T: The visuals of this story continue to be stunning. I love the zapping of the very British phone box, and a couple of shots featuring the war machine are superb – one that’s speeded up shows it moving along at a fair lick, and there’s an even better one when it’s reflected in a puddle beneath the spinning wheel of a recently abandoned bicycle. And if the presence of the military wasn’t enough to conjure up memories of Quatermass and the Pit, the pub scene – complete with the public watching the sci-fi events unfold on television – really does. The use of the media that you’ve rightly highlighted is an old Nigel Kneale trick; it grounds the unbelievable in a recognisable context, and lends it scale. And not only does Kenneth Kendall add verisimilitude to the proceedings, he’s joined by broadcaster Dwight Whylie – who I believe is the first black person to have a speaking part on the show.
There are a few things about this episode that I don’t entirely understand – why, for instance, do the highly trained and paid military personnel defer an extremely dangerous job (albeit one that hardly requires specialist skill) to an old man and a young sailor? The real-life answer is, obviously, because the soldiers are just extras, and the Doctor and his incoming companion need more screen time, but within the fiction itself, it’s harder to justify. Also, it seems odd that the War Machine enters the trap rather than just extinguishing the soldiers (and Ben) who are each seen a mere foot or so away from it. As killing machines go, Wotan’s troops leave something to be desired.
Can I stop for a moment, though, and mention that something I’ve seen listed time and again as a goof isn’t one? It’s claimed that Michael Craze hauls the Doctor’s cloak over the War Machine, but then knocks the end of its gun off and has to cover his tracks by bending down, picking it up and replacing it. Nope! That’s done very deliberately (after all, the camera would hardly go out of its way to highlight an error) – the clatter is the TARDIS key falling out of the Doctor’s cloak, whereupon Ben has to pick it up so he and Polly can later gain access to the Ship! It’s amazing how these myths get accepted so effortlessly!
And so, Dodo does indeed get barged away off screen. Welcome aboard, Ben and Polly! I just hope that for your sakes, the producer doesn’t get tired of you...
Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 AD
R: Let’s be honest. On any reasonable level, this is a lot better than the TV version which inspired it. It obviously looks better for a start – the special effects, the explosions, the action sequences, they’re all top notch. Gordon Flemyng is directing this as an exciting feature film, and Richard Martin is nowhere in sight. The acting is far superior across the board. Ray Brooks turns David (appearing here without the surname he had in the TV story) into a moody freedom fighter who’s clearly survived so far because he’s bold and brutal; Andrew Keir actually gives resistance-man Wyler the sort of character journey clearly earmarked for Jenny in the original version, so he becomes a man who is humanised by his adventures with Susie; Philip Madoc is extraordinary in only a few minutes’ screen time, making his black marketeer someone very credible and very dangerous by downplaying every line he’s given. And the plot is better too – it’s lean and tight, it actually makes more sense, and in spite of the fact that it’s less than half the running time of the original, it still finds a way of elongating the story’s climax so that it feels more epic. (This results in lots of smashing scenes where Daleks are pulled magnetically through walls or down mine shafts. Great stuff.) There’s an attention to detail here that’s missing from The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and makes the ruined London seem much more believable: all those peeling advertisements for Sugar Puffs suggest a society which is dead, but which no-one has bothered to clean away yet.
And Bernard Cribbins is funny and heroic and likeable in a way that, bless his heart, Roy Castle simply couldn’t be in the first movie. He’s a bit of a bungler is Constable Tom Campbell, it’s true – but the comedy sequences he’s involved in portray him as an ordinary man struggling out of his depth, not as a klutz there as light relief for the little ‘uns. The food-machine scene is a development of the bit in Dr Who and the Daleks where Castle couldn’t make sense of the electronic doors – both show the male hero get into scrapes with future technology. The difference with Cribbins’ take on it is that it’s only funny accidentally – it’s Tom’s desperate attempts to imitate the Robomen, and in doing so save his life, which provide the laughs. The stakes are higher, so the comedy is less forced.
But I’m going to be unreasonable anyway. I can’t help it – I do rather prefer the original, clumsy and dated as it is. The Robomen on TV look crap compared to these ones, who marching along in perfect time in PVC, and blast away with their explosive ray guns – but it’s that very crapness which reminds us that these are just uncared-for corpses being used as an easy work force. It’s cheaper and rougher and dirtier in Hartnell’s Who, and that’s mostly because they couldn’t afford anything better – but it also meant that the ruined Earth was an expression of real despair, not just a background for an exciting action adventure.
And I cared more for the characters in the original. I can’t help it – I miss Barbara and Ian and Susan, and seeing these paler counterparts (Louise?... even Peter Cushing seems to forget about his niece, and hardly bothers to express concern for her during the whole movie!) only reminds us that there isn’t time in a movie like this to give them any background. It’s typified by a scene in which Tom is relieved to see his fellow captive from the Dalek spaceship, and calls out to him as “Craddock” – but there hasn’t been more than a few lines between the pair nearly an hour earlier into the film, and certainly they never exchanged names on screen. When you see the end credits, with characters like “Man with carrier bag” popping up amidst all the unidentifiable surnames, you really need a few “Man left to be robotised on spaceship” or “Man who makes a break for it and gets shot”s to give you any idea who they are.
I’m being churlish. It’s a good, spectacular movie – and it utterly fills its remit, to give us a taste of a big-screen Dalek adventure on a scale and with a budget we’d never have seen on television. It’s hardly surprising there’s a bit of a trade-off with character depth. It’s charming the way the original TV adventure made so much of seeing Daleks on location parading around famous landmarks – the movie doesn’t even try to do a sequence at Trafalgar Square, because its visuals are already in a different league to anything Verity Lambert could impress us with. (It’s interesting perhaps that the only big visual image it replicates, that of the Dalek rising out of the Thames, counts for nothing in the movie – the big reveal on the TV screen is such small fry, it’s as if Gordon Flemyng doesn’t even realise it’s meant to be so iconic.) It’s ultimately a matter of personal taste that I find myself hankering after the black and white original, Slyther and all – but I can’t deny that the Aaru movie is genuinely very good.
It’s such a shame that this wasn’t a hit. I’d have loved to have seen what they’d have done with The Chase. (I’d bet they’d have cast Ronnie Corbett this time, maybe as Abraham Lincoln.)
T: Rewatching this movie is very nostalgic for me – I saw it many times on TV, usually after realising I’d just missed a broadcast of the first Peter Cushing film. Then a friend of mine opened a video shop and got hold of this, long before the TV series started being released commercially, I think (or certainly, before they were affordable). This movie is now so cosily familiar, I can even anticipate some of the music cues. And I’m not a late clamberer onto the Cribbins bandwagon either – he’d always been a favourite in our household, long before he won our hearts as Wilfred Mott. He pitches his comedy and his drama just right in this, and proves why he’s a national treasure. In fact, I might watch his Fawlty Towers episode later – he’s bloody marvellous in that too. Thinking of Cribbins’ performances just makes my heart warm, and puts a gentle smile on my face.
My limited ability to watch Doctor Who growing up caused some re-evaluation of this film, though – I distinctly rem
ember when a friend of mine saw The Dalek Invasion of Earth at Longleat, and was so excited to tell me that the “proper” Robomen didn’t have black uniforms, but were just ordinary people with robotic headgear. It deferred some retrospective class onto something that actually predated the assumed images we already had in our minds (both from this movie and the Target novelisation of the TV story, which misleadingly had what looked like a Blake’s 7 Federation trooper on its cover). What never paled for me, however, was the way the Cushing film mounted effects shots, exteriors and action sequences so much more successfully than the TV version could ever hope to do – there’s a tracking shot in the Dalek base in Bedford that’s giddily impressive, the fights and stunts are very well done, and the Dalek spaceship is incredible (especially the way its two sections spin in different directions). The Dalek rising from the Thames does so at one hell of a lick, and is undermined only by the fact that the score begins to sound, at this point, uncannily like the theme to Police Squad!
By no means is this movie perfect – the intelligence test is hardly The Krypton Factor, and Tom runs through the spaceship looking for “the girl” (Louise), despite the fact that he’s no reason to know that she’s there in the first place. And whilst I adore the music, the opening title sequence is a huge contrast to the eerie, experimental TV-series blobbyness as it amounts to, in all its glory, some coloured water swirling down a plughole!
But I do love almost everything about this film – it’s exciting, well staged, funny and economical, and it reminds me of winter afternoons in front of a warm log fire. I could simply list the brilliant moments that stick in my head – the rebel getting tugged back as a Roboman whip wraps itself around his face, the low-angled shot of the imposing Dalek frighteningly looking down at Tom Campbell as he escapes from the mine, and even the crap Roboman with the wonky mask, who sits next to Cribbins in the comedy lunchtime scene.
As you can doubtless tell, I’ll probably never be able to view this movie with anything approaching objectivity, as it makes my heart beat faster just to think about it. So I’ll just close here by saying that for all the happiness this movie gives me, I’ve never considered it to be proper Doctor Who, and still don’t. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an impressive achievement (it’s Doctor Who – in the cinema!), but the people making it weren’t versed in the history, continuity and essential ingredients that made my favourite programme so special. They actually refer to him as “Doctor Who”, for starters. And they’d never do that in the TV series, would they?
By the way, I just realised – you’re right, Rob! A movie version of The Chase would have been brilliant! Imagine the trailer: “Robin Askwith is Malsan – the Aridian with a confession to make!”
March 6th
The Smugglers episode one
R: The Doctor’s got two new companions – and for the first time, the newbies outnumber him. Which means, in wonderfully human fashion, that even though Ben and Polly by degrees have to adjust to the impossibility of the TARDIS and the fact it’s taken them from London in 1966, they still are more readily disposed to believe each other’s theories about what’s going on than listen to the man who actually knows. Some might claim this is a rather unbelievable way for them to behave – but I’ve been on package holidays to Crete, and if you’ve ever been on a tour coach where every passenger is more likely to listen to their fellow tourists than the native, then this will seem very familiar. They adapt to things by degrees. The fact they can accept that they’ve been transported in seconds to the coast at Cornwall, but still refuse to take the Doctor seriously when he suggests they’ve got back in time, and insist on looking for a train station, is delightfully funny. And Hartnell’s Doctor is by turns both frustrated and amused with their antics. Which seems only fair.
It’s a new season, and rather cleverly, we’re looking at the entire series through fresh eyes. The Doctor is on hand to explain the TARDIS, but no-one’s really listening. And so we’re plopped down into a story which any seasoned viewer is likely to find fairly familiar fare – but it’s energised by the reactions of two new time travellers who react to the whole thing rather like tourists. I especially love the way that Ben and Polly make fun of all the patrons at the inn as if they’re just amusing characters in a pageant. And that’s what makes the episode so clever. It deceives us with a deliberately slow pace, inviting us too to relax with a pretty low-key adventure – and then in the final ten minutes ignites the action. The Doctor is captured by pirates, and Ben and Polly are arrested for murder. You get the feeling that the story has suddenly sped up without warning, and turned upon the Doctor’s all too complacent new pals.
T: The Smugglers is probably one of the least-remembered Doctor Who stories, but I actually think about its first episode quite a lot. As you know, I’m just getting used to that there London, and the Tube especially. I still get that odd feeling where some bizarre impulse tempts me too close to the platform edge – where I dare myself to tiptoe nearer and toy with danger, looking onto the track while simultaneously being terrified of falling off. The connection my mesmerising Tube experience has with this episode? Terence De Marney, who here plays the Churchwarden, died a few short years after making this story when he was accidentally knocked into the path of a Tube train. It’s a little morbid, I know, but he’s always in the back of my mind as I struggle and tussle through the anonymous throng.
Otherwise, the new TARDIS crew makes for interesting watching (or, rather, listening). Ben and Polly are gloriously game, with her deciding to “like it or lump it” and Ben appreciating the potential virtues of the pub! They’re a breath of fresh, funky air, and I adore Polly’s costume, even if it makes everyone mistake her for a boy. (Well, if she looks like a bloke, I’m not as firmly heterosexual as I’d hitherto thought!)
William Hartnell, sadly, isn’t entirely in command of himself – he fluffs a fair bit in this episode, and even gives up halfway though one sentence as De Marney decides to plough on regardless, rather than wait for him to finish. Indeed, at one point, in relation to a question he’s just been asked, Hartnell gives all the wrong stresses in the sentence “We don’t come from this part of the country.” But, there are still traces of what makes him such a special Doctor, such as his conflicting emotions when he muses that he’d thought he might be alone again, and contrives to sound cheery and wistful at the same time. He also picks up on the Churchwarden’s plight, gently pressing him and offering assistance – “You appear to be afraid, Sir, can we help?” That’s the Doctor in a nutshell.
For all Hartnell’s muck-ups though, De Marney commits the major one, as he gets one of the names wrong in the critical piece of plot info he gives the Doctor. (They could have revised later episodes to accommodate this, but it seems that no-one bothered.) Although the Churchwarden doesn’t survive past episode one, his character does offer a good piece of psychology: he constantly refers to his Christianity to remind himself that he’s now a “good” man, but his reliance on alcohol suggests someone who is haunted, deep down, by his criminal past. He gets drunk to hide his shame and fear, and it’s a quite frightening element in an episode that’s awash with ripe language and hearty villainy. We shouldn’t write off this story as a harmless historical outing; there’s a real dark undercurrent to it.
The Smugglers episode two
R: The Doctor is clearly delighted to find out he’s caught up in a smuggling adventure – and his enthusiasm is infectious! The way he trades off the gentleman pretensions of Captain Pike, and knows what part to play in ensuring he gets a share of any buried treasure, is absolutely gorgeous. When Hartnell gets the chance to seize on a bit of comedy, there’s really no-one better, and it’s just great that here in his penultimate story, he’s given a final chance to indulge himself. Captain Pike and Cherub make a terrific double act; their mock disgust at Polly and the standards of modern-day youth is absolutely priceless.
Polly and Ben too acquit themselves well, escaping from their guard by making a voodoo doll of h
im. The best bit is when Ben, quite cruelly, tells the stable-hand Tom that by setting him free, he now too is an agent of Satan and “one of us”... It’s all very funny, but it does a first in Doctor Who – and that’s to assume that a character is a bit stupid simply because he comes from ye olden days and therefore doesn’t know much. It’s a somewhat disturbing sign; we’ve seen so many historical periods in the series now, and they’ve been treated in such a variety of tones – but never quite this smugly. The closest we’ve come before now was Barbara’s patronising attitude towards the Aztecs, where she felt that by virtue of her modern-day morals, she could better an entire society. And look what happened to her. Up to this point, no matter whether it was played straight or as a comedy, the history settings in the show have been something to which the TARDIS crew had to adapt – they’ve never before been able to exploit a superiority just by dint of coming from the 1960s.
What do you think of this, Mr Hadoke? There’s a whole bit in your Moths stage play where you talk about this very modern-day arrogance towards the past – did this grate on you as much as it did with me?
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 38