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

by Robert Shearman

  There’s just one thing I don’t get about this episode. If Trask once served as first mate to the mob-leader Willie Mackay, couldn’t Mackay have anticipated that the man might have been trouble, what with him having the speech and mannerisms of a pirate ‘n’ all? If your first mate says “ahhrr” a lot and storms about calling everyone “swab”, you’d probably have good reason not to trust him. After all, you wouldn’t hire someone who lives in a lightning scarred castle and has an aversion to garlic to be your babysitter, would you?

  The Highlanders episode four

  R: This satisfying conclusion makes The Highlanders that rare thing – a consistently good story. The construction is pretty near perfect – the overthrow of Trask aboard The Annabelle is exciting, but also allows room for some surprisingly tender moments, and the Laird’s conviction that his hearing Kirsty must be the imagination of a dying man is actually very moving. And still the episode refuses to be predictable – the set piece aboard the boat would act as most story’s climax, but, very neatly, the tension of the travellers getting back through the fog and the Redcoats to find the TARDIS is well preserved. (Indeed, the idea that the danger isn’t really over until the crew are safely behind TARDIS doors is an early Hartnellism you wouldn’t expect to surface again in a comedy historical.) Good to see too that Grey survives the story, albeit within ffinch’s custody, and that Perkins’ redemption is somewhat grudging. (The Doctor’s assertion that the highlanders can trust him as their clerk in France until the winds change direction is wonderful; Gerry Davis refuses to give simple solutions in what by expectations really ought to be a simple runaround.)

  It still seems extraordinary that Jamie leaves in the TARDIS at the end of the story. Frazer Hines has acted very well, but the character itself has been thinly drawn. When Ben and Polly express such surprise to see him on shore near the end of the story, I echoed it – I’d all but forgotten he was even in this adventure. And of course, from now on, there’ll be another regular inside the TARDIS to share all the companions’ lines. In a way, it’s a great shame that in a story where both Ben and Polly have been allowed to shine, its conclusion condemns them both largely to bit parts from this point on.

  T: Like last week’s cliffhanger, it’s the middle of this episode that’s a bit tricky for us to interpret – being, as it is, a big long fight. Even with the soundtrack and the telesnaps to help us, it’s very hard to judge if this was well-mounted or an apologetic and scrappily staged shambles. It’s worth noting though, that even though the writer has gone to great ends to depict the bloodiness and cruelty of the setting, not one of the major villains is seen to die. In fact, no-one has been killed since Alexander perished in episode one... Trask might drown when Jamie chucks him overboard, but it’s not explicit. (I couldn’t be certain, but I don’t think he gets mortally wounded before being pitched into the firth.) And I think it quite right that Perkins gets a let off; he’s been an obsequious little creep who, even as he joins the good guys, is explicitly outed as a shifty bounder, but he’s been good fun. The bit where he turns on Grey – like a rebellious Ariel spitting at the feet of his Prospero – brings a joyful closure to this entertaining double act.

  And three cheers for Algernon ffinch – an idiot and a thoughtless coward who, through interacting with the TARDIS crew, finds the goodness that dwells within him. His subplot has been a delightful addition to this adventure, and I hope that the viewers became very fond of him. It’s a credit to Michael Elwyn’s performance, and indeed to that of Anneke Wills, who’s gamely manipulated ffinch but has always displayed a sense of humour while doing so.

  Then we come to that spurious end scene that you mentioned, where Jamie suddenly joins the TARDIS crew. I have to confess that it’s very difficult for me not to use my foreknowledge of the companions’ fates to underscore my opinions of it – I’m trying, as best I can, to contextualise episodes only in light of what has happened in the series thus far, but this is one of the exceptions where that isn’t really possible. Michael Craze and Anneke Wills have been fantastic, and pretty much grounded the series when its leading man has been either poorly (Hartnell) or untrustworthy (Troughton). But what of Jamie (whose introduction here spells the beginning of their end)? If he’d stayed aboard the Annabelle, he’d have been safely stowed in France... but because he goes with the Doctor, when he’s finally returned to his time at the end of Season Six, it’s during the aftermath of a bloody battle, when Redcoats were happily scouring the countryside killing anyone they even vaguely suspected of being a Jacobite. So, for the sake of three years in space and time he won’t even remember, Jamie quite probably goes to an early grave at the end of a British soldier’s sword. Okay, that’s only one possible interpretation, but, rather sadly, it’s feasible.

  But on a more upbeat note, did you hear it? “I would like a hat like that!” That’s it, it’s a catchphrase! I can just imagine Troughton blacking up, wearing a wind-jammer captain’s costume and striding into Lloyd’s office, suggesting that in each story, the Doctor wears a different hat! Why, if they’d followed through with such a plan, just think of all the action-figure variants we could now have...

  March 15th

  The Underwater Menace episode one

  R: Aha! This one’s rather interesting. It’s a story which has been written off as a clunker for decades – its reputation not helped, I suspect, by the fact that episode three is the only one in the archives, and watched cold seems to be comprised mostly of fish people having a strange watery ballet. But I think this is a story you cannot just watch cold – jumping into the madness halfway through doesn’t let your brain click into what the tone should be.

  Because this is mad – barking, in fact – and deliberately so. And the key to that is in the wonderful TARDIS scene that opens the episode. Ostensibly, it’s all about introducing Jamie to his new home. In practice, though, it’s a reminder to the audience that this programme can (and will) do absolutely anything. The camera focuses upon each of the regulars in turn, and we hear their thoughts on where they’d like to end up. (“Prehistoric monsters!” Troughton thinks with glee.) But it’s Jamie’s reaction that is the most telling, as he wonders what insanity he’s wandered into. We’re offered present-day adventure, familiar old baddies or something back in time – and the production team ensure that when the TARDIS doors open, we get something completely different to all of them.

  So there’s a strange high priest who wants to sacrifice our heroes to the gods – but we find out this is set in 1970. There’s reference – the first one, I think, in the series – to the Cold War as Zaroff is sought by Eastern and Western governments... and this sudden dose of real-world politics is tempered by the fact that he feeds people to killer sharks. It would have been so easy for writer Geoffrey Orme to have crafted this as either a modern-day James Bond spoof or set it right back in history to better suggest the Dark Ages approach to religion – and it’s the fact that he bolts the two together that makes this so frankly weird. It’s as if the production team are deliberately playing with the conventions of the series. As soon as they leave the TARDIS, all the crew split up as per usual – which is utterly pointless, because within three minutes they’re all imprisoned together as if that hadn’t happened. You could say that it’s clumsy plotting. But I’d argue that it’s part of a process where our expectations are challenged. It’s no excuse that Polly suggests at the beginning they’re in Cornwall; we’ve just had an adventure which alluded to its own similarity to The Smugglers, and straight afterwards this next story does the same. And immediately plonks us into a situation unlike anything we’ve ever had before. The episode ending, I’ll remind you, is of Polly being held down by doctors who want to inject her so she’ll end up with fish gills. That’s a novelty. Doctor Who has been jumping around from genre to genre for years now, from future to past and back again, until we pretty well know what to look out from either. It’s been years since we’ve had anything like The Edge of Destruction or The Space Museum,
which has so consciously wanted to go sideways and challenge us with something new.

  T: You make some very good points, but this story isn’t that bonkers just yet. In fact – if I were being truly honest about this – the first 15 minutes are actually desperately dull. Yes, the little insight into the thoughts of the TARDIS crew is quite sweet, but the charging about on the rocks seems to take forever – as does, actually, the sacrifice sequence where it’s pretty obvious that Zaroff will eventually stop it, as it’s only episode one and he’s the only person who can.

  What strikes me most about this episode, though, is the genre that we’re dealing with; when the rather shabby looking Atlanteans come along, it’s the closest Doctor Who has ever got to being a shoddy 50s B-Movie. The funny thing is, I actually don’t mind watching a shoddy 50s B-Movie, and even a genuine one typically takes a good while to get so-bad-that-you-can-laugh-at-it. This is only episode one, and so odds are high that we’re going to be waiting for the plot to take hold, and for things to get truly silly. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the only way is down – but that’s probably okay, because the only way this will get any good is, perversely, if it gets worse. The main way this strategy could backfire is if it becomes too difficult to watch this without feeling a little patronising – the Doctor’s bluff to Zaroff, for instance, could either be a clever example of our hero’s optimistic improvisation, or just a lazy piece of writing. (Sadly, that Zaroff subsequently doesn’t kill our heroes only because he likes the Doctor’s sense of humour leads me to suspect the latter.)

  But the surviving telesnaps reveal something very interesting – the Doctor signs a note as “Dr. W”. Watching the series chronologically has made me notice how closely together these hints that his name is Doctor Who come. Calling him “Doctor Who” in The War Machines has always been brushed under the carpet, passed off as a mild aberration that was quickly spotted and never repeated. Well, this is the fourth such allusion (with, admittedly, different degrees of obliqueness) in eight stories. The fifth, actually, if you count the caption slide at the end of The Gunfighters telling us that the next episode is called “Dr. Who And The Savages.”

  It’s also what he’s called in the credits, of course, but nobody seems inclined to count that.

  The Underwater Menace episode two

  R: Actually, I’m rethinking what I said about that last episode. I’m not sure that The Underwater Menace is especially challenging. As you suggested, Toby, I think it’s really very silly.

  But I’m not sure that’s necessarily such a great crime. Because what it’s done, in its wacky way, is consolidate the second Doctor. During his past two stories, Troughton has come across as something of a wild schizophrenic. He has a catchphrase about wanting people’s hats. He keeps on pretending to be other people – sometimes several within the same episode – and it’s hard to nail down who he actually is. And so to pit Troughton now against Joseph Furst’s Zaroff is a stroke of good fortune. It reins him in. There’s no way that Troughton at his most comic can compete with Furst at his most over the top. And so instead he’s forced to play the sane one. The scene where the Doctor quietly asks this lunatic scientist why he wants to split the earth open like an egg is a revelation – he’s talking carefully to a man who is so unhinged, he’ll kill himself and everybody else for nothing more than the achievement of doing so. And the scenes he shares with Tom Watson as the priest Ramo are terrific. Here’s a Doctor who will risk his own life just for the chance of persuading others that he is the voice of reason. For the first time, you feel he can pull it off – that there’s a calm sincerity to this manic clown, that here there’s a figure of real authority.

  Yes, very silly, as I say. But it’s interesting that the cynicism of The Power of the Daleks, and the depiction of war’s currency that made The Highlanders so grim, made Troughton invent the Doctor as a joker by comparison. And that when the tone of the story is made lighter and dafter, that Troughton is the one who allows you to take it just seriously enough you can enjoy it.

  T: I’m deeply concerned about Geoffrey Orme – what was he on when he wrote this? Zaroff’s motivation for blowing up the world is because he can? He’s mad obviously, but it’s all-purpose TV mad. Medical students watching this may quibble with the suggestion that the best way to diagnose madness is to look at your patient’s eyes and try to spot any boggleyness, but where Zaroff is concerned, this isn’t a bad idea.

  But if anything, the script is even more insane than Zaroff – and clearly written in about 15 minutes. In a repeat of episode one, Ramo asks the Doctor why he should trust him, and what does our cosmic genius say in reply? That he doesn’t know – so Ramo trusts him anyway. And neither Ramo nor the serving girl Ara like Zaroff – why, you may ask? Because they’re goodies, and goodies don’t like the man. In fact, we’re evidently supposed to like Ramo simply because the Doctor has decided he’s a potential ally, even though they’ve barely spoken before. All we’ve really seen of him up till now is him getting cross because a human sacrifice has been cancelled, which is hardly a quality one looks for in a friend.

  The telesnaps give us some indication of the design for this episode, and boy, it’s a really curious hybrid – everyone from Atlantis wears shells and seaweed (Ara’s even got an Oyster bra!), and yet the Overseer has a lumberjack shirt and a hard hat. And only in daft old Doctor Who could you get an actor with the illustrious pedigree of Colin Jeavons (here playing Damon, Zaroff’s assistant) and then cast him only in this story and K-9 and Company. And deck him out with massive eyebrows. For that matter, only Doctor Who could get a cast like Jeavons, Tom Watson and Noel Johnson, and have them give such duff performances. It seems that having seen Joseph Furst go in one direction as Zaroff, they’ve all gone in the other. Whilst he’s gone for apocalyptically proportioned OTT, they’re all a bit too blandly sincere and (Johnson, particularly) mannered. It’s bizarre.

  Do you know what, though? The B-Movie strategy that I mentioned is working... I’m man enough to say that The Underwater Menace is so naff, I rather like it. And next up, we get to see the surviving episode in all its glory!

  March 16th

  The Underwater Menace episode three

  R: I think it’s a measure of just how unpredictable The Underwater Menace is, that in the scene where the Doctor’s execution is prevented by a voice coming from a large idol, you really can just about believe that the great god Amdo has just popped up to save the day. Tonally, this story is so over the place that literally anything could happen. And this means that such things that would normally be of vital significance to a story – like plot, or logic – are wilfully abandoned in favour of a more freewheeling style. Let’s kidnap Zaroff!, the Doctor suggests. Or let’s make the fish people revolt! As soon as a character hits upon an idea, it’s no more raised than easily achieved. Considering the mine-workers Sean and Jacko spend their time persuading the Fish People to rise up against their oppressors by mocking the size of their manhood, it’s utterly bizarre they manage to get their rather disgruntled piscine pals to go on strike. And no sooner have they determined to go on strike, than the community is reduced to its knees! Incredible! Considering Zaroff is the most powerful man in Atlantis, with an armed guard to protect him, it’s even more bizarre that two young men in leather, a girl dressed up as a Can Can dancer and a man in drag can capture him within minutes. And having achieved this, that they simply fall foul of his cunning plan to escape – by his clutching his stomach and saying “ow” a lot.

  By my reckoning, there are about three points in this episode where you’d traditionally expect the story to end. The scene where Zaroff is imprisoned feels like an end of adventure moment. Later on, when he’s hounded by Jamie as he escapes over a rockface, you anticipate him falling Morbius-like to his doom. Or when the Fish People rebel, that King Thous turns against him. And each time the story waves at you cheerily, no no no, I’m carrying on. In some ways, it’s truly awful; it feels increasingly like the episode hasn’
t been so much scripted as thrown together in improvisation. And in others, it’s rather exhilarating. The adventure doesn’t have a clue where it’s going. And so neither can we – it’s an insane ride into the unknown. It’s like Geoffrey Orme has fitted the Randomiser to his typewriter.

  Joseph Furst’s performance sums it up. In that final, famous scene, he can scream to the camera that nuffink in ze world can stop him now, and it’s outrageous and funny – but it follows immediately after a line in which he dispassionately orders two men to be murdered off camera. It’s all over the place, and out of control. Is it any good? Of course not. Is it entertaining? Just about, if you hold on tight, and don’t resist where it takes you.

  T: I have a confession to make... I’ve just finished watching this, and I have a big, stupid grin on my face. Did you hear that, fandom? I love it, I love it to pieces!

  I’m not exactly unbiased though – this episode has always had a special place in my heart. When I was a teenager and the Doctor Who VHS range was merely a gleam in some savvy marketing guru’s eye, I had an exotic day trip to the nearest buzzing metropolis to where I lived. Oh yes, I fondly recall those glamorous city lights that lured me like a moth to the urban flame that was... Wolverhampton. I went to a shop called The Place that had advertised in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, and whilst I was there, feasting on such rarities as the first edition of Doctor Who Weekly (no transfers), I overheard two guys talking about episodes that you’d expect they couldn’t possibly have seen. My older friend (and driver) Derek, much more confident than me, asked about how they’d got access to the existing back catalogue of the BBC archives... and a whole world of bootlegging opened itself up to me. My first order (cost: give the man two VHS tapes, get one back in return) was all of the orphaned Troughton episodes. I figured I’d get more variety that way, and so, of course, the very first old episode I viewed in this manner was – yes, it’s true – The Underwater Menace episode three.