Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (44 page)

T:
It’s a testament to the quality of the previous episode that I got so carried away with it, I forgot to acknowledge that it was the last full episode with Hartnell’s Doctor that we can actually see. I should have given Hartnell a valedictory nod – I’m like that, I salute magpies and everything.

Without Hartnell and the Cybermen though, the cracks really start to appear in this episode. If all the central characters have to do is wait for matters to resolve themselves, then they’re probably being invaded by the stupidest creatures in the universe. And if your invasion plan leads to your own destruction and you haven’t picked up on that, it obliterates any potential for menace you may have. It’s like being invaded by those kamikaze blokes at the end of Life of Brian. Or held hostage by lemmings.

That overriding problem aside, there’s much to enjoy here. Derek Martinus continues to be game, and just about successfully sells what’s happening to us. He’s helped immeasurably by a solid cast, the best of whom is the undemonstrative, plausibly professional and likeable David Dodimead (playing Barclay), who keeps things real whilst selling the jeopardy. Plus... hooray for the first major use of ventilation shafts, as Ben attempts to disable the rocket! They’re not just adopting clichés, this production team, they’re establishing a few of them too, which is no mean feat.

Given the developments in the next episode, I suppose you could say that William Hartnell’s illness here was serendipitous... the Doctor’s collapse is incorporated into the script relatively simply, and it helps to foreshadow the astonishing transformation that’s going to happen in episode four. This isn’t some random instance of getting the Doctor out of the way for a bit (such as his suddenly passing out at the start of The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode four, or all the times Troughton will be knocked unconscious); it’s part and parcel of one of the greatest make-overs the series will ever get.

The Tenth Planet episode four

R:
It’s a shame; the Cybermen were much more interesting as something amoral rather than predictably evil. Previously, they actively wanted to help humanity become like them – now they’re just thugs who want to blow up a planet. (And although their sing-song voices were weird and eerie when their intentions were so much more ambiguous, they really don’t suit the galactic conquerors they are here. The high-pitched Cyberleader Gern exulting from an office in Geneva that he’s master of the world is very,
very
funny indeed.) And there’s not an awful lot of tension to the episode, as we know that Mondas is going to destroy itself. Having established
how
the story is going to be resolved, the only suspense comes from finding out
when
it’s going to happen. And it’d have been a pretty safe bet that it’d happen just a few minutes before the end of the episode. Oh, look. It did!

But of course, we don’t care much about such things as plot or monsters by the end of the episode. That must be the strongest, strangest cliffhanger the series has shown yet – the lights in the TARDIS going mad, the Doctor falling to the ground... and suddenly, Hartnell’s gone. What’s astonishing is how little attempt there is to make this remotely reassuring. Ben is indeed put out by the Doctor’s behaviour, saying that he’s lost his sense of humour – and as he shuts himself away in the TARDIS, there’s a real sense that he’s entirely forgotten his new friends and may well abandon them at the South Pole. Certainly, they’re nothing to do with this transformation he’s undergoing, and he only lets them witness it as an afterthought. When so much has happened over the last three seasons to shape Hartnell’s Doctor into someone grandfatherly and cuddly, it seems wonderfully apt that in his last few minutes’ screen time, he’s as alien and unknowable and dangerous as he’s ever been. And Hartnell is typically brilliant, finding even in his last gasp new ways to play the part – he’s driven and insane when released from the Cyberman’s spaceship, almost as if he were reeling drunk. Just about every other regeneration sequence (not that we’ll call it that yet, of course) has allowed a moment of sentiment, a chance for the audience and the companion to say goodbye to the Doctor. Tragic or triumphant, only here is it sold to us as something
frightening.
Doctor Who is doing something very brave again, all of a sudden. Better hold on tight.

T:
Here at the end of the Hartnell era, I’m flooded with mixed emotions. In the first place, I’m in disbelief that the BBC managed to hang onto last week’s Doctor- and Cybermen-lite episode, but they misplaced episode four, which is a milestone! The fact that it’s gone seems both a criminal shame and, to be fair, symptomatic of just how much television at the time was regarded as virtually unrepeatable and inherently disposable. It’s such a marked departure from the world we live in now, where, for instance, the DVD of
Torchwood: Children of Earth
was on sale the week after broadcast.

I’m also struggling a bit to keep up with the technobabble at work here. I’m quite happy with such made-up terminology if it facilitates something exciting, adventurous, satirical, moving or witty, but a whacking great planet travelling through space – that conveniently takes the Cybermen with it when it melts – really doesn’t do it for me. (You could have anticipated this reaction, I’m sure, Rob, after I made your ears bleed after the transmission of Journey’s End.) All of this seems such a shame because there are some
really
neat concepts in this story – a Tenth Planet is a nice idea, as are the Cybermen. But in implementation, everything seems to fall apart in the final episode. Even the supporting cast seem to undergo personality transplants – Cutler goes from solid, gravelly authority to drooling ham, Gern the Cyberleader just sounds daft and Dyson has turned into an irritating whinger. A bright spot, though, is that the technician Haines doesn’t die as he does in the book, poor chap. I always felt sorry for him, as he goes uncredited in the cast list (he’s played by Freddie Eldrett, whose partner, Philip Gilbert, played Tim in The Tomorrow People). Dying would be bad enough, but dying and not getting a namecheck seems horribly ignominious.

But most of all, I feel sorrow that William Hartnell – who made such a commitment to Doctor Who, enabled its early success and has given me such great enjoyment over these three seasons – is here pushed out of the series with so little ceremony. I will credit that the final TARDIS scene re-injects some of the oddness I’ve been missing – the Ship is once again this weird, unsettling environment, in a way it hasn’t been for a couple of years! But this doesn’t paper over the fact that the Hartnell Doctor doesn’t perform a brave or clever act in his final adventure; instead, it’s as if he bows out after having a kip. Even at the end, Hartnell manages to infuse the proceedings with some nuance – his statement that, “I must go now” is wonderfully laced with double meaning, and is quite powerful – but he seems to be finding such depth in spite of the script, not because of it.

And astonishingly, no explanation is given regarding what’s happening with the regeneration – not even a perfunctory “Look, he’s changing!” from Ben or Polly – and the event is so whited out and in such extreme close-up that, had I been watching on first broadcast, I’m not altogether sure I’d have known what the hell was going on. (I probably shouldn’t complain about that, though – I’ve been wanting more mysteriousness in the series, and God knows, this passes the mark.)

For all the nice things I’m sure I’ll say about Patrick Troughton, I’m going to miss William Hartnell. Watching his performance from beginning to end has been a real eye opener, and even if I don’t buy that his muddled delivery was a deliberate acting choice, it frequently didn’t do any harm, and he tended to successfully ad lib himself out of trouble, or to rely on the rock solid support he was given by William Russell and then Peter Purves. He was very good at some forms of comedy, and he had a natural ability to flit between the imperious and the gentle. He certainly gives a
great
performance when you consider the arduous production schedule and limited recourse to retakes in this era. It would be enough to send most modern actors scurrying back to their Pilates classes, but Hartnell was largely up to the task.

And in the end, he generously came back to hand the role over to his successor... and then wound up collapsing on the floor of the TARDIS, and changing for what seems to be the most spurious of reasons. They may as well have saved him the bother, not had him back at all, and just got Troughton to lie on the floor and put on a wig.

March 10th

The Power of the Daleks episode one

R:
The first thing that Patrick Troughton does is thoughtlessly step into a dead man’s shoes and assume his identity. Whether it’s William Hartnell’s Doctor, or Martin King’s Examiner, it comes to much the same thing; watch out for this man, the story says, he’s an impostor. It’s remarkable just how little this episode wants to endear you to the new man in the TARDIS. He is at turns desperately irritating, only answering his companions’ questions with blasts on a recorder, deliberately unhelpful, always referring to the Doctor in the third person just to give his friends more reason not to trust him, and even strangely sinister – that moment he takes out a dagger, only to identify it as something Saladin once owned, plays directly upon our fears that the man’s a threat.

And of course it’s wonderful that the episode risks alienating Ben and Polly, and the audience at home into the bargain. The job of this story is to
show
that Troughton is the Doctor, not tell it outright. You wonder why the Doctor is making it so difficult for his friends to accept him, even at moments of great tension. Why, when they discover the Daleks in the capsule, he still wants to keep his silly game going – as if to suggest that he may not be the Doctor after all. And it has to be because he wants his actions, not his words, to be the proof. It’s very clever, this; when Ben hits upon the idea that the Doctor has renewed himself, Troughton repeats the line back at him – not in assent, but as if he too is being persuaded by the idea. He wants his audience to do the job of working out this mystery for themselves. He’s got other things to do than waste time explaining himself.

T:
It’s so easy for the two of us to be blasé about this... when we started learning about Doctor Who, things like “regeneration” and “different Doctors” were the norm. Last week we had flashing lights and a silent denouement; there were no valedictory speeches, self-sacrificial set pieces or climactic explanations.
This
week, the show – like the Doctor himself – is wilfully oblique. It’s now deemed a bad idea that Colin Baker spent his first story being difficult and unknowable, but the production team at the time could reasonably cite The Power of the Daleks as a precedent. I mean, we’re currently experiencing the extreme (and, it has to be said, sensible) measures employed to reassure the audience that the move from David Tennant to new boy Matt Smith will be all right... yet with this episode, the trailer doesn’t even bother to mention that there’s a new Doctor at all!

It helps to establish the new boy’s credentials, though, that he’s put through the mill from the start. The “renewal” sounds like a pretty shocking and painful process, and he wails like he’s suffering cataclysms, and thus spends the rest of the episode slightly off kilter. The few snatches of 8 mm off-screen footage that we have from episode one (recorded by an anonymous Australian and his cine camera) are very helpful in this regard – we can see, albeit a bit murkily, how jolted the new Doctor seems by his transformation, and can witness that poignant bit where Hartnell’s face stares back at Troughton from a mirror.

Aside from the new lead’s tantalising work – and the way he’s helped by a believably irritated turn from Michael Craze – the depiction of the colonists contains some pleasing little subtleties. It’s clear that Bragen and Quinn (respectively the colony’s head of security and deputy governor) aren’t pals, with the latter making disparaging remarks about the intellectual shortcomings of the former’s guards. It establishes their difficult relationship well, whilst hinting at the power at Bragen’s disposal. Meanwhile, Janley’s bunch are referred to as – at this stage at least – a pressure group rather than rebels. Everything seems a tad more believable and less generic than the set-up otherwise might have been.

But even if the central character isn’t too keen to let us know that it’s business as usual, his greatest enemies are. With Tristram Cary’s music again employed to great (and – not to be sniffed at – fiscally sound) effect, the emergence of the Daleks draws this episode to a close. It’s surely no accident that in his fright, Ben blurts out the final line, and it is but one word...

Doctor.

The Power of the Daleks episode two

R:
So, this is the situation. We’ve got a Doctor who doesn’t seem like he’s the Doctor. And we’ve got Daleks who aren’t behaving like Daleks. In one fell swoop, the whole series has been turned on its head. And my God, doesn’t it feel fresh and exciting?

This is a superb episode, shot through with a comic irony as black as anything ever seen in the programme. The episode depends upon the audience’s familiarity with the Daleks in a way that perhaps wouldn’t have worked before this story, as you want to cry out to the scientists innocently working around one of the machines to take care. It is a heart-stopping moment when the colony’s chief scientist, Lesterson, bends down and looks into the gun stick and says, “Can’t imagine what this short stubby arm is for...” And it’s telling that the one person who feels disquieted by the Daleks is the one that gets suddenly exterminated – it’s as if the Dalek can sense fear. You’re only safe from them if you don’t realise they’re a threat – and that’s a great pity for all the kids watching at home, because that puts them next in line of fire. And the Doctor too, of course – at the climax of the episode he’s genuinely frightened (and we’ve barely seen that before) trying to shout down a Dalek, who mockingly grates it is a servant. It’s one of the best cliffhangers yet.

And through all this, Troughton is magnificent. Here is a Doctor who can suddenly be distracted from deadly earnest by a bowl of fruit or an accidental tongue twister. Special note must also be made of Robert James as Lesterson, whose eagerness in reanimating the Daleks is so boyish that you feel both sympathetic and revolted at the same time.

I love the way, too, that Ben makes mention of the Daleks as something the Doctor is always going on about. It conjures up this delightful image of him standing around the console room, boring all his companions to death with his anecdotes about The Chase. “They were my only recurring monsters, you know – I thought there was a chance with the Zarbi or the Mechonoids, but it just never happened.” But the reason it has an impact here is twofold. Firstly, it suggests a Doctor who is genuinely obsessed by these creatures – and yet to the audience, the Daleks are far more familiar than this Doctor is. It’s not that we side with
them
, not exactly, but they may feel oddly safer. And yet, the way that the Dalek clearly recognises the Doctor, even though his human friends cannot, does so much to give Troughton the proper credentials.

T:
Remember how the Daleks treated the raving Mavic Chen with silence in The Daleks’ Master Plan, and how eerie I found them? Well, the same trick is employed here. Much as I love the Dalek voices, the impression one gets is that the Dalek seen here is observing, conniving and planning its next move. The scene where it observes Lesterson’s assistant Resno is spectacularly creepy (aided in no small part by a really menacing soundtrack), and the POV shot of his face in the Dalek’s eyeline sends a shiver down the spine. There’s something incredibly unnerving about being
watched
, and all the scenes with the Dalek ooze with menace – with us, the audience, more aware than most of the characters involved in this adventure just how deadly these creatures are. It’s like watching kids playing with a hand grenade, but being stuck behind soundproofed glass and unable to issue a warning.

Troughton does absolutely sterling work making the silent Dalek as terrifying a threat to the oblivious colonists as possible – he’s still a very shadowy presence, this new Doctor, with Troughton speaking in throaty, hushed tones and still not communicating in anything like a normal fashion. His namedropping is interesting, though – Saladin and Marco Polo are figures that at least some of the audience will know that the Doctor has met, but Ben and Polly don’t. Quite why he’s playing around with his companions is anyone’s idea, but it certainly keeps the viewer intrigued. So long as he doesn’t get out a projector and do a planet Quinnis slideshow, this should be fine.

And then there’s that terrific line that sums up this new Doctor perfectly: “I want [the Daleks] broken up or melted down – up or down, don’t care which.” He’s a bundle of contradictions – he’ll give orders (but in a quirky way) and he’ll articulate his fear (but mask it with funny phraseology). I don’t know quite how they alighted on this particular characterisation to follow on from Hartnell, but at this stage it’s somehow reinforced the “Who?” if not always “the Doctor”.

I particularly love the cliffhanger here, as the Dalek seems to eyeball (or, rather, eyestalk) the Doctor just as it did Resno – whom it brutally exterminated. Had I been watching this episode back in 1966, I’d probably have finished it still unsure about what they’d done to the titular character, and wondered if this was still the series I knew and loved. But I’d definitely be back next week, because on its own terms, this is something quite special.

March 11th

The Power of the Daleks episode three

R:
Oh, this is absolutely wonderful. This is the longest story we’ve had in almost a year – ever since, oh, that last Dalek story. (Odd that.) And it means that with a six-parter there’s actually the
space
to explore characters that would be pretty functional otherwise. And they’re a funny bunch, this lot on Vulcan – backbiters and politicians, the lot of them. I love the way that Bragen is able to manipulate Governor Hensell, just as Janley does Lesterson. The vanity of them all with their trivial little power games seems so especially banal when they can’t see the real threat of the Daleks right under their noses. The irony is that the character who’s in greatest opposition to the Doctor is Lesterson – and he’s the one man there who’s honestly likeable. Listen to his excitement about his new robotic servants – it’s always the genuine good of the colony that interests him, not his own personal glory. Robert James plays the part a little like a bumptious child; I love the smarmy way he insists upon a guard being posted outside his laboratory once he’s won his argument with the Doctor. That’s what’s so damning about the way this story treats its humans. Let Bragen and Hensell and Janley and Quinn fight it out and destroy themselves, and there wouldn’t even
be
a threat from the Daleks; they’d still be sitting at the bottom of a mercury swamp, no doubt. But with Lesterson – poor well-meaning and socially concerned Lesterson – there’s a real danger for evil to emerge.

It’s the Daleks and the Doctor who are the stand-outs of the episode, mind you. The humiliation that the Dalek puts itself through answering feeble chemistry questions even I could get right, the way that it pretends to immobilise itself because the Doctor demands it proves it’s servile – you can hear the contempt in its voice as it flatters and fawns at Lesterson. It means that the sequence where it resurrects its two Dalek compatriots feels almost like a relief –
now
, you think, it’ll show its true colours – and then it has their guns removed. That’s what’s really chilling, that it’s willing to abase itself still further; its ambitions must be so much more lethal than we supposed. Patrick Troughton is excellent playing a man so obsessed by his hatred that he utterly disregards Ben’s concern for Polly. He’s something of a clown, it’s true, but he’s a dangerous clown. Hartnell may have been more cantankerous, but his Doctor was always more concerned with the safety of his companions than his apparently foolish successor.

T:
Lesterson also struck me as the most likeable guest character – which is funny, as his actions have caused this entire mess. But this man is far from being an idiot – he’s smart enough to ask the Dalek why it disobeyed orders, and he doesn’t stumble blindly in the face of logic. It’s telling that it’s the glimmer of doubt he exhibits towards the Daleks that marks the ending of this smart and nuanced episode.

Indeed, the devil’s in the detail in this clever script. It’s profoundly ironic that Lesterson mentions that the Daleks have “a
certain
intelligence”, since
we
know that they’re much smarter than any of the humans present. Along the same lines, it’s great that the Dalek stutters when the Doctor tries to outwit it. This isn’t a round of cack-handed humanising like you’d find in the Richard Martin stories; instead, it’s a battle of wits between two formidable opponents, both of whom have to keep their cards close to their chests. What’s fascinating about this is the degree to which you sense that the Dalek is desperately trying to hold its composure in public, rather than rely upon its usual trick of yelling and shooting everyone in sight. Thanks to Peter Hawkins (another unsung hero of the 60s), this Dalek becomes a
character
who exhibits guile and cunning, rather than just being a one-note monster. It’s great seeing a Dalek under such pressure, and it helps us delve into its Machiavellian psyche. I especially adore the moment where it fires its empty gun, either as a reflex or in frustration.

And it’s also interesting that the Doctor has to turn on the charm to get access to Lesterson’s lab – despite his clowning, this new Doctor has plenty of guile. And then he tries to electrocute the Dalek! This story really
was
an influence on your TV script wasn’t it, Rob? It clearly wasn’t just the war-scarred Christopher Eccleston who would go to those lengths when confronted with his greatest enemy!