Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (76 page)

T:
Nope, it doesn’t. Doubly so, because I suspect that you’re taking one for the team, and are letting me off the hook so I can just declare this is rubbish before nipping out to do my shopping. But if I did that, I’d owe you a favour, and who knows what story down the road you might insist that I say something nice about, just to balance the scales.

So... what do I like about this? Well, Wendy Padbury is continuing to shine. It’s a common complaint from Doctor Who girls that whatever groundbreaking roles they were promised, their characters were gradually eroded away until they were reduced to asking stupid questions and screaming. That’s not a complaint Padbury could legitimately make, I think. She had the learning machines business in The Krotons, her computer-trouncing and missile-plotting The Invasion, and her total recall of the base layout in The Seeds of Death. And here, she gets to be terribly clever regarding their course and location. It’s a year into her tenure, and she’s still the usefully precocious genius. It’s admirable.

Even Hermack gets a good stroppy moment this week, when Major Warne asks to be rescued immediately and is met with a terse “Your request is noted...” before being left where he is! And thank God for Gostelow, who seems to ad-lib half his lines (he does one about Gruyere cheese which seems to genuinely throw Troughton and Hines). He has a refreshing unpredictability which is both believable and entertaining.

And this isn’t a complaint per se, but isn’t it strange that, just as I previously mentioned the threadbare contribution of the TARDIS crew up to this point, the space pirates seem to have taken a sabbatical also? Having been completely absent from episode two, it looks for a while like the titular bad guys aren’t going to bother to turn up this week either. If this were a Hartnell episode with its own title, they’d have called it Waiting For Caven.

May 2nd

The Space Pirates episode four

R:
There’s some intelligence here – I love the way the Doctor surmises that there must be an exit from the pit, but because there’s fragile crockery down there. And there’s some decent comedy too – the Doctor’s fondness for drawing pins is rather sweet. But what appealed to me yesterday about the way the TARDIS crew are almost unaware of the main plot happening around them is now beginning to grate. When the main villain starts getting concerned about Clancey, you think, fair enough, he’s a guest star. When he starts giving attention to Sorba, who’s not even been in the story since episode one, you grit your teeth a bit, but put up with it. But when he
still
, two-thirds of the way through the story, hasn’t taken the slightest interest in the Doctor, it speaks volumes about the way this adventure has been structured.

And I can only imagine this must have been deliberate. We know from interviews and contemporary accounts that Troughton was unhappy with the series by this stage – hey, that’s why he was leaving, after all. One of the reasons was the heavy workload, and that’s why the episodes of The Mind Robber all ran so short: in a story that put so much emphasis upon the regulars, Troughton threatened to go on strike unless his lines were cut. You can well imagine by this stage that the production team asked Robert Holmes to sideline the TARDIS crew a bit, just to give Troughton something of a breathing space, and that he’s simply done the job too well. So now that Troughton is leaving the show, we’re in that frustrating position once again of seeing a Doctor bow out whilst barely being present within his own show any more. If what was done to Hartnell was insulting, though, here it’s merely a way of trying to keep Troughton appeased. It’s not as if we can lay the blame for the Doctor’s ineffectual appearance within the adventure squarely on Robert Holmes’ inexperience – as we’ve seen, whatever other problems it may have had, The Krotons highlighted Troughton perfectly.

So we’re in one of those situations that we don’t get again in Doctor Who until the days of David Tennant, where a story is constructed to give the lead actor a minor role. And so this week, the Doctor spends the episode trying to get out of a pit. Which rather says it all.

T:
Whatever weaknesses Holmes has displayed here (and as you say, it’s not
his
fault if he was asked to sideline the star), he does have a grasp for making space-age names seem unusual without being naff. He doesn’t give us hoary old nonsense like Yartek, Zentos and Exorse or boring run-of-the-mill monikers like Hobson or Bennett. There’s an almost retro Olde Worlde aspect to his nomenclature... so we have talk of Dom Issigri, Hermack’s name is Nikolai (ahh, so maybe I
wasn’t
imagining the Russian accent), and a reluctant, snivelling lackey called Dervish (that’s positively Dickensian). I’m not sure about Caven being called “Maurice”, though. That must be up there with “Keith” and “Tim” for the Most Unthreatening Villainous Name of the Year Award.

Otherwise, this story’s attempts to underline the difficulties of space flight – complete with painstaking manoeuvres and lots of time spent in transit – would be laudable were it not for the fact that it’s, well, so deathly dull. If really exciting things were happening to the Doctor, or if Caven was (I dunno) torturing a teddy bear, I could probably endure Penn’s lengthy navigation processes. But they’re not, so I can’t. Especially as this episode compounds the sin of consigning the Doctor to a boring cave by having him escape by rigging up a fatal (!) trap. Tomb nearly got away with a similar scenario because the Doctor was sealing away a potent threat to the universe. Here, he’s merely attempting to wriggle out of a comparatively minor jam. I know he only kills an extra – which at present is apparently no more heinous a crime than breaking a cup – but it does make me recall the brilliant bit in Clerks were they discuss the ramifications of the rebels killing all the freelance labourers working on the Death Star.

Let me close with a couple of positive notes. I’m pleased to see that Steve Peters gives a decent turn as the speaking pirate-guard – he clearly has more talent than his ability to fill a tall monster suit, so I’m glad he was given a slightly more rewarding role. And I do like the way Caven just starts blasting at the regulars – there’s no grandstanding, questions or opportunities to escape while he gloats. Just bang, bang, bang.

The Space Pirates episode five

R:
It began as a space opera, then became a cowboy western. Now the story becomes, of all things, a Victorian melodrama! The scenes with the Doctor are lit by candlelight, which I can only imagine change the atmosphere of the adventure quite considerably, and contrast with the steely brightness we’d have come to expect. And against this backdrop we’ve got something straight out of Bronte – the madman locked away for years in his own study, his daughter thinking he was dead. It’s nonsense, naturally, but so long as the
style
was right, and the guttering lighting made the study look suitably old-fashioned, then this turn of the plot might have been just odd enough to have worked. Caven starts behaving like a Victorian cad, blackmailing the beautiful heiress; in one very good scene, Dervish explains that he fell in with Caven because of “one mistake” – if this really
were
Victorian, he’d probably have got pregnant with an illegitimate child or something. (That would have been rather fun.)

The change of style is welcome. That said – last week the Doctor spent the episode trying to escape from a pit, and this time he spends a good 20 minutes escaping from a locked room. It’s getting a little beyond a joke.

T:
Director Michael Hart (brother of Tony, don’t you know) is a bit of a mystery where Doctor Who contributors are concerned. As far as I know, Hart is one of a very few directors – in a group that includes Henric Hirsch, Mervyn Pinfield, George Spenton-Foster and John Crockett – who have never been interviewed about their work on the series. It’s hard to say if this is a great loss, however, because while I can credit Hart for trying to inject a bit of pace early on in this episode (by having Simpson’s galloping music playing underneath the early scenes), it’s a bit incredible that he’s managed to assemble such a terrific cast (on paper, at least) and then, even allowing that the material is so uninspiring, got most of them to fail at lifting it in any capacity. It’s like he’s gone to the RSC with the script for Crossroads, and asked them to learn it the night before the first performance.

But the crux of this episode involves everyone getting chucked into a dusty library, and finding a bedraggled old man cowering under a desk. Yes, it’s Madeleine Issigri’s “late” father Dom, who has been mentioned too many times to
not
turn out to be alive after all. And as it happens, he’s an even more enigmatic figure in Doctor Who history than Michael Hart – because there are no pictures or telesnaps of Dom, we’ve no idea what Esmond Knight looked like in the role, no clue as to the state of his hair, beard and wardrobe. Which is something of a shame, as he was a close collaborator of Olivier in his Shakespeare films, and so by extension was one of the most illustrious actors the series had nabbed to this point. I remember Donald Gee telling me how thrilled he was to work alongside Knight, who had been a childhood hero of his. And yet, nobody at BBC Pictures could be bothered to nip down and grab a shot of him.

I also know that Knight lost most of his eyesight during the war – not from any Who related research, but because my Mum told me. We were at the Grand Theatre Wolverhampton to watch Colin Baker and Jack Watling in Corpse, and Knight was included in some big pictures of stars from past performances. Mum told me about Knight’s ocular deficiency – and it’s funny that she knew that, because while she’s no philistine, she’s not a habitual theatregoer either. She’s also the one who told me that Dudley Foster (who plays Caven) had tragically committed suicide; I think she’s just from that generation who knew stuff, even if it wasn’t necessarily in their field. And if it enriches my Doctor Who knowledge, so much the better!

May 3rd

The Space Pirates episode six

R:
And sometimes a story just ends. In this instance, with the forced laughter of a Scooby Doo climax. That’s its job. Fair enough.

No, the remarkable thing about this episode is that it’s the final missing episode. Hurrah! From now on, every bit of Who I watch will come lovingly pristine from the archives, with moving pictures and stuff. The dialogue will actually issue from actors’ mouths. I can’t tell you what a relief that’ll be. If not on my eyes, then on my
mind.
There were times during this project that I had to concentrate so hard on what was going on, I thought my brain would snap.

But the even more remarkable thing? Really? Is that this episode exists in any format at all. Because, let’s face it, what are the odds?

When I became a fan in the early 1980s, weaned on Jean-Marc Lofficier’s Programme Guides, and learning by rote not only all the story titles in order but even their bloody production codes, it took a while for it to dawn on me that a huge number of these episodes were no longer stored in the BBC archives. They all sounded so magical – my God, didn’t The Underwater Menace sound like fun! – that it seemed almost criminal that they’d been wiped. It upset me hugely. And as my Who obsession grew, I remember lying in bed one night, with the pull-out posters from Doctor Who Monthly staring down at me, and praying to God. “Please restore all the missing episodes to the archives,” I said to God. And, realising even at that age you don’t get something for nothing, I added, “And in return, you can take years off my life.”

That’s honestly true. That’s how much I cared.

It didn’t work immediately, and that was okay, and I didn’t blame God necessarily – he hadn’t protected me from the bullies on the school coach either, or removed my acne. And it occurred to me some time later that God may not operate at quite the same speed as I might have wished. That just because, by the end of that week, all the Troughton stories weren’t safely back in storage didn’t mean that God might not get round to honouring the deal later. After all, he’s dealing with a lot of prayers – probably – and I can hardly expect him to answer them all at once. As the years went by, as we passed through the Colin Baker years, then the Sylvester McCoys, I began to regret the offer I’d made. At the age of 13, in the anticipatory mania for The Five Doctors, giving up a portion of my life in return for The Space Pirates seemed right and proper; at the age of 19, watching the final season of Doctor Who in the university common room and squirming with embarrassment as fellow students laughed at it, it didn’t feel such a fair swap. In 1992, all the episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen, at the time the most keenly desired story a fan could wish for, were found in immaculate condition in Hong Kong, and I genuinely began to fear that this might be the start of a trend. Maybe next week God would give us back The Web of Fear. By the end of the month, The Evil of the Daleks and episode four of The Tenth Planet. And by the end of the summer, as he finally plugged the last hole with The Feast of Steven, and William Hartnell wishing all us viewers a merry Christmas, he’d put me straight under a truck.

It didn’t happen, of course. There are still 108 episodes missing from the BBC archives. My life is safe. (So far.)

As a fan I’ve spent an undue amount of my life mourning what’s been lost. And not marvelling at what we have. Because it’s extraordinary – we’ve well over
half
of the black and white episodes of Doctor Who, complete and in good condition. (And all the Pertwees too. Just because at that point we entered the colour age of television, it doesn’t mean we necessarily moved out of some strange brutal philistine time where everything creative got deleted after broadcast – it’s curious how lucky we are that it’s only the monochrome portion of the programme that has gaps in.) But what’s more remarkable still is that for most of these missing episodes, we have telesnaps. My God, we actually have visual evidence of most of the Troughton era, where some chap called John Cura was actually
paid
to keep photographing his TV set broadcasting Who every few seconds, as if somehow he twigged just how much an anal-retentive fandom, 40 years later, would need to know the exact facial expression that Jamaica would pull when killed by Captain Pike in The Smugglers. And, no, even more incredible: the fact that we have complete audio soundtracks for every single one of these missing episodes too. Not a single one is absent.
Not a single one.
(And my 13-year-old self would boggle at this – you can actually walk down to your local record emporium and
buy
each and every one of these lost stories on crystal clear compact disc. Fans these days don’t know how lucky they are.)