Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (18 page)

World’s End (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode one)

R:
It’s very jarring to see the regular cast actually walking around
on location.
We’ve got so used by now to seeing what the house style of Doctor Who can be, in all its studio-bound glory, that to see it played outside makes it suddenly look so much more epic, somehow. What I love about this episode is that, for the very first time, there’s a self-conscious anticipation about the series – it
knows
that this is a big story. And the audience at home know too; the Daleks are back, the adventure has been well publicised – for the first time, the viewers know more about what’s waiting around the corner than the characters do. It’s a subtle difference in the way the episode is told, and a very stylish one. There’s an atmosphere to this that is grimmer and thicker than anything we’ve yet seen on Doctor Who, and it really feels like a different programme – the children’s series has grown up. The lack of a reprise subtly suggests that this is a different thing altogether, and that a clean break has been made. And rather than opening with Hartnell pondering over a broken scanner in the TARDIS, instead we’re presented with a grotesque image of a man screaming out like an animal and all too eagerly committing suicide, leaving only a sign in the background telling us that it’s forbidden to dump bodies in the river. It’s astonishing they got away with it; Doctor Who has been experimenting with shifts in style ever since it started, but never quite as abruptly as this. It’s brave and exhilarating and more than a little unnerving.

It stands a comparison with the other opening episodes we’ve seen from Terry Nation so far. Once more, it’s an exercise in the slow burn – the characters explore their surroundings for 25 minutes, and marvel at what they find. But this time, instead of remarkable bits of fantasy to goggle at, they find a London so dead that Ian wants to run away without further investigation. It’s the drab and ordinary turned into something sick and poisonous. Every time a Nation story opens, the cast find a dead body – in The Dead Planet, it was of a fossilised animal; in The Sea of Death, it was little more than an empty wetsuit. Here, it’s a strange parody of a man hidden amongst the rubbish with a knife protruding from his back. Any regular viewer watching this will have recognised the structure of what was going on – and also that it was being presented in a starker, realer way than ever before.

And then, just as the episode can test that viewer’s patience no longer, at last a Dalek appears. It hasn’t even emerged from the water before the end credits roll. Almost tauntingly, the screen reads: “
Next
Episode: The Daleks.”

T:
It really does start well, with that horrible, grisly self-inflicted death. But then – as if to prove that director Richard Martin is only at his best when using film – we cut to a TARDIS scene where the framing is cack-handedly sloppy, and the camerawork poor. On some occasions, the character we’re supposed to be looking at (say, the Doctor) disappears from shot altogether. It’s an ugly piece of work, although it does at least emphasise how good the outside images are. At the episode’s climax, the iconic image of the Dalek rising from the Thames isn’t helped by the jarring cut from studio to film – it looks curiously detached from events occurring in what’s supposedly the same scene and location, and the action doesn’t flow at all seamlessly. That said, it’s the climax to a grim, moody episode; plague is mentioned, floating bodies are seen, London has been desolated. You can see why Terry Nation liked an apocalypse; it really helps to drench everything in a morbid atmosphere.

William Russell keeps getting the job of telling the audience how serious the situation is, and he does it well. He has a different kind of authority to Hartnell, but an equally important one. “Intelligent”, the Doctor tells Ian approvingly – the old man’s starting to respect the schoolteachers. And just as he despaired that they all split up in the previous story, Ian now berates the absent girls for their tendency to wander off (and into danger). He’s aware of what the clichés are.

I also really like the bit where Ian falls though the door-leading-to-nowhere – stunt-arranger Peter Diamond often gets overlooked because people interested in such things tend to focus on the work Havoc did on 70s Who, but Diamond was a damn good stuntman who later choreographed one of the best swordfights in cinema ever (for The Princess Bride) and worked on a number of motion pictures, Star Wars included.

Oh, and a special mention should go to Susan spraining her ankle – something cited as a cliché of Doctor Who, but which doesn’t actually happen very often. I wonder if Carole Ann Ford was revelling in the knowledge that she’s been made to trip over clumsily for the very last time, not realising that she’ll have to do it again, 19 years down the road, in The Five Doctors. (If only the Doctor had installed a Wii in the TARDIS, so she could have sorted out her co-ordination!)

Had I seen the first broadcast of this as a kid, I’d have been really looking forward to the return of the Daleks – and been pissed off when the credits rolled and promised them
next
week. I’m sure I would have cursed the Radio Times and its cover-spoilers (that revealed the creature that appears in the cliffhanger) – thank goodness that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

January 24th

The Daleks (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode two)

R:
We’ve never had a story on this scale before – and in a way, we never will again. As we get ever further into Doctor Who (and, tellingly, ever further away from the Second World War and a genuine fear of Nazi occupation), alien invasions are the sort of everyday thing that the Doctor
prevents
from happening. On the odd occasion when there’s a tale that tries something similar – to show an Earth already subjugated by alien aggressors – it’ll be as in Day of the Daleks, something that can be handily rewritten from history owing to some helpful time paradox. But there’s nothing so reassuring in this story – Doctor Who is here doing an adventure in which (technically) contemporary Earth is destroyed. (I know that this adventure is set in the twenty-second century, but that’s just a storytelling necessity – in every part of the design, in every part of the plotting, there’s no attempt to suggest that what all this represents is anything more than the world that the TV viewers intimately know being wiped out. Terry Nation likes this sort of modern doomsday thing – if he’d written Survivors as a Doctor Who adventure, he’d have had to knock it into a so-called “twenty-second century” too.)

The ambition of this instalment is tremendous, which makes its awkward moments and clumsy beats forgiveable. Nation is not the most elegant of writers, but it’s actually that very bluntness of his which makes this episode so strong. No, there’s nothing especially subtle about the scenes of Dalek propaganda over the radio, or the way they’re leading prisoners into work camps – but there’s a satirical
anger
to it all that would make subtlety look lily-livered. “Daleks offer you life,” indeed. The epic nature of what Nation is attempting here all but dwarfs the regular cast. Never before have the TARDIS crew been so companion clichéd – Susan twists her ankle, Barbara busies herself with the cooking, Ian’s only on hand to ask questions and look confused. But with the scale of Doctor Who changed, it’s apt that only the Doctor is now big enough a character that he remains imposing and unaffected; it’s the Doctor who gets to give the big speech about the futility of the Daleks’ victory, it’s the Doctor who gets to shine as a genius. The brilliance of this episode is that it finally accomplishes what the last few stories have been edging towards – it turns the Doctor into the star. This is the moment he gets defined.

And can I just say how much I love the Robomen too? They might look like a bunch of extras with metal helmets, but, actually, that’s the point. No snug fitting black PVC costumes as is in the Aaru film, just a group of captured prisoners automated in whatever rags they happened to be wearing at the time. The body horror that’s suggested by this – that they’re really the walking dead, with all identity and hope removed – anticipates the Cybermen two years early.

T:
You have to wonder if Terry Nation ever set foot in a BBC studio, because he’s demanding a
hell
of a lot from the production team. (For instance, I’ve just realised that the brilliant warehouse set in World’s End was a one-week wonder, never to make an appearance in the five remaining episodes.) So it’s perhaps understandable that some of the action here is pretty messy, and the slightly bewildering way that the cliffhanger is shot suggests either that the camera has magically moved through a wall, or that the Dalek Robo-machine – which the baddies start to lower onto the Doctor – is situated on a bench in the lobby of their spaceship.

(Okay, I have to admit it... I’m
trying
to cut Richard Martin some slack here, given the requirements for this production, but I worry that I’m only half-succeeding. To his credit, there’s a curious illustrative scene that takes place outside the Dalek saucer, in which a pretty blonde girl waits to get karate chopped by a Roboman – it’s an offbeat choice, directorially, but it works. But then we get the rather stupid way the Supreme Dalek
clears his throat
before making an announcement, which just makes me want to give Martin a hard slap.)

But, most importantly for this episode, Nation has worked out what kids want – it’s as if he wrote this story from a checklist of things that would seem cool or intriguing to an 11 year old, then found a way to bung them in. Examples so far include a man with a Germanic name in a wheelchair, zombies with whips and a bloke chucking himself into a river. At times, though, this proves interesting for the adults as well – as you say, the concept of the Robomen is indeed horrific, and David Campbell’s claim that they smash their heads against walls or jump off buildings when they malfunction is deeply unpleasant stuff.

All right, so this looks a bit slapdash in places, but there is lots going on, and so I’m eager to see the next episode...

Day of Reckoning (The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode three)

R:
In the first season, the attack upon the Dalek city by the Thals was more than a little perfunctory, but they won through anyway; the moral seemed to be that so long as you confronted your demons, you could beat them. Here we have a restaging of that attack, this time on the spacecraft standing on the heliport: it’s much more dramatic, and it’s
much
better directed. The human resistance put lots of welly into it – but it’s a complete and utter disaster for them. There’s never been a better demonstration of just how powerful the Daleks are, nor how brutal or callous. There’s that poor extra who gets blasted into negative just as he thinks he’s reached the safety of a trapdoor; there’s Baker, who only has to say goodbye to the Doctor and wish him luck before unluckily running into a Dalek patrol and being exterminated without even a farewell speech. But my favourite of all is the death that we hear off-camera – that of a panicked man pleading for his life and being killed regardless, the horror of it all being played out on Susan and David’s faces as they hide, unable to help.

What a very brutal episode this is – there’s the realisation that the Roboman that Ian confronts is none other than the same chap who shared a cell (and lots of exposition) with him only the week before. Then, more horrifyingly, there’s the very dispassionate way that after the Roboman is electrocuted, Ian tips his corpse down a service duct without sparing him sympathy. Or the cruelty of the scene in which the wheelchair-bound Dortmun tests his bombs against the Daleks himself, not wanting to accept that his own failure got most of his followers killed already, not wanting to give into his disability. It should be a powerful image of hope and victory, the brave man rising to his feet and stumbling towards the invaders – and his death is for nothing, because the bombs don’t work. I love the way that the shot is framed, the wheelchair rolling away from him once it’s abandoned. If there’s ever a scene that proves the lie to the simple optimism that was offered by the Dalek defeat on Skaro, it’s this one.

The sequences in which the Daleks parade around London, riding over Westminster Bridge, hobnobbing under Nelson’s Column, are justly famous. It’s not that they look especially impressive, really – indeed, they seem a bit like tourists out to see the sights, and they look dwarved by the lions in Trafalgar Square. But it’s the very
wrongness
of the image that makes it work, these strange looking pepperpots from last year’s children’s TV serial holding their own against the city backdrop. Remembering that this episode is long before the Daleks became icons in their own right, what we’ve got here is surreal and silly, and just a bit unnerving.

I also love the anger David Campbell shows when Susan suggests they escape together in the TARDIS. It’s quite clear now that there’s a moral purpose to these adventures we’re watching – a duty in righting wrongs, not just selfish survival and hopping off to the next planet when things turn ugly.

And to lower the tone a moment, is it wrong of me to find Dortmun’s helper Jenny so fetching when she’s wearing that little balaclava of hers? That’s Richard Briers’ wife, you know.