Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (40 page)

It makes me very grumpy (though not, I think, as grumpy as you). I know that at the moment, Russell T Davies is working hard to ensure that David Tennant gets the biggest and most triumphant exit a Doctor could wish for. But the 1966 production team are doing the opposite to Hartnell, so that when he finally shuffles off to the unemployment office, the viewers at home may not even notice. It’s shameful.

But I’m glad to see the spirit of Hartnell still exists, even if it’s only in Toby Hadoke getting peevish when things are going wrong around him, and lashing out at his companion. Admit it, I’m not the source of your irritation at all. It’s The bloody Savages! Don’t worry. It’s coming to an end now.

The Savages episode four

What I love about this ending is how unequivocally triumphant it is. As with so much of The Savages, all the standing about at the end and thanking the Doctor is something we’re going to get used to terribly quickly. (And it’s amusing to consider that just as it starts becoming familiar, Ian Stuart Black subverts it again in time for The Macra Terror!) But it’s very rarely happened before. Under Verity Lambert, the regulars either wanted to nip back to the TARDIS and escape, having done nothing more decisive to the status quo than having survived it, or at least stood apart from the other characters in the story sufficiently that a hearty handshake from them at the end would have seemed a bit inappropriate. When you
do
get something of that nature – say, in The Daleks or The Keys of Marinus – it’s more a parting from people with whom the Doctor has
shared
an adventure, not saved them himself per se. And under John Wiles, of course, the story conclusions became more about the Doctor looking depressed and working out how great the body count was.

So the build up to a climax here feels actually very redemptive. In the joyous scene where the laboratory is smashed up, the Doctor talks about the satisfaction of destroying something which is evil. And he’s absolutely right – although the story very deliberately tried to sideline William Hartnell, it was a celebration nonetheless of the
Doctor
, the way his conscience infected Jano, and the way his humanist ideals have given a society a new way to live. In light of that, and how in context the optimism of the ending and the forefronting of the TARDIS crew seems so fresh, it feels absolutely right that this should be the moment that Steven departs to take on new challenges. Yes, it’s abrupt – but it’s beautifully abrupt; for the very first time, Steven is part of an adventure where at the story’s end all the characters have a respect and a need for him. The Doctor says he’s very proud of him – and, sentimental old git that I am, I feel rather proud of him too. Peter Purves has worked so very hard on the character, taking all the things that made him at first somewhat unlikeable and turning those bouts of impatience and stubbornness into things which have made Steven wholly credible. He’s never given a bad performance.

T:
I hope you’ll cut me a bit of slack, Rob... it’s now Day Three Without Cigarettes. I think I’m allowed to be grumpy.

Listening to Peter Purves’ final episode makes me remember a time long ago when I got the Radio Times 20th Anniversary Special, and saw a picture of him in the chapter about companions. “That’s Peter Purves from Blue Peter,” I thought, “was he a companion on Doctor Who?” At the time, the Target novels were my only source of Who knowledge, so I’d never heard of Steven Taylor at all, let alone had any idea who played him. So I’ve always thought of Purves as a “Blue Peter Presenter who in His Acting Days was on Doctor Who”; it was an interesting trivia factoid, a curio, but nothing to boast about.

In execution, however, Purves has been so much more – at various stages, he’s been an action hero, a comedy stooge and a moral centre. He’s been adaptable to the point that no role has been beyond him, whilst remaining solid at the ailing Hartnell’s side. So it’s wonderful that he here gets a decent send off, as he becomes the man best suited to mediate between the Elders and the Savages.

If I’m overly fixated on Steven, it’s probably because if this
wasn’t
his final story, I’d be struggling to say anything about it at all. (Except of course, for the fact that – as if to counterbalance the John Wiles era – everybody lives!) This could well be the most innocuous Doctor Who story of all time – which is an accolade of sorts, I suppose. I’m hard pressed to call this “interesting”; “curious” is perhaps a better descriptor for it. But that’s perfectly fine – Doctor Who should be willing to do such material, there shouldn’t be a formula to it. Even if this hasn’t been the most exciting of stories, it has its charms and it’s been
about
something. Best of all, Steven’s departure is given necessary weight, and both Hartnell and Lane act their socks off in response. We will miss him, but we trust him to rise to this new challenge.

Did you notice, though, how we pretty much leave Steven as we found him, stuck on an alien planet? Only this time, he hasn’t got a stuffed panda to keep him company. Never mind, Clare Jenkins is certainly more than adequate recompense.

The War Machines episode one

R:
Something that’s always puzzled me: the rogue computer is called Wotan, so why does everyone pronounce it as if it begins with a “V”? The “W” stands for “world”, and yet no-one goes around referring to how the war machines are going to enslave the vorld’s population for the next four episodes. For a while you think that maybe it’s Professor Brett’s own affectation, but everybody else does it as well – perhaps he’s got some strange speech impediment, and Sir Charles and Major Green are merely imitating him rather cruelly to take the piss. It’s rather odd. I suppose it’s an attempt by the production team to give all this a Cold War sense – which is fine, 60s movies are full of East German scientists making armageddon devices. But then why not just go the whole hog, and have the Professor called Himmler rather than Brett?

And, of course, that’s where the oddness just starts. If I said that The Savages had an air to it that no-one involved had ever watched the programme, then that goes double here with knobs on. To see the Doctor in a contemporary setting for the first time is weird enough – what makes it all the weirder is that no-one producing the show seems to realise it’s never happened before, and treats it as if, like The Avengers, this is what Doctor Who has
always
been doing. (And before too long, of course, they’ll be absolutely right! But what’s bizarre is that we go from a situation in which contemporary adventures were unthinkable to one where they’re the norm immediately, with no blurring in between.) Professor Brett knows who the Doctor is, and Sir Charles accepts his presence immediately. Verity Lambert once complained that the Jon Pertwee Doctor was too much part of the establishment, but that’s nothing to a William Hartnell who has a personal secretary, waltzes into scientific establishments and press conferences as if they’re routine day job stuff, and whose fab gear gets compared to disc jockeys in trendy London nightclubs. Frankly, at the end of the episode, when Wotan expresses his interest in a certain chap called “Doctor Who” paying him a visit, that they even get his name wrong is hardly a shock at all.

But the episode works well. At times it all feels staggeringly naïve, at others it feels fresh and real – and, bizarrely, it’s the collision of that which makes it so much fun to watch. There’s something wonderfully charming about seeing the Doctor be amazed at a huge computer – just because it can work out a square root of a small number at a speed considerably slower than a pocket calculator. And though the Inferno nightclub is a rather peculiar mix of groovy cats dancing and kids drinking soft drinks, the scenes there are utterly unlike anything we’ve seen in the show before. Anneke Wills as fun-lovin’ sailor-cheerin’ good time girl Polly makes Dodo look staid and old-fashioned within a single episode. And it’s peculiar to note that although the BBC put the kibosh on Jackie Lane speaking in a Cockney accent when she was introduced, it’s only a few months later grumpy sailor Ben Jackson can get away with it. (Someone should keep an eye on him. He beats up a fellow patron, and makes a lunge for the barmaid a huge leer on his face. I reckon his Coca-Cola has been spiked.)

All this, and John Cater (as Professor Krimpton) in a frankly
tremendous
scene fighting against his possession and insisting upon the superiority of human life over machines.

T:
Jackie Lane never did a bloody Cockney accent, it was Mancunian!
Will this torment never bloody cease? If you mention Harold Pinter when we get to The Abominable Snowmen I’ll have you shot...

Other than that, though, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Innes Lloyd has clearly never seen the programme before... first he had a grotesque children’s nightmare rewritten into a load of unthreatening parlour games, then he gave us an episode of Star Trek (albeit three months before the first Trek episode aired), and now we have a twentieth century larks in which the Doctor (sorry, “Doctor Who”) gains access to everywhere with ease. If the latter isn’t very convincing with what we’ve seen before, though, I do like it – having the Doctor trusted from the outset gets rid of lots of tedious to-ing and fro-ing whilst he proves himself and wins everyone’s trust.

In terms of style, this episode is a self-consciously hip depiction of 60s life (just look at how the nightclub-owner tells the Doctor “I dig your fab gear”!). Polly is a breath of fresh air – she’s funny, upbeat and stunning. And Hartnell looks wonderfully incongruous in this contemporary setting, especially when he walks the London streets in that hat (it’s obviously his twentieth century hat, as we haven’t seen it since An Unearthly Child). His performance in the opening scene is shockingly all over the place, though – you almost have to wonder if he’s rattled because he’s just seen Innes Lloyd at the other end of the studio, linking arms with Patrick Troughton and taking him up to his office for coffee and a little chat.

Is
this story that made Doctor Who the programme we’ve come to know and love, though? Wasn’t it inevitable that the series would eventually come to Earth so the viewers had some sort of investment in, or identification with, the proceedings? The Savages was a curiously detached experience, and I found it difficult to care about what was going on. The War Machines by contrast isn’t perfect, but it starts to shape Doctor Who into a series that is about confronting our fears, or creating fear out of the everyday. It’s a cracked mirror, one that gives us skewed reflections for comedic, satirical, frightening or entertaining effect.

Intentionally or otherwise, Innes Lloyd has happened upon that something we now take for granted: the modern setting. As a result, Doctor Who will never be the same again. The Doctor’s visits to the present won’t happen with a lot of frequency just yet (even in this story, the Doctor will become saddled with two
more
modern-day companions whom he can’t take home because he can’t pilot the TARDIS properly), but before too much longer, his returns to twentieth century Earth will become a default setting; they’ll be a matter of course, of habit. The Doc returning to Earth is like me with cigarettes... I don’t know
why
I do it, but if I don’t do it on a regular basis, I’ll get all testy.

Like you, though, I’ve no idea why they pronounce Wotan as “Votan”. But I love the fact that he gets his own credit!

March 4th

The War Machines episode two

R:
The murder of the tramp is incredibly brutal. Right up to the moment he dies, he’s playing the part as a comic cameo, doing jokey coughs and pretending he’s just come out of the ‘ospital. The look of horror on his face, when he realises these workmen are in earnest and are actually going to kill him, is like a realisation that he’s strayed into the wrong TV show; this isn’t Steptoe and Son after all. And it’s the very inhumanity of the death that’s so memorable. Mob lynching has been a recurring trope in the third season – it was used for comic effect in The Gunfighters, and rather more chillingly in The Massacre. But right after the broadcast of The Savages, in which the elite victimise the underclasses, the destruction of the homeless man by all the people with jobs looks very deliberate. The tramp even
looks
like he’s wandered off the set of The Savages, all scraggly beard and rags.

And it’s that inhumanity which makes The War Machines work so well. Yes, you can laugh at its fumbled attempts to be “with it”, or its hugely dated understanding of computers. And the War Machines themselves, let’s face it, are as impractical and ungainly a bunch of killing machines as Wotan could devise. But it’s scenes such as the one where Major Green decides to test the efficacy of a War Machine’s gun by trying it out on the first hapless technician he points at – and, even more powerfully, the way that the victim just stands there without fear and gets shot – that give the story such power. And no-one is safe; just by picking up a phone you can become enslaved to Wotan’s will and lose your identity. This is the very first story to exploit a contemporary setting to the full, and it hasn’t taken long before the programme has insidiously turned innocent everyday objects into instruments of fear.

Michael Ferguson directs all the warehouse scenes wonderfully; there’s a cold beauty to the way these workmen, their individuality sucked out of them, work like machines to produce more machines. (And this comes only a couple of stories from the debut of the Cybermen – you can see Kit Pedler’s influence on the story premise seen here.) Weighed against this is the Doctor – Hartnell is superb at displaying, in contrast, real warmth and tenderness. The gentle way in which he relieves Dodo’s hypnotism, in what turns out to be her last scene, is gorgeous.

And, yes, Jackie Lane’s gone! Just like that! It’s staggeringly abrupt. Ironically, Dodo leaves the series on something of a high, as she’s far more interesting as someone possessed than she ever was when left to her own devices. Lane plays these scenes really cleverly; if there’s one thing that has typified Dodo, it’s that she behaves like an infant, and you can see Lane playing her character as evil merely by... not doing that, and acting her age. Dodo becomes an adult for her last gasp of screen time, and we don’t like her very much. Her innocence has gone, and so is her point. Bye.

T:
It’s probably fair to say that The War Machines tends to be one of the more popular stories from Season Three – certainly, it has the advantage of actually existing in the archives (not that this has helped The Ark or The Gunfighters as much). And yet, for my money, this isn’t in the same league as the much-less-feted The Myth Makers, The Massacre or even (yes, a controversial choice, this) The Gunfighters – not because The War Machines is
bad
, but because, apart from the direction, it’s a pretty pedestrian affair. You can make some accommodation because this is something of a template for future stories, so it’s a bit excusable that so many subsequent adventures did this sort of thing much better... but, er, the truth still remains that the subsequent adventures
did
do this sort of thing so much better. Script-wise (and wherever Innes Lloyd was when he wasn’t watching Doctor Who, Ian Stuart Black was clearly with him), nothing much happens here, except for an aborted attempt to kidnap the Doctor and the very lengthy construction of a hugely impractical tank-monster. And poor old John Harvey, as Professor Brett, isn’t just forced to do zombie acting – he’s a zombie who spouts exposition at two other zombies.

Some of the elements you’ve already hinged on, Rob, are amongst those I’d have a go at. Look, there’s a comedy tramp played by a bloody awful actor! Oh, and the newspapers already have a picture of him on file, and so can get the story in their first editions with such speed and efficiency, despite the murder happening in the early morning hours. And yes, it’s a bit creepy when the workman willingly stands before the machine as it tests its gun – but he’s also obliged to fall over dead when it seems to miss him completely!

Still, there’s plenty of good in this – the production values are on the whole excellent, and there are some impressive film sequences, with the director choreographing everyone’s movements with an eye towards interesting visuals. Ben Jackson is proving to be a sprightly addition to the series – he’s polite, thoughtful, resourceful, respectful of the Doctor and played with chirpy charm by Michael Craze. And speaking only for myself, I’m very entertained by the way John Harvey provides No. 1 in what’s to become an occasional series called Hadoke’s Hilariously Rubbish Sci-Fi Bits. When Brett gets the line, “He must be destroyed...”, his voice (for some inexplicable reason) goes up several octaves on the final word, thus speaking in a fashion people only do in science-fiction series. I find it hugely amusing that Stephen Fry does a similar thing in the futuristic segment of Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, when he orders “Send them to the sprouting
chamber
!”

But by God, Rob, you’re right – it was an unforgiving business, being a Doctor Who companion in the 60s. Seventeen minutes in, we get our last shot of poor, plucky Jackie Lane. Saddled with a dopey character, she was never less than enthusiastic – and while she maybe she wasn’t up to much as an actress, I do feel a bit sorry for the way she gets to spend her valedictory moments. Whatever your feelings towards Dodo, she deserved better than to end her time with us snoozing on a chair.

The War Machines episode three

R:
There’s a protracted action sequence which lasts
over five minutes
where the army take on a War Machine in a warehouse. It’s the sort of stuff which will seem a bit passé during the UNIT years, but we’ve never seen anything like it on Doctor Who before. Michael Ferguson does wonders considering two things especially – that all the soldiers’ guns lock so that they can’t actually fire, and that all the War Machine can do against them is fire a fire extinguisher and knock over crates. It ought to be ridiculous. Instead, it feels like Doctor Who from a new era, with a concentration upon the visual rather than the verbal. And it builds up to an extraordinarily effective cliffhanger, in which only the Doctor stands indomitable against the advance of the killer machine. Beautiful stuff.

And, as if to remind us we’re still in 1966, there’s also a painfully long scene in which Sir Charles has an
entire
phone conversation with not only the minister but the minister’s secretary; it’s completely from his point of view, and he says not only what the audience already know, but what he’s already told the Doctor he’s going to say. So it’s a strange, unending painful repeat of exposition that was unnecessary the first time. I bring it up not to mock it, but to point out the strange collision in this episode between the old and the new – between the pitched battle on film that Ferguson milks for all he’s worth, and the strange, clunky studio-bound drama that thinks it’s still a piece of theatre. Isn’t that one of the things that’s so extraordinary about Hartnell’s Who, that you can see the trappings of traditional TV even as it’s doing its best to shake them off?