T: Yes, it did, but only because I read your email prior to watching the episode, and was thus on the lookout for it. I’m not sure I would have made the connections that you did, but yes – the voodoo doll really is a terribly convoluted way of facilitating an escape, when a quick distraction and a whack on the head would have sufficed. The method they use is a bit mocking of poor old Tom, and makes Ben come across as a little cruel.
Everyone involved in this story seems to be enjoying themselves, and because they’re entertaining us too, it’s easy to get carried away with the fun and frolics. So far, The Smugglers is proving to be a “jolly” romp where the villains, behind their smiles, are still palpably dangerous, and the threat of violence lurks beneath all the bonhomie. It would be a stretch to call this highly innovative, and nobody is ever going to hold it up as a shining example of the series, but it does nothing wrong, trots along quite merrily, and is played with plenty of gusto by a colourful cast.
And can I digress to add that one of the cast has become unwittingly responsible for another actor-based myth about Doctor Who? David Blake Kelly, here playing the landlord Jacob Kewper, is in fact the same David Blake Kelly who appeared as the captain of the Mary Celeste in The Chase (hence them having exactly the same name!). He is not, however, David Kelly from Robin’s Nest and Waking Ned (hence them having slightly different names). Sadly, this isn’t what it says on Wikipedia or IMDb... where someone well versed in Internet matters (but clueless about Doctor Who and actors) has gone to great lengths to suggest that David Kelly temporarily changed his name to that of an already existing actor for four weeks, on only the one occasion in a 50 year career, purely so Doctor Who fans can claim that the bloke who played O’Reilly in The Builders episode of Fawlty Towers did a Doctor Who. By that astounding piece of logic, the Paul Whitsun-Jones who here plays The Squire isn’t at all the same Paul Whitsun-Jones who appears in The Mutants, but is actually Paul Jones from Manfred Mann.
I don’t know why I get so annoyed at stuff like this – perhaps it’s because, like the coveted Avery’s treasure, the clues are in the names. The names! Needless to say, I’ve been on IMDb to change it, and have done my little part to bring truth to the world. (Don’t all thank me at once...)
March 7th
The Smugglers episode three
R: And now the Doctor’s up to it, escaping from the stupid pirate by predicting the future with a pack of playing cards! There’s no odder image than seeing this man of science while away his hours with a spot of tarot reading.
One of the funniest things about the comedy is the way in which this story’s writer, Brian Hayles, allows Captain Pike and Cherub to eclipse the small-time villainy of the Squire and his cohorts. You get the impression that the Squire is really rather proud of his smuggling activities; he’s probably the sort of man nowadays who’d get a vicarious thrill from speeding his car in built-up areas, or from downloading illegal videos. He enjoys being a bit of a rogue, cheerfully showing off where he hides his loot to the first pair of strangers who come sniffing around looking appreciative. When he realises he’s been consorting with honest-to-God actual criminals – the sort who’d skewer a fellow pirate then wipe the blood off with a lace handkerchief – the smile is wiped from his face. And cleverly, it means that for all their humour, the pirates come across as being genuinely quite threatening in contrast. The Squire is a hypocrite and a bureaucrat, but Captain Pike is psychotic.
This really does feel at moments like it’s reinforcing the series’ main credo for any new viewers who might be tuning into the start of the season. Ben is all for escaping in the TARDIS the first chance he can, claiming that the events here are nothing to do with them. Does that remind you of anyone from the early days? But now it’s the Doctor who insists they stay and see the story out, telling his new friends about the “moral obligation” he feels. We’ll get odd flashes of the Doctor wanting to duck out of adventures again – it happens in a couple of weeks’ time, actually – but from now on, more or less, the template for Doctor Who is clear. And William Hartnell has never had the opportunity to express it quite so baldly.
T: With all of this story missing from the archives, I find myself drawn to the few surviving clips of it – initially cut out by the Australian censor and left in a box somewhere, then recovered in the mid-90s – and am looking at Jamaica’s death scene. We’ll probably never know why the censor objected to Pike’s “Twill be a merry night” line, as nothing scary seems to be happening at that point. But if nothing else, the bit a couple of seconds later, where Pike wipes Jamaica’s blood off his... um... pike is gruesomely effective (especially as Jamaica’s eyes coldly stare open in death). It also reminds me of the connection between Pike’s name and the old Tony Hawks joke, i.e. “What was Captain Hook’s name before he lost his hand?” And the other censor clip from this episode is Kewper’s demise, meaning our Australian cousins must have been slightly confused as the credits rolled, having been robbed of the actual cliffhanger! (Funny how censors don’t take that sort of thing into account – it wasn’t that many years ago that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story Smashed, in its pre-watershed broadcast, lost the Buffy-Spike sex scene that ends the episode.)
The irony here is that for an episode that lost some scenes for violent content, everyone talks about being a gentleman – a rather clever little theme Brian Hayles seems to have slipped in. The Doctor is versed in certain practices which pass as gentlemanly in the company of rogues, Pike enjoys the status and trappings of gentlemanly behaviour, and the Squire kids himself that he’s a cut above the common criminals with whom he consorts; it’s all a slyly witty comment on overblown egos and pompous villainy.
And it’s a nifty turn of events that the revenue man Blake is allowed to free Ben and Polly thanks to his own guile, as it’s refreshing that a guest character from the past doesn’t need one of our heroes to educate them (not to mention that it’s a nice contrast to the treatment of Tom last week). There’s an urgency and authority in John Ringham’s performance as Blake, and we’re very lucky to have him in a role that seems to consist mostly of dashing about on a horse. (Maybe it was the holiday in Cornwall that convinced him to take the part. We used to holiday in Cornwall when I was a kid and it was lovely; there was winkle picking on the beach, clotted cream and my refusal to swim in the sea because I’d seen Jaws and was terrified.)
Oh, and let’s gloss over the fact that the Doctor’s tarot readings all turn out to be correct, and that everyone who goes looking for Avery’s treasure winds up dead, shall we? Otherwise, you’d think it was a deliberate bit of foreshadowing on the production team’s part for what’s going to happen in the next story...
The Smugglers episode four
R: Hmm. It’s honestly a little hard to know what to make of this one. The scope of the series is changing – it’s now becoming increasingly normal to have an episode made up of stunt action sequences and fighting. And there’s an awful lot of fighting in this episode; according to well-worn interview anecdotes, this involved stuntmen who’d get killed get out of shot, then put on some different clothes and re-enter the fray! Whilst watching the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the army’s attack on the War Machines at the warehouse, I considered how lucky we were to be able to see these sustained scenes of fisticuffs, because we’d be lost if we were relying upon nothing more than a soundtrack and a set of blurred telesnaps. It’s only with this episode that the luck runs out... for all I can tell, amid all the shoutings and death gurgles, Michael Godfrey’s Captain Pike sounds as demented as he should be. It’s great that a pirate who was so downplayed to an assumed level of gentlemanly sophistication should come across as such a nutter when the chips are down.
T: Like you, I can’t think of much to say because the video is missing. There seems to be lots fighting and charging about on horses – and of course boats and coasts always look good on screen and are unusual sights in Doctor Who.
The characters, at least, hold my attention irrespective
of the action sequences. Cherub is such a gleeful villain that one feels a bit cheated when he gets nobbled early – especially as we get that rather tiresome trait of one villain dispatching another, and thereby doing the hero’s work for him. George A Cooper and Michael Godfrey (respectively Cherub and Pike) have both given great performances – they’ve had fun without sending the show up, and it’s been a delight to boo and hiss them.
And Cherub isn’t alone in having a face-off with Pike – the Doctor and the Squire get the chance to do so as well. What’s interesting about this is that the Doctor, even when bluffing Pike and playing for time, rejects the opportunity to acquire cash and is firm about the sanctity of human life. Strictly speaking, he’s only stalling so Blake can come in and defeat the baddie, but the Doctor’s presence is vital. Being exposed to the Doctor’s generosity of spirit has made the Squire see the error of his ways, and he’s the one who prevents Pike from killing the Doctor and emerges a reformed character. (That’s very Russell T Davies, that.) This section of the adventure, and last week’s “moral obligation” bit, are really most unexpected. They’ve managed to smuggle something quite fundamental and lasting about the series into one of the least showy and venerated adventures.
At the end, the Doctor buggers off before anyone can say thank you. This is becoming a habit. Speaking of habits, did the baddies really have to be smuggling tobacco? It’s been 44 years since this story was made, and yet everyone involved seems intent on reminding me about smoking!
March 8th
The Tenth Planet episode one
R: Well, we know this one is special. It’s the introduction of the Cybermen, and Hartnell’s swan song, so it’s hard to rid the story of all its weighty significance and look at it objectively. But I think, even though I’m straining to do so – here I go – that it still stands out as something distinctive.
For a start, there’s that setting. The snow effects are pretty good, and it looks all so wonderfully bleak; this is the first time the series has given us what is going to be a bit of a hoary old chestnut – the isolated base under siege. You almost couldn’t get more isolated, and the way the episode turns the North Pole into a landscape as alien as anything we’ve ever seen before is very clever. And then there’s the time: 1986! It’s another first, a dip into a near future, which means that everybody can look normal and talk normal and have normal concerns – but that when the gloves are off, the events that take place here can be as far reaching as those on a different world. The series can have its cake and eat it, playing with contemporary characters but without the need to put all the toys back in the box as neatly as it did with The War Machines.
And just listen to all that variety of accents and nationalities, and even – my God – different skin colours! It doesn’t matter particularly that the cast are stereotyping the types of foreigners that they’re depicting – that we get a horny Italian who sings Verdi, or an American who shouts a lot and calls the Doctor “pop” – because it’s a forgiveable shorthand to demonstrate that this story has truly international consequences. It’s helped by all the maps in Wigner’s office, let alone that there’s someone in African dress. It all contributes to an atmosphere of world concern never yet felt in Doctor Who before. And this is compounded by the scenes on Zeus Four, in which the extremely realistic acting from Earl Cameron (playing a Yank) and Alan White (an Aussie) as the space pilots who begin to panic as they lose control of their spacecraft make for some of the tensest scenes seen in the Hartnell era. And all this achieved by two actors, always static, sitting in a couple of armchairs side by side...
The appearance of Mondas, the tenth planet, too is a highlight. A couple of stories ago, we were asked to be in awe of a computer that could calculate square roots – now, for the first time in ages, there is a real sense of intrigue and wonder in the programme. That planet appearing on the screen, that false Earth, is a haunting image. It’s the best introduction any alien race has had in the series since the Daleks, and it’s a great deal more interesting. As the American sergeant blasts away in panic at the creatures moving towards him through the snow, there truly is a sense of something momentous happening in the programme.
T: Well, this is certainly different... Gerry Davis – here co-writing this story with Kit Pedlar – ultimately went off to work in America, and you can see his predilection for American-style TV here. It’s all military, macho, space faring stuff. The presence of “Yanks” (including John Brandon, playing a sergeant) in the cast grounds the episode somehow, making it feel more like a prosaic action/adventure than a twee space opera. Having Americans playing Americans over here in Britain tends to make everything more realistic (as the man who wrote Dalek, I’m sure you’d agree)... but then Robert Beatty saunters in as General Cutler, and demonstrates that having Canadians playing Americans does the same trick.
The whole presentation of this is solid, realistic and less fantastical than usual; everyone is dressed relatively normally, so the setting is immediately plausible. The part of me that used to petulantly defend the series against all the slights it suffered in the dark years – particularly with regards its production values – loves this grounded solidity. But another part of me – the one that’s rediscovered the magic of this era by doing this exercise – is starting to miss what separated the programme from other TV: its strangeness. Up until recently, Doctor Who was interesting because it was a bit weird; even some of the historicals had a mysterious, frighteningly alien aspect. Not any more, though. For all of the rollicking jeopardy we saw in The Smugglers, the bravura characters and situations therein were recognisable types. Under Doctor Who’s new regime, the past (or in this case, the near future) may be another country, but it comes with a map and interpreter thrown in for free.
That this episode works at all is mostly down to the director, Derek Martinus. The camerawork is slick; he keeps everything moving and doesn’t indulge in frivolity. The bustle of the control room is conveyed very effectively, with over-lapping dialogue and convincing bustle. I like little touches like one of the astronauts, Schultz, being referred to as “Blue” (Australian slang for redheads, if I remember the mini-series Anzacs correctly). They use his surname when more formality is required – because not even your friends always address you in the same manner do they Rob, Robert, Mr Shearman? It’s little things like this that help us to buy the outlandish; the low-key interactions between the two astronauts, as well as their colloquial dialogue, is bang on the money.
And isn’t the music interesting? The infamous piece of stock music named “Space Adventure” is here used for the Cyber-march, but not the part of the piece that will become the norm for the Cybermen. Instead, we get the opening, suspenseful build-up (it’s even laid over the reveal of Mondas, but at a slower speed). And in that same scene...
Hurrah! The moment arrives... as the creatures march through the snow, there’s that pan-up from their bare hands – which are impervious to the cold – to those odd faces which flirt between the frightening and the ridiculous. It returns that sense of strangeness to a show that recently has been a little more down to Earth than we’ve come to expect. I love the cliffhanger here, and could do with more of this type of eeriness, please!
Why, it’s enough to nearly make me forget that one of the soldiers was having a fag (this is getting beyond a joke, now).
The Tenth Planet episode two
R: The Cybermen are great! By later standards, of course, they look very primitive – but that’s precisely the point. There’s something rather distasteful about the way they proclaim they are the superior race in all their dubious splendour of awkward plastic frames and cloth skull faces. When you see later Cybermen talk about their desire to upgrade the human race, you can perhaps see their point – in their metal robot suits, they do look pretty impressive. But this bunch are all the more horrifying because they look like they’ve been cobbled together by machines with no appreciation of beauty or elegance – such things, of course, are unimportant
. To be turned into an Earthshock Cyberman would be pretty cool. To be turned into one from The Tenth Planet would be obscene.
I love their voices too. Nick Briggs told me of the time he played the Mondas Cybermen voices for a Big Finish story, and the way that Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton fell around laughing at the strange sing-song he imitated. But again, it feels like the parody of human conversation, all the inflection put into the wrong place; the English language has been turned into something grotesque and alien. And that’s all the more emphatic because for all the terrible things they say – for all that they kill and let people die – they’re incredibly polite about it. “That really was most unfortunate, you should not have done that,” says the leader, a little like he learned how to talk from a training film for waiters. The Cybermen have really only seemed properly emotionless once, and it’s here, in this story, where every threat comes out as something vague and matter-of-fact.
The deaths of Schultz and Williams are so simply conveyed, the monitor screens going blank to signify that Zeus Four has exploded. It’s all the more moving for that. Indeed, death is a serious business for this story. The way that the camera lingers just that little bit too long on the soldiers killed by the Cybermen at the top of the episode, their corpses already getting buried beneath the snow; the wonderful smoke effect that comes from a body shot by the Cyberman’s gun; best of all, the way that Ben is truly appalled that by taking the Cyberman’s weapon from him, he’s obliged to shoot him dead – a Cyberman cannot feel fear, so cannot be intimidated. I could say that there’s something nicely apt about a Cyberman being blinded by something as frivolous and human as a movie in a projector – but I dare say I’m just taking the metaphor too far.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 39