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

by Robert Shearman

  And the very ending is lovely! So many Doctor Who stories will take urban legends or myths and demystify them. The Loch Ness Monster? That’s a Zygon robot, you know. Vampires? Oh, they’re deadly alien foes of the Time Lords. The joy of this is that the story puts its sci-fi spin on the abominable snowmen of Tibet, and shows they’re the mechanical muscle of an extraterrestrial intelligence. And then, brilliantly, it reveals in the final minutes that there are real Yeti after all, that there is still magic and wonder in the world. Travers excitedly says goodbye to his new friends, and sets off after the creatures he’s spent so many years searching for. His illusions haven’t been shattered, and there’s still innocence to be had. It’s delightful.

  T: It’s that man Wolfe Morris again – he articulates Padmasambhava’s turmoil extremely well, and later on emits a horrible, blood-curdling laugh. What’s most interesting about this is that years ago, I was chatting to a fan who actually saw these episodes on broadcast, and who insisted that Padmasambhava’s face melted when he died. Now, the memory does cheat, and there’s no sign of that in the telesnaps. However, it came to light many years later that a face-melting scene had been filmed and then, apparently, cut. If that was the case, how would my friend have remembered it? It’s an awfully large coincidence, and it can’t be the case that he read about the supposedly abandoned melting and revised his memories, because that information hadn’t come to light when he described it to me. Appropriately, it’s a mystery about a story about a mystery.

  Overall, I’d approached The Abominable Snowmen expecting a bit of a jolly – you know, that it’d be not bad, but slightly overlong and not all that special either. Well, I have to say it’s surprised me – it’s very well structured, very eerie, but most of all it’s extremely weighty. Haisman and Lincoln impressively crank up the drama – that moment you mention, where the Doctor screams in abject agony, is doubly shocking as it happens almost as soon as he’s disappeared inside a secret chamber for his ultimate confrontation. And that’s before Jamie and Thonmi smash the Yeti-control sphere... and the heroes still haven’t won. Then Travers shoots Padmasambhava... but to no avail. In the dramatic stakes category, this story with supposedly “cuddly” opponents is anything but resting on its laurels.

  The Ice Warriors episode one

  R: The first few minutes of the adventure are a bit disorientating. You’ve got all these scientists dressed in weird swirly designed costumes getting panicked about copious amounts of technobabble. It looks like sci-fi with a capital S and a capital F... and yet there’s one little thing that grounds it. And it’s that Peter Barkworth, as base-leader Clent, hobbles about with a stick. These may be people from the distant future, and they may be talking about ionisation and stuff, but they’re human, and with human frailties.

  And what’s clever about the episode is that it contrasts the Very Very Futuristic – all the shiny computers and clinical sets – with the Very Very Old. It all takes place, rather bizarrely, in an old Georgian house for one thing, if only to make all this ionisation talk sound all the more incongruous. And, of course, it deals with a prehistoric figure buried in the ice. It’s all the odder to have this caveman era giant resurrected somewhere another thousand years or so in the future – it only emphasises the yawning history between them. And right in the middle of this rather solemn scientific future and this unnerving distant past are our heroes, having fun and making jokes and refusing to take things quite so seriously. The scene where the TARDIS arrives on its side, and the crew have to climb out of the doors on top of each other, is just beautifully silly – and silliness is exactly the right sort of antidote to lots of engineers huddled around computer screens shouting numbers at each other.

  Speaking of which, the Doctor takes against the base computers pretty swiftly, doesn’t he? It’s going to be a theme of the story, I know, pitting man’s instincts against machine logic – but it’s not as if the Doctor knows that’s what writer Brian Hayles will be up to. And he hasn’t been there long enough to realise that Clent and his assistant, Miss Garrett, are techie nerds yet. He reacts to the computers as if he’s long had a horror of technology – and he hasn’t, has he? This isn’t the way he reacted to WOTAN or the Gravitron; it’s all a bit too convenient. And although Troughton deadpans very amusingly, it does make him look a bit rude – like he’s being shown someone’s iPod and snootily saying he prefers vinyl records.

  Another thing he doesn’t know yet – and nor do the viewers at home – is that the defrosting caveman is going to be a new returning baddie like the Daleks and the Cybermen. It’s hard for us, perhaps, to look at the Ice Warrior with ignorance, and not think of the Galactic Federation and Alan Bennion and Monster of Peladon – but in the closing seconds it looks like something utterly alien and unknowable, its strange face crumpling and pouting at us as this ancient creature returns to life. The Troughton stories have played a lot upon the complacency of its characters not realising that the Daleks on Vulcan are dangerous, or that the tombs of the Cybermen should be left buried – here it’s Jamie, bantering about how he’d like Victoria’s kit off (she should slap him, ye ken), and not bothering even to spare a glance at the reptile thing about to wreak havoc.

  One final thing. Arden – the leader of the expedition that recovers the Ice Warrior Varga – is a pretty cool customer, isn’t he? He reacts to the supposed death of one of his team members, Davis, with no more than the irritation that it’ll get him into trouble with his boss. And by the time he brings his frozen warrior back to camp, he’s all smiles and jokes and doesn’t feel it’s worth mentioning one of his party’s dead. What a bastard. I hope he gets his just desserts soon. (Oh, and that was a pretty impressive avalanche, by the way.)

  T: I’d go a step further and say that Mrs Davis could sue Ioniser International for the unnecessary loss of her son’s life. It’s pretty bizarre – perhaps Brian Hayles is showing us Arden’s cavalier attitude to anything that isn’t the advancement of his own legacy, and yet his other assistant, Walters, is equally jocular about the prospect of Davis being found dead. All right, people rarely react completely plausibly to death in Doctor Who – it’s a staple occurrence in any adventure genre, and would soon become a chore if everyone responded to it by having a nervous breakdown. But it’s too odd a beat here, with the writer making his characters deal with the loss of a human life as if they’re aware that they’re in a TV drama, and that fatalities are an unremarkable inevitability.

  This seems like a funny (not to mention misguided) state of affairs, given that the other characters in this story have been thrown into the mix with such care and thematic validity. Clent, for instance, is clearly the personification of this highly defined and ordered future society, one where there’s talk of a meeting that’s scheduled to take place in precisely three minutes and fifteen seconds. So, are we meant to view Arden and Walters’ callousness as a symptom of humanity being more cold, mechanical and computer-like in this era, or do they demonstrate that the world isn’t nearly as ordered and regimented as Clent likes to pretend? It’s a bit hard to tell what Hayles is getting at with Davis’ death, but...

  When you come down to it, this story is all about incongruity. There’s a spaceman in prehistoric ice, futuristic machinery in a Victorian mansion, and a shabby Doctor amongst the slick conformity of the computer room. He looks brilliant scampering around trying to stop the base from exploding, doing comedy business whilst retaining enough believable authority to compel everyone to do as he says. And how right that he’s a second out with his calculations – I don’t like my Doctor invulnerable, I like him a bit imperfect. He’s a hero for people like myself, who never get things exactly right.

  So this is a wonderfully complex story with a lot going for it, and even though the schoolboy error in the science of how Earth came to experience a new ice age is completely, unforgivably bad (fewer plants meant less carbon dioxide, so the planet got cooler – sorry, did they ask Kit Pedler to consult on this?), I do like the one-line l
ament Clent uses when describing what’s happened to the world: “One year, there was no Spring.” So it’s not global warming that got us in the end, it’s global cooling. Jeremy Clarkson was right all along – so yes, this story is most definitely science fiction.

  April 2nd

  The Ice Warriors episode two

  R: Peter Sallis, here appearing as the scientist-gone-rogue Penley, makes a fine surrogate Doctor – he’s sensitive, intelligent, and iconoclastic. The scene in which they first encounter each other is the highlight of the episode, and feels like a true meeting of minds. Bernard Bresslaw is truly impressive as Varga the Ice Warrior. He plays a character who has to come to terms with the shock of being in a world several thousand years after the one he has known, and to think fiercely about how to protect himself and to ensure his own survival. He’s big and brutish, of course, but in the way he so practically adjusts to the new circumstances he’s very intelligent too, and oddly admirable.

  All of Hayles’ Ice Warrior scripts are based on the struggle between technological innovation and luddite conservatism, but this is by far the best. Particularly memorable is when the Doctor bursts into the conference to announce the electronic connections in Varga’s helmet, proving that he is an alien. In most Doctor Who stories, it would be the simple fact that there’s a bulky alien walking around which would be the reason for Troughton’s outburst. But when you realise his concern isn’t for the Ice Warrior at all per se, but for the indication that he might own a nuclear-powered spaceship that endangers the ionisation programme, it is quite a surprise. And it is in the treatment of Varga as a conceptual threat, rather than merely as monster of the month, that makes this story so successful.

  T: This continues to be very clever and well done (well, for the most part). Clent asks the computer to assess the Doctor’s “work potential and community value”, which sounds terribly sinister and is a fairly damning critique of the inhumanity of this ordered society. By contrast, we have Penley, who is amiable, witty, all-too human (he can’t rush to Victoria’s aid) and serves as a concrete riposte to the stark functionality of this world. And if it’s remarkable that we have an actor of Peter Sallis’ calibre pop up in this, it’s doubly remarkable that he does so in a story that already has Peter Barkworth and Bernard Bresslaw in it. This is an astonishing line-up, and all credit should go to Derek Martinus for hiring three such respected and able performers.

  I said this was clever and well done, though, “for the most part”, and my reservation chiefly centres around Storr (an outsider who has renounced science) and Arden. In short, they’re pillocks. It’s to Sallis’ credit that he reacts with such good humour to Storr’s one-track-minded moaning – the two of them are so unalike, you expect that they’ll next be performing in a production of The Odd Couple. Arden, though, has his own trademarked brand of selfish single mindedness when it comes to pursuit of his achievements. When the Ice Warrior comes to life and abducts Victoria, everyone panics and worries about her safety – everyone, that is, apart from Arden, for whom the fact that he’s probably unleashed a homicidal lizard man seems secondary to what this will do for his career and reputation. He’s an awful person – but good on George Waring for adding some fear into his voice when he warns Clent how terrifying it is to be in the ice after dark. No wonder Arden is scared, though – night is probably when the ghosts of all the men he’s casually lost out there over the years come out.

  The Ice Warriors episode three

  R: The speed-through reconstruction of these missing episodes on the VHS release does the job of filling in the gaps – but what it does indicate is that the best scenes are the ones you can safely excise and call padding. Take the confrontation scene between Penley and Garrett, for instance, in which she first tries to persuade him, then threatens him, to return to the base with her and work for Clent. She fails, so the scene achieves no useful progression within the plot, so it can be discarded. (If this were a new series adventure, there’d be no time for it at all.) But what’s brilliant about it is that it actually allows two characters we’ve not seen together on screen before talk – and by doing that establish a relationship which gives them both a depth, and the situation a renewed urgency.

  Season Five has adopted a story structure of six episodes; it’s the first time Doctor Who has done this, until now largely settling on the four episode length as best. The added hour of storytelling does mean that there are longueurs to wade through; neither The Faceless Ones or The Abominable Snowmen have so much plot that they couldn’t have been told with a couple of episodes lopped off. But the extra space that the six-episode format has gives so much greater an opportunity for character development. Khrisong in The Abominable Snowmen changes from obstructive military hothead to a figure of real dignity. And in The Ice Warriors, we can see the effect all the more. Penley describes Clent the way the nuts and bolts storyline sees him – as an emotionless man more interested in technology than people. Clent could so easily have been just another Hobson, a stubborn, bad-tempered base commander. He is all those things, but there’s the time for Peter Barkworth to make him believably human and sympathetic, which makes his trust only in technology all the more shaming. At one moment he can interrupt Victoria’s frightened grief for Jamie with demands for news about the spaceship power system, at others he can stammer out words of comfort to Arden. And when Arden (and Jamie!) are gunned down by the Ice Warriors, it is so much more powerful because we have already been party both to Arden’s scientific enthusiasm and his guilt that that enthusiasm has been so disastrous.

  What that means is that the scene between Penley and Garrett is all the better because Penley isn’t even right; Clent is so much more than the soulless button pusher. And this has a knock-on effect of making Penley so much more than the Doctorish figure who is adopting Brian Hayles’ own distrustful viewpoint about technology. It means that the scene doesn’t work to advance the plot, and it doesn’t even work as straight exposition – it’s even more dispensable than we might have thought. And therefore it’s so much more valuable too. Doctor Who at this stage isn’t merely composed of moments which have a specific function, but scenes which give ambiguity and colour to the story. The way drama is meant to do. The Ice Warriors is slow by any modern standards – and it’s telling that the events of the missing episodes two and three really can be summarised within 15 minutes perfectly coherently. But it’s the steady pace that gives this atmosphere and depth, and that’s what makes these stories still have such impact now.

  T: Long ago in the murky mists of time, I once had a dream about this story being returned to the archives, only to wake up and become terribly disappointed when I realised it hadn’t. (Yes, that’s what young Toby used to dream about – not sexy ladies, but absent archive telly.) And then, at the very beginning of one of only two conventions I ever attended as a lad, it was announced that four of the six episodes of this story had been recovered! Two-thirds of my dream had come true! And eventually, I was able to see all sorts of funny little touches in this story that I never conjured from reading the Target novel or looking at the photographs – Clent’s limp and walking stick, the sheer size of the typography in the opening credits (Brian Hayles’ Mum must have been pleased – his name is massive), and the changing Ice Warrior helmet designs.

  So now I’m watching a reconstruction of the still-absent episode three, and I’m obsessing about what we can’t see here. The pictures suggest that the thawing Martians in the blocks of ice looked absolutely terrific, whilst the ambush of Jamie and Arden – and the unceremonious way they’re cut down – is pretty brutal. Arden’s death, surprisingly, comes only after he’s shown pangs of conscience for no particular reason – he’s not even reported the death he treated so glibly in episode one, and the last time we saw him, he was demonstrating vaulting ambition and anticipating personal glory. But if nothing else, Arden’s sudden inclination to fret gives Peter Barkworth a chance to stumble as Clent tentatively attempts to show some humanity in re
sponse. It’s a brilliant piece of characterisation – subtle, consistent and multi-layered, this is one of the series’ finest guest performances up to this point.

  And it’s Clent who begins to really spell out this story’s central conflict: that of science verses humanity. He insists on checking the Doctor’s findings with the computer (a move that Troughton crossly resents), and talks of colleagues, not friends. The challenges they’re facing are somewhat typical Doctor Who adventure and jeopardy – one of the companions has been taken hostage, another has been shot and there are deadly aliens thawing out – but the likes of Clent, Penley and Miss Garrett make the proceedings pop off the screen.

  Oh, one more thing... Penley has been keeping notes on The Omega Factor, has he? It’s good to know that an intimate knowledge of 1970s telefantasy featuring Louise Jameson will be vital when the world’s under threat. (You and I, Rob, might end up becoming indispensable experts come the environmental apocalypse.)

  April 3rd

  The Ice Warriors episode four

  R: I’m in a good mood. Because this – and another bumper two episodes after it! – actually exist in the archives, and I can watch them as moving pictures on my telly screen. You know, the way they were intended. It makes me much more forgiving of their faults. (God knows how I’m going to respond to the series after we reach The War Games; I’ll be so overjoyed to be in a world free of blurry telesnaps that I’ll probably love everything, just on principle. Watch this space.)

  So, yes, intellectually, I think episode four has a few problems. It’s that midway point in a long serial, so not very much really happens. Victoria escapes from the Ice Warriors, but is recaptured in time for the closing credits. The Doctor sets out for the Ice Warrior spaceship – but only gets there in time for the episode ending. And what an episode ending! Simply by refusing to be civil, and answering a perfectly innocuous question, the Doctor faces death and a contrived cliffhanger. If I were watching this by telesnap alone, I’m not sure I’d be getting much out of it. But with all the pictures in place, I can see how good Derek Martinus’ direction is. On paper the sequence where the Ice Warrior Turoc lumbers after Victoria should do the Ice Warriors’ credibility no good whatsoever, emphasising that they can’t move very fast and have an alarming blind spot when people hide directly in front of them. But Martinus makes the slow heavy lurch of the Ice Warrior very intimidating – and coupled with Dudley Simpson’s terrific music, there’s a real tension to these scenes where a terrified Victoria runs for her life.