation is a funny thing. You remember that convention panel we were on a couple of weeks ago in LA, Toby? We were discussing the future of the series, and what we might expect under the aegis of Steven Moffat. And a woman in the audience piped up, as if she were delivering holy writ, that there were two monsters she didn’t want to see make a return appearance in Doctor Who. The Zarbi were one, and the Gunfighters were the other. Leaving aside the rather odd idea that BBC Wales might be planning Revenge of the Clantons or The Bat Masterson Stratagem, it reinforced again this peculiar idea of The Gunfighters as the show’s nadir. That was based on the fact that it had the lowest ratings ever (not even remotely true), looked cheap and nasty (nope) and had jokes in (aah... guilty as charged there, your honour).

  Of course it has jokes in. It’s a Donald Cotton script! You can tell that much from the appalling pun in the title, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not the comedy classic that The Myth Makers tried to be, but something far more restrained and gentle. In a way, I rather prefer that. The Myth Makers could afford to be bizarre and self-parodic, its characters speaking in anachronisms, because it was set at a time of myth and legend that was only on mild speaking terms with established history. The Gunfighters is set less than a hundred years before its first broadcast, and had Cotton’s comedy been as freewheeling, it’d have looked as silly as The Feast of Steven. So instead of verbal tricksiness and broad satire, what Cotton gives us instead is character comedy. And it’s lovely – to see Steven and Dodo excited at the story’s setting, and get carried away playing cowboys, restores that element of fun that’s been missing from the show for months.

  And better yet... look, everyone, William Hartnell’s back! I don’t know who that strange intruder in the TARDIS was while John Wiles was on the watch, but the actor playing this Doctor has brilliant comic timing and subtlety, and there’s a sense of joy to Hartnell’s performance again. Notice his exasperation as his friends forget about his toothache as they play about, his fear as he realises he’s going to have a tooth extracted without anaesthetic by a first-time dentist, and his delightful naivety as he misinterprets Seth Harper’s summons to be shot as the greetings of a new friend wanting to buy him a drink. It’s a relief to see this Doctor again, the one I want to share adventures with in time and space. The one who has the skill of a deadpan comedian – the moment where he mutters after his operation that he’s grateful he didn’t need his tonsils out is probably the single funniest we’ve had all season.