Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient!

Happy Birthday, Billy (and Abnormal Service May Be…?)

2011-01-08T23:39:00.010Z

Happy 103rd birthday, today, to the Doctor – William Hartnell. And isn’t it odd to think that he was barely past his half-century when he was on our screens the first time around?

Having successfully managed to post absolutely nothing here at all last year, due on top of my habit of putting things off to having been very much more ill than usual last year (and, though still not being at all well, casting the dubious hope that 2011 can’t possibly be worse than 2010), seeing this morning that it was Billy’s birthday on Nicholas Whyte’s marvellous running digest of Doctor Who anniversaries made me think, oh, if anyone’s still reading this, I really ought to say hello. Several times, I’ve watched / listened to an episode or three of Marco Polo, but not got further in making notes, though I did watch the gorgeous full-colour Recon all the way through simply to enjoy it at about this time last year, which may be something of a cautionary tale. I’d like to carry on here, though, so perhaps I will.

There have been two straws in the wind in the last few days.

First, on my other blog, Love and Liberty (and, in the evening, on my Twitter stream), I had an unusual day last Wednesday: I was typing from before seven in the morning until after nine at night, which is by far the most I’ve done for several years. One of my favourite artists, Gerry Rafferty, had died the day before, and I wanted to say what I felt about him… Then, I happened to see that there would be a mass Tweet-along that evening watching the rather-later-than-Billy Doctor Who story Earthshock, which as luck would have it I’d been intending to write about for some weeks. So I did, taking me to about 7,000 words posted that day. Then watched it, firing off possibly my largest number of Tweets in one evening, too, though that’s harder to check (and, you know, it takes longer to write something short).

Obviously, the next day I was so exhausted that I slept for most of it, except when my right arm, wrist and hand were waking me with the severe pain they were all in. Still, a good sign.

The Horror of Running Through Corridors

Then a new book arrived, with uncanny timing for today’s festival. I’ve been looking forward to it for months, as it’s written by Rob Shearman (who writes awfully well, and who I’ve met several times and is lovely – and when not lovely, interesting) and Toby Hadoke (who I’ve seen do brilliant stand-up, and probably met in the bar afterwards in more of a blur) and is very much my sort of thing. So much my sort of thing, in fact, that it might as well be 323 pages printed with ‘GET YOUR ARSE IN GEAR’ printed over and over again in exceedingly large type, like an abusive flickbook (of which more later).

Running Through Corridors Volume 1: The 60s is the first of three books watching the whole of Doctor Who, in which two talented and highly readable chaps, both amusing and immensely Who-literate, do a sort of Time Team thing, in which they’ve written up their reactions to watching the whole of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to The End of Time during the “gap year” of 2009. While paying especial attention to the positive aspects of each story, because too few fans focus on why even the not so great Doctor Who is still brilliant.

“I wasn’t expecting that.”

My regular readers, of whom I have none, may recognise that I started off trying to do my own Time Team thing, and that I also set out to answer for every story “Why Is This Brilliant?” – because I thought too many ’guides’ only ever looked at the negative side. Good grief, nearly four and a half years ago. And yet two people did the whole lot in one year, while I… Haven’t, and am unlikely to before a more literal End of Time. At this rate, my only hope of even finishing as far as Doctor Who’s got so far in my lifetime is for me to be frozen, revived every Christmas Eve (what a horrible thought – always Winter, and never Christmas), then prodded with a stick to spend all day making Who notes and posting them, then being shown the previous year’s ‘new’ Christmas Special and grumbling, ‘Humbug! It’s not as good as The Web Planet.’ In short (too late), Running Through Corridors may as well have floated dimly above me at midnight, croaking ‘Marco was dead: to begin with…’

Today being what it is, I’ve read the opening of the book, in which Rob has a brilliant idea at 6.30am on New Year’s Day, and his wife is unaccountably unenthused by it. So he shares it with Toby instead, who swears a lot (off). Both are fluent and funny as ever, while I found myself laughing at Rob’s report that Toby isn’t doing anything much in 2009, which Toby expands into “I’m getting married this year.” I’m also amused when Toby talks about his “fiancé”. Not that he’s getting married to a man; this is neither a bad thing, nor anything to be surprised about from a Doctor Who fan. The surprise and amusement is when he then reveals that his fiancé’s name is Katherine. At this point, it becomes clear that for all Toby’s protestations that his impending wedding should be far more important than watching Doctor Who, he’s only gone and proven that the series is far more important: I bet it’ll be far, far further into the book before he allows that sort of mistake in a Doctor Who detail. Some things are unthinkable.

I’ve read what they have to say about An Unearthly Child, and am relieved both that it’s entertaining and thought-provoking, and that it still leaves a few things that I can still point to as unique to mine. Phew. They elaborate on moral subtleties; on the cusp of everyone suddenly knowing who Matt Smith is, there’s a startling anecdote about Waris Hussein; and Rob meditates on death in Doctor Who, comparing the dance around it in An Unearthly Child (though with surprisingly little attention to skulls) to the nervousness the writers had about the subject before they brought the series in 2005. Like the Waris Hussein story, this has a peculiarly serendipitous timing; just last week, Richard and I set out to start watching the whole of David Tennant’s adventures, his now being an ‘old Doctor’ a year past, and New Earth inspired us to discuss exactly the same thing that Rob brings up. When Cassandra reappeared in 2006, you see, we found it deeply ironic, as her ‘death’ in 2005 had been an enormous relief to us, being the first explicit, visible sign that the new series wouldn’t be afraid to be as “steeped in death” – in Russell’s words – as the old, and then she turns out to have survived her flesh exploding in front of our eyes when all the bashfully off-screen dead stayed dead. But that’s for another day (or year. Or century).

I’m now in a quandary. I’ve always consumed Doctor Who guides whole, particularly the good ones (and this looks very much that way), but this is so very much the same sort of thing I’ve, er, started here that I worry that once I plunge over The Edge of Destruction, it’ll be dispiriting for its industry, or daunting for its quality, or simply so comprehensive that I won’t be able to avoid ripping it off when I try to record my own reactions and think my own thoughts. I suspect I won’t be able to resist, but I’m not sure with that intimidating me that I’ll enjoy it.

I did enjoy, however, the gag. Not the written one; the drawn one. If you flick through Running Through Corridors Volume 1: The 60s, you’ll see a little figure running along the top of the pages (see, I said I’d come back to the flickbook), which is very entertaining, if a little lop-sided. Here’s a funny thing; he – and I can’t help assigning the authors’ gender – runs along happily if you’re flicking forward, but go back in time, and it’s just the same figure, throughout, never moving a millimetre. That strikes me as very mean to Rob. He’s the one who appears first in each of the exchanges, so you assume he’s the stick-man standing on the left-hand pages, while Toby’s on the right – and yet, Rob must have been doing a lot of running, as the last couple of times I bumped into him he’d lost a huge amount of weight (while I’ve gained it. I suspect he has a picture of me in his attic).

Anyway, I take this book as a sign from – well, it’s Mad Norwegian, so possibly Odin – that I should get back into it, and I’m very tempted.

On the other hand, I’ve not finished that piece I was writing for The Avengers’ Fiftieth Anniversary yesterday, have I?

So, watch this space. But probably not very often.

Doctor Who Magazine’s Golden Treasure

2009-06-08T23:26:00.020+01:00

If you’re like me, you’ll probably need cheering up after the European Elections (though the locals were pretty good). If you’re even more like me, one way is to dip into Doctor Who Magazine’s latest special, 200 Golden Moments, featuring absolutely wonderful scenes from every single Doctor Who story. It is, quite simply, a joy. It answers the question I wish fans would ask more often – ‘Why is this brilliant?’ – across the whole TV series from 1963 to this Easter, and rivals the Radio Times’ legendary Tenth Anniversary Special as the most marvellous Doctor Who magazine ever printed.

Strike a pose!

Back in 1973, years before Doctor Who Magazine began, before any of the mass of guidebooks (still less websites) naming every Doctor Who story were published, the Radio Times celebrated ten years of the series with a special glossy full-colour magazine, back when the Radio Times itself was printed on loo-roll. It boasted a mini-guide to every story (sometimes accurate), plans to build your own Dalek (with the measurements wrong), a Dalek story by Terry Nation (who decided it didn’t count, so used the same idea for a Blake’s 7 episode) and, above all, it was packed with thrilling photos, both from the stories themselves and specially staged ones with many of the actors who’d played the Doctor’s companions. I probably wasn’t walking yet by then, still less watching Doctor Who or arguing with other fans, but a few years later a family friend gave me the slightly battered copy he’d bought at the time, and it instantly became (and has remained) one of my most treasured possessions. For many years, it was a window into the series’ prehistory – anything from before I started watching was, of course, ancient, and anything from before I was born practically mythological – that you simply couldn’t get in any other way. It still looks terrific today, and is so iconic that drawing a variation of the cover (starring the two of us) was the natural choice for Richard and my tenth anniversary.

So in terms of affection and excitement, and with well over 400 Doctor Who Magazines since then, the bar is set pretty high. Well, 200 Golden Moments pretty much clears it. It’s the ideal celebration, and if I were you I’d go out and buy a copy before they all sell out. Though I’m half-American I’m incapable of a convincing American accent, so it’s a good job I’m only writing a booming advertiser’s voice: ‘If you only buy one Doctor Who magazine, make it this one’.

My scanner doesn’t like the gold foil, but it’s prettier in real life

I love reading – and writing – in-depth articles on Doctor Who, something thought-provoking and with a bit of punch. I love laughing at the bits that don’t work (though – as with any tribe – only with another Who-lover, defending the series against all comers from ‘outside’). And I love watching some stories an awful lot more than I love watching certain others. But, above all, I love Doctor Who, and sometimes it’s a little wearing when all a particular fan or book or site seems to do is be negative. Four or five years ago, Richard and I were reading a particularly in-depth, insightful and comprehensive book on the series and greatly enjoying its ideas, its turns of phrase, and ganging up on it together when we thought it had got something hilariously wrong. But although it and its companions are probably the best set of books ever written on the series, we often felt that at times they lost sight of why they were into Doctor Who in the first place. So from then on, when Richard and I watch Who together, even a story we really don’t think much of, we’ve always tried to ask that question that was missing from these books – why is this story brilliant? Whether it’s a chorus of praise or just a saving grace, the idea of the series is so magnificent that every part of it has something worth treasuring. And that’s why I love this new special: at last, someone’s produced the very thing I want to read to cheer myself up about any of Doctor Who you care to name.

Why Is This Brilliant?

It’s immensely readable. It’s made up of a couple of hundred little nuggets, all beautifully illustrated, by dozens of different authors in dozens of different styles and finding something memorable for many dozens of different reasons. It focuses on great drama, funny one-liners, special effects wonders, scary cliffhangers, gorgeous music, fantastic acting, long, short, sad, happy, old, new… Like the series itself, each piece is something new. If you know every story, you can look at it through someone else’s eyes; if you’re a more casual watcher, it’s like 200 trailers or bite-sized insights, something that might make you think, ‘Ooh, I’d like to try that one’. You can read it from cover to cover, or back to front, or pop in and out at your leisure – it’s ideal to dip into, and like a particularly good chocolate selection box, you can just take one at a time, or you can swallow 200 at a sitting.

Now, obviously I’m a Doctor Who fan, so naturally I could pick at this. I could point out that, as some stories get more than one “golden moment,” there are actually not 200 but 222 of them here. But what sort of pedant would you have to be not to see that as a bonus? I could complain that when I picked out 46 stories to illustrate Why Doctor Who Is Brilliant last year I roamed across the whole glorious panoply of Doctor Who, from TV to novels to comics to radio plays, and this sets its sights too narrowly to do the whole marvellous concept. But then, I only picked one story from each year, and they’re doing the lot – just how many pages would it take to cover “A Few Thousand Golden Moments”? So, you know, they’ve got it as near to just right as it could ever be. And, like that fabled Tenth Anniversary Special, open it up and it looks gorgeous.

A Peek Inside…

I’m not going to offer a critique of every single piece in there, because – well, obviously, because I don’t want to take up 146 pages (and probably 146 days to write). But I’d like to pull out a little of the best of it, and raise the odd eyebrow. The first thing, of course, is that they haven’t – they can’t have – chosen all the same moments that I would. So with some stories you turn the page to find exactly the famous scene that’s always praised, while with others there’s an iconoclastic focus on something you wouldn’t expect at all, with the one everyone raves about suddenly missing. I set myself to scribble down the half a dozen scenes from the entire series that I thought were the most indispensable, and when I flipped through to check, they had three of them. But, you know, most of the time it’s just as joyous to find yourself looking at a little-thought-of scene in a new light as it is to bask in the comforting glow of something you’ve always ‘known’ was magnificent. And if you’re too upset about your favourite being ignored, Philip MacDonald’s evocative introductions for each Doctor pick out a brace of brilliant moments each sketched in a few words, just a selection of some of the bits they didn’t choose, and chances are you might find it mentioned there anyway.

I’ll take you on a trip through my favourite Doctor, then skip more swiftly through the others. The magazine starts perfectly – the first choice, for the first story, is exactly the one I’d have made, as Ian, Barbara and all of us first enter the TARDIS. I look at my scrawled six and, yes, that’s just about the most indispensable of the lot. And when I wrote the other week about why The Edge of Destruction was brilliant, the moment quoted here is one of the scenes that gripped me, too. We come to the earliest-broadcast story I don’t think too much of and, hurrah, Jonny Morris has gone for exactly the nightmarish moment I always think of as its finest. Matt Michael picks a scene that I wouldn’t for The Sensorites, but captures it beautifully, and links the marvellous William Hartnell all the way to Christopher Eccleston in a flick of a phrase – then his next choice includes the lines I used when, ten years into making political speeches, I first flourished a quotation from Doctor Who to a packed room. Andrew Pixley, known for his learned, detailed archive work, is a revelation, making me smile throughout with sheer, infectious joy, then Gareth Roberts – known for his fine comic writing – leaps in with one of the most searingly dramatic arguments the series has ever known, even if he falls for the Earl of Leicester’s spin-doctoring. Jonny Morris reveals Billy’s lolcats; Nev Fountain thanks the stars that Doctor Who always managed to avoid (sometimes by a whisker) such ghastly sci-fi clichés as the Planet of Women. Paul Cornell shares the “sheer magic” of Billy’s most moving soliloquy; Mark Wright picks out what, if Bill Hartnell was the star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – what a marvellous, marvellous idea – would be his ‘hero moment’ for the titles. And Patrick Mulkern picks out some eye candy, then later on plays what I’m certain is a Hampstead euphemism. I know where he’s coming from.

Rob Shearman, ah, the lovely Rob Shearman, superb writer, incisive critic, swoops in on just how utterly brave and brilliant was the way they changed the Doctor for the first time. Stuart Manning takes a minor scene from one of my favourite little-known stories to illustrate in a couple of hundred words exactly the ideological point I made in several thousand. Philip MacDonald, in The Tomb of the Cybermen, hits on another of those magic six I’d scribbled down, and makes a lovely case for The Abominable Snowmen – and he’s right, you know. Between them, on one of those stories that get two golden moments, Keith Topping and Jonathan Morris capture exactly the most horribly memorable scenes… Though I’d have been torn in making it three, and added the terrible, fearful, hideous glee that comes in torturing a Cyberman.

Probably the biggest shock in the entire magazine is that a scene so memorable it’s been remade three times in Doctor Who TV, for pop videos and even for Pringles, killer shop window dummies smashing through the high street in Spearhead From Space, is ostentatiously missing as a scene I’d never have thought of takes what everyone would assume was its place. Which is why it’s so perfect that the pull-out quote for the scene which every fan will frown at for being the wrong one is, “Is this someone’s idea of a joke?” Priceless! Then, for the sequel, Scott Handcock makes me see the brilliance in a cliffhanger that, I’ll confess, I’d always thought a bit rubbish. And Dave Owen nails the relationship at the heart of The Three Doctors, while Philip MacDonald treasures a tiny, exquisite moment from the next story along.

After an ad for Big Finish’s Short Trips books, now at the end of the line and flying off at half-price – you know you want to – there’s Tom Baker. Gosh. What a lot of Tom. And every little bit marvellous. There’s a lovely little moment by Paul Vyse from The Sontaran Experiment, then Gary Russell and David A McIntee between them zero in on the central drama of Genesis of the Daleks (even without the scenes I’d have picked – the Doctor and Davros’ philosophical debate for sheer electricity, and Ronson’s screaming death for memories of boyhood bloodlust). But while Gary’s piece nails Davros’ fatal flaw, I have a problem with David’s. Even though (thanks, Jennie) he did vote Lib Dem in the Euros. You see, he’s both absolutely right and dead wrong on the Doctor’s moral quandary over whether to destroy the Daleks. Where David goes wrong is in his shortcut to answering the Doctor’s question, where he rephrases Sarah’s comparison of the Daleks to a virus into “a genetically modified mould in a dodgem car” and that, because of the dehumanising words “genetically modified,” it’s fine to kill them… Which, rather than listening to the Doctor’s argument that this is an intelligent species, ironically takes the Daleks’ side that you can say another form of life isn’t like us, and so destroy it. Where he’s right, and impeccably liberal, is in seeing what’s so important about a hero that asks questions:

“This is a hero, a role model, who, when faced with a difficult decision and unpleasant options thinks about them… The nature of the question, or the answer, doesn’t matter; it’s the concept of asking that’s so fabulous.”

Nev Fountain then earns incredible brownie points for pointing out just what an incredible cliffhanger Part One of The Deadly Assassin has – yep, it’s my favourite cliffhanger, and my favourite story. So I’ll ignore the choice he makes for one later story of one of the few scenes in the special I still think’s rotten… Love to Philip MacDonald again, too, for finding a moment in The Face of Evil that says exactly how vitally important Tom Baker could be. Readers who know The Robots of Death well will understand just why it’s disturbing that “David Bailey” writes about it, and hooray for Marcus Hearn, who spots one of the most marvellous things about Robert Holmes’ writing, as well as Kate Orman, who knows exactly why the last Doctor Who story to really, really scare me was so scary.

You can tell I love this period, can’t you? Because I’ll never finish at this rate. I’d better skip most of Tom and tell you just to get the magazine itself, which is much more fun to read, after all. Look out, along the way, for top Gary Russellness on The Invasion of Time, Peter Anghelides hitting one of the tiniest, most perfectly crafted things about The Androids of Tara (albeit making the mistake that everyone makes about the story, and not picking the line I borrowed for a certain blog), Gareth Roberts filling me with enthusiasm for The Power of Kroll, which is no mean feat, and Dave Owen, hurrah, knowing that the music is the most gorgeous thing in City of Death. Plus lots and lots of Jonny Morris (and more for free), who always comes up with something new – even if I don’t think he gives enough credit to the brilliantly talented David Fisher.

Rob Shearman doesn’t write many of the pieces here, but they’re some of the best. He’s spot-on – and, unexpectedly, very funny – for Full Circle, and supplies two brilliant moments for the early Peter Davison era. Also unexpectedly, that period gets perhaps the most impressive run of nuggets in the magazine; if you want quality writing, the middle’s a good place to start. Scott Handcock again sees right into the Master in Castrovalva, Gareth Roberts finds a premonition of death, and Rob, again, takes an opening scene I’d always thought of as perfunctory and shows the unsettling effect it’s there to create. It’s probably the most memorable moment in the magazine for making me see a scene from an entirely new angle. Jonathan Morris gets it right again and again on Snakedance and Frontios, Ian Farrington summons up Sgt Pepper, and Matt Michael has a marvellous moment of childhood terror – a piece of personal memory that even beats Gareth Roberts and Bonnie Langford.

I know David Darlington, but I can assure you he’s not bribed me to say that I loved his celebration of Colin Baker in The Twin Dilemma. Oh, it made me smile. And at the other end of Colin, Cavan Scott picks something way cool. New Grand Mekon of All Doctor Who Steven Moffat writes about Dragonfire; you know, I don’t really agree with him, but he writes it jolly well. And Mark Wright’s dead right on Paradise Towers. I know Joe Lidster a bit, too, and when I saw him on Saturday I really should have told him how perfectly he conjures a moment of The Curse of Fenric. I don’t know James Moran, but I also met him on Saturday and he seemed terribly nice; I should have told him, too, that he was lovely on Survival. Because I knew, of course, it had to be that scene, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone evoke it so well. Bless Kate Orman, next, for what she says about kissing, and Dave Owen on just how funny the Master is. He is, you know.

Gosh, only nine paragraphs into the three I meant to write about the magazine itself, and I’m into this century. Yay for Matt Michael on The End of the World; I love it too. There’s Jonathan Blum on Doctor Who making you cry – the story he writes about did for me, too – and Scott Handcock, on it scaring you all over again. Then David Tennant thunders into Doctorness with a fabulous scene brought to us by Peter Anghelides, and it’s that Jonathan Morris again, not making the choice I’d have made but drawing me into his view of New Earth. And what scene’s a Dalek’s favourite? I’ll let you read it and find out, but it’s brilliant, too. And thank you, Gary, for hitting what might just be my favourite David Tennant moment in one of his finest little stories, while Jason Arnopp picks probably the mesmerising “moment” I’ve watched more than any other from this century’s Who. Though he lifts out seven minutes, and I just can’t stop before I’ve watched the episode’s whole last sixteen. And what could be a better end – to the beginning – than Andrew Pixley making me utterly thrilled when reading about Planet of the Dead?

Go on, go on. Buy it. Their snippets are much better than my snippets about their snippets.

Other Marvellous Moments

The lovely Tom Spilsbury’s Editorial opening the magazine mentions the inspiration for it all, DWM’s 1996 article 20 Moments When You Know You’re Watching the Greatest Television Series Ever Made. That evocation of Doctor Who’s That Certain Something stirred a lot of imaginations at the time, followed by ten more suggested by readers, another ten of the best cliffhangers – bizarrely excluded from the ‘main’ set – and one ‘best moment’ each for the Master and the Cybermen. That’ll be 42, then. Strangely, given that those were DWM’s indispensable moments for the series thirteen years ago, only 19 of them made it into the 222 (the ‘extras’ suggested by readers turn out to be the most successful). Then the flurry of favourite snippets died down until DWM published its list of the series’ greatest deaths last year, and even the top one of those doesn’t make it here. Inspired like many people back in 1996, though, and by my childhood marvelling at clips and comment documentary Whose Doctor Who, I edited together my own 50 favourite scenes – don’t worry, I won’t list them all – of which 20 appear in 200 Golden Moments.

I’m going to finish by writing about just one scene I’d like to pick as a magic moment. In the spirit of the special magazine, it’s finding something absolutely glorious nestling in a story that’s perhaps not one of the best. 40 years ago yesterday, a BBC press conference presented Jon Pertwee as the new Doctor. My feelings about his Doctor have been complicated over the years, and I’d say now that, while I love him, he’s the Doctor I find it most difficult to like. Slight update: I was getting rather sleepy by this point in the article (having had just two hours’ sleep amidst grumbling at the election results the night before) and entirely forgot that this was the point at which I meant to unmask the identity of the outstanding but aggravating book series about Doctor Who alluded to above, one volume of which inspired my whole ‘Why is this brilliant?’ concept through being detailed, thought-provoking but persistently sour. It is, of course, Lawrence Miles’ and Tat Wood’s About Time collection. By a stroke of serendipity, Tat’s vastly expanded second edition of Volume 3 (covering the Third Doctor, though that’s less of a given than you might think) has just been published, and I started reading it yesterday. I had no idea until I read in that very book, 40 years to the day later, of the date on which Mr Pertwee’s casting had been announced. Then, irresistibly, another anniversary presents itself today, this time serendipitously chiming in with the blue giant spider on the cover of About Time 3…

Skip forward, and 35 years ago today his Doctor suffered fatal radiation poisoning and regenerated into Tom Baker, at the end of a story that was something of a Pertwee megamix, flourishing many of the era’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Planet of the Spiders is even one of those few Doctor Who stories which I have major ideological arguments with. With all that, you wouldn’t think I love it, but I do – and a large part of my love for that story, and the love I have for Pertwee’s Doctor too, comes with the climactic scene from 35 years ago today.

Back when I was five years old, I wasn’t allowed to stay up for Melvyn Bragg’s Arena arts special Whose Doctor Who, so my Dad recorded the sound from it on open-reel tape. Though now the whole thing’s easily available on the marvellous The Talons of Weng-Chiang DVD, for several decades I pored over the soundtrack, taking years to identify where some of the clips came from. Among them, though, there were three scenes that I could always identify and which I absolutely adored and always held me spellbound. The one which I hadn’t seen on TV on first transmission (and didn’t until the story was released on VHS in the early ’90s, with a fantastic cover based on this very scene) was taken from the final episode of Planet of the Spiders, a story where the action centres on – as you might guess – giant spiders seeking a blue crystal with the power to expand your mind to an incredible degree. Yes, it was made in 1974, since you ask.

“Now listen to me. Listen. I haven’t got much time left. What you’re trying to do is impossible – if you complete that circuit, the energy will build up and up until it cannot be contained. You will destroy yourself.”

At the story’s climax, the Doctor walks into the heart of the Spiders’ domain, facing his fear and the Great One, the huge, demented god-empress of the Spiders. Knowing that even to walk into her crystal-powered cave will kill him, he still goes in and offers her the final crystal in the hope that she’ll leave the humans alone. Maureen Morris voices the Great One in a tour de force of power and madness, confronted by Pertwee’s bravery and desperation. The blazing blue of it all, and the giant spider, socks you in the eyes, but the most striking ‘effect’ aiding this extraordinary face-off is the huge, eerie music. It might just be composer Dudley Simpson’s finest moment, and probably Jon Pertwee’s, too.

What’s so magnificent about this scene isn’t just the performances, or the music underscoring them. It’s that the Doctor sacrifices himself to bring the ultimate villain the crystal – but still begs her not to take it. His desperation isn’t for himself, and his pleading isn’t for himself; it’s initially for the people he’s dying to save, but during this scene it changes to a desperate pleading to save the villain. He holds off actually giving her the crystal out of fear for her – and she uses her mind to snatch it out of her hand, thirsting and aching to impose her will on the entire Universe, believing that the last crystal will give her limitless power. He’s aghast not for the Universe, but because he knows she won’t be able to contain it. He pleads, he protests, and is quite frantic to save her even as she’s crying her triumph. The Doctor with the biggest ego confronts the very personification of ego and, dying, tries desperately to save even an evil megalomaniac. He fails. The Great One’s terrific gloating power becomes agonized screams, and they’re the most chilling sound ever heard in the series.

The giant spider thrills the boy in me, the awesome music makes my spine tingle and the dying screams make the hairs on my neck rise, but what really makes this a golden moment for me is the sheer Doctorishness of Pertwee risking his last minutes of life to save his enemy. He’s heartbreaking.

Cross-posted to Love and Liberty, my main blog.

The Edge of Destruction

2009-05-14T23:00:00.016+01:00

The third Doctor Who story is an experimental tale unlike any other, but it does set one standard that an awful lot of other stories would follow – it divides opinion. It’s fair to say that this is the first ‘Marmite’ story, with those who are into it finding it compelling, and those who don’t thinking it’s a total waste of time. I remember seeing it twenty years ago on crummy 27th-generation VHS from a dodgy backstreet Doctor Who dealer (no, really; I had to traipse the seedy alleys of Manchester before widespread availability on VHS, DVD and YouTube) and being absolutely hypnotised. I still am. And if you’re not, it’s one of the shortest of all Twentieth Century Doctor Who TV stories – just two twenty-five minute episodes, making it the same length as the standard adventure today. At the very least, a useful breather between two seven-part epics, then.

Again, I’ve found a creation from Colin Brockhurst that showcases the story, a thrilling cross between a Hitchcock film poster and a pulp sci-fi comic. Oddly, while Susan has probably the most disturbing scenes in the story, here she looks the least demented of the characters – but watch out for those scissors…

An Outer-Space Psychological Thriller In Two Weekly Parts

My ‘The Review all Doctor Who Challenge’ posting in an online discussion, January 2004:

A great first episode with lots of mystery, a rather silly resolution at the end, but what a fun little story. Surprisingly creepy. Reminds you how good all the regulars are – Barbara has a great shouting match with the Doctor, and even Susan’s quite scary. In a good way.

And I Said…

This has a very odd feel when watched in a rush after the first eleven episodes; continuing the story in some ways, a breathing space in others, but harsher, and unsettling everything you’ve just got – nearly – used to. There’s very little music, and no other setting, so we just concentrate on the actors we know. And with everyone acting so strangely, it’s as if we don’t know them at all…

Barbara’s the most normal, but even she’s lost her memory a little; the Doctor’s scheming and suspicious; Susan frighteningly psychotic, with huge shaggy hair and knife-like scissors; and Ian in some ways the most disturbing, first amnesiac, next cold where you’d expect him to be concerned, then laughing and smiling at misfortune. By just a few minutes into the first episode, we’re alienated from all of them.

It’s often very stylised, and very intense – and with the two rooms and just four actors shouting at each other, it’s like the Pilot episode mixed with an experimental play. Shame the ‘climax’ is a bit of a let-down after the TARDIS’s psychodrama, but the last few minutes as they finally mellow to each other and the Doctor does his best to make it up with Barbara is rather lovely, too.

Yay for the first near-ideal Doctor Who title – welcome to “The Something of Something”. And, according to taste, you need only wait for the next story’s first episode or for Patrick Troughton’s arrival for the form to reach perfection with that all-important second “the”.

Despite our having seen it the previous week, the opening explosion is presented with shocking suddenness, shifting to brief darkness then harsh lights as the Doctor lies at a crazed angle. The music may be stock, but it’s very effective here – keening, up-swinging weird shit that makes us think, ‘OK, this is nothing as normal as Daleks…’

Disconcertingly, Susan doesn’t know who Ian is, but still wants to help him – while Barbara is more concerned with the Doctor. When Ian does come round, he’s cold and strange, alienated and alienating. I’m glad that doesn’t last too long; he’s usually such a reassuring presence that he’d probably have been the most disturbing of the lot (Richard adds, “Isn’t the idea that their personalities have become mixed up? Carole Ann Ford is playing ‘Barbara’; William Russell is playing ‘The Doctor’?”).

It’s a very staged moment when Susan confronts Ian with her scissors – she’s so starkly posed that it’s almost a tableau – but her not recognising him and then stabbing the mattress again and again makes the scene horribly strange and powerful.

The story’s most memorable scene comes when Barbara finally loses her temper with the Doctor and turns him to toast, but her anger flares up earlier, too; the Doctor tells Barbara the Ship must have landed somewhere and, fed up, she snaps, “You don’t know, do you! You’re just guessing!”

Susan, becoming hysterical – as she would be, with her home haunted – guesses that there’s something inside the Ship, which sets Barbara thinking (and makes the Doctor unreasonably defensive)… Then, with brilliant circularity, Ian’s warning not to share that theory with Susan for fear of scaring her is overheard by her, which only reinforces the paranoia that came up with it in the first place.

The ironic thing is, despite the idea that there’s something inside the spaceship being a product of Susan’s fears and the Doctor and Ian scoffing at the very idea of a man or an animal getting in when Barbara tentatively raises it, it turns out in the end that Barbara’s suggestion of “Another intelligence?” is right all along, just not in the way any of them imagined.

After we’ve already seen Susan’s violence with the scissors when Ian went in to her, we can empathise with Barbara’s nervousness as Susan sits in her dark robe and almost-wimple, asking cold questions – but that very nervousness just makes Susan more convinced that the teacher’s lying. Even Barbara seizing the scissors doesn’t relive the tension, as Susan carries on creeping Babs out about the silence, the shadows and then, with a note of triumph, possession.

The story’s most disturbing moment – of many – comes with Susan looking like a sweaty, evil nun under her ‘wimple’, apparently getting malicious satisfaction in worrying Barbara. Her suggestion that something’s hiding “In one of us” is as unsettling to the viewer as it is to Babs, then Ian’s “You must be clairvoyant” hints at Susan being not just suddenly nasty but a poltergeist medium.

One of the eeriest threats in this story is the series’ first hint of possession – though it turns out to be a red herring this time, it soon won’t be, and Doctor Who will never look back!

The best scene in the show is that magnificent face-off between the Doctor and Barbara when he, fuelled by his fears for his Ship and Susan, accuses the teachers of sabotage – but Barbara, furious, slices his argument and authority to pieces over his ingratitude for their having saved his life several times over. Just as importantly as the scene itself, it’s less than half-way through the story: it doesn’t resolve their differences; he takes a while to climb down and swallow his pride, just as in real life someone ripping you a new one doesn’t instantly win you over.

Barbara is fantastic, and fiery – so it’s a shame that she goes straight from giving the Doctor the tongue-lashing of his life to screaming at the melted clock. Otherwise, it’s one of the strongest scenes for any companion. And she’ll get a stronger one…

All the characters are all over the place here under the extreme conditions, but Barbara is the most plausible: unnerved by all the weirdness, but given strength by her fury! Her shouting the Doctor out in the first episode is a stunning moment, and if that sort of thing happened more often, it would do him a power of good. It probably inspired Donna…

The melted clock-faces are a great concept, but while I can ignore their logical failings, it’s difficult to forgive the director for making such a mess of them; there’s a belated close-up of the big clock and an indistinct one of Ian’s watch, yet the biggest reaction to them is of Barbara in long-shot, pulling off a watch we can just about see on a big modern telly and throwing down first it then herself. Has he heard of moving the camera?

Do the melting clocks prefigure the fast return switch for Dalí aficionados? What else does going back, and back, and back again signify but The Persistence of Memory?

The story’s most disturbing moment comes with Susan looking like a sweaty, evil nun and getting malicious satisfaction in worrying Barbara with her suggestion that something’s hiding “In one of us” – then Ian’s “You must be clairvoyant” hints at Susan being not just suddenly nasty but a poltergeist medium.

Billy looks great sitting in his chair, close to the camera (all the more effective for being almost the only close-up in the first episode), face half-shadowed, surrounded by huge concentric circles of light of light amid the shadows and deeply suspicious in both senses of the word.

The Doctor has some great plotting moments towards the end of the first episode, acting the devious butler after debating with Ian – who he thinks is trying to get the better of him – while Ian is still suspicious of the cleverer man’s motives. Both the trick with the drinks and that argument are direct echoes of their conversation over the Geiger counters in The Daleks, again with Susan as spectator (lurking by the food machine), though this time the Doctor’s deception is a response to clashing with Ian rather than the cause of it.

Susan tries to be the peacemaker with an unrelenting Barbara, like patching up a quarrel between parents – at once the youngest and the most mature of the party.

There’s a superb cliffhanger, with the Doctor prowling round his drugged companions to eerie, oscillating, high-pitched music, giggling nastily and waving his hand in front of them before going through to the console and stretching his fingers over it like a concert pianist – only for hands to appear round his neck. Next week, of course, you realise that this ‘strangulation’ is the series’ first really forced cliffhanger, with its first deeply unconvincing resolution. There’ll be much less plausible to come, though…

There’s a fascinating contrast between the two episodes, breaking noticeably into two acts through both the script and a sharp change in direction. The first looks occasionally shaky, but has great performances and powerful material, making it off-putting and compelling at the same time. The second makes far better use of close-up, light and shadow, but has uneven scripting and a very different threat – while initially we’re afraid that something has crept into the TARDIS while they were all unconscious and of what the Doctor will do as a result, by mere minutes after half-way he’s making up and leading rather than splitting the crew under the danger of disintegration…

We’re so used to Ian being buttoned up, metaphorically and literally, that it’s startling to see him apparently attack the Doctor, then collapse, twitching and raving. Almost as disturbing is his robe falling open all the way up to his boxers. No, no, he’s a teacher! Put it away! Avert your eyes and pretend he’s Arthur Dent.

Susan’s the one who seems the most changeable this story – varying from hysterical to coldly judgemental to the crew’s sole peacemaker at a bat of her huge eyes – but when the Doctor hints at putting the humans off the Ship, that threat seems to make sense of snapping her out of hostility and into concern. And though his manner doesn’t suggest a climbdown, after Susan pleads with him the Doctor tries to prompt a confession rather than promising expulsion, as if – as ever – looking for a way both to save face and to give in to his granddaughter.

It’s fascinating that, for the Doctor, a load of lights flashing is a more impossible trick for the teachers to arrange than melting every clock on the Ship. Still, once the whole fault locator goes off, the Doctor decides on the spot to stop diddling about and pull together.

I love how the Doctor reassures Ian and Barbara about his intentions by warning them that the Ship is on the point of disintegration! Kudos to him, though, for throwing away his prejudices – at least when the facts become overwhelming – and admitting he’s misjudged them both.

The Doctor’s sudden turn from scheming threat to the hero taking charge is abrupt, yet convincing and utterly compelling. Though William Hartnell hesitates over the odd line, he’s gripping, his authority sells the character completely, and the new director’s sudden switch to using close-ups and deeper shadows complements him perfectly just as the story really wants us to sit up and take notice.

“We had time taken away from us,” Barbara ponders, “and now it’s being given back to us… Because it’s running out!” Look, I know it makes no sense, but it sounds brilliant, doesn’t it?

That deep ‘thoom’ of power and flare of light as the force beneath the Ship’s console surges to agree with Barbara – making the four travellers stagger away from the straining column in a cross pattern – is a simple but brilliant effect, like the world’s loudest séance tap.

With the first episode centring on the clash between the Doctor and Barbara, here the Doctor’s been tempered by that chastening experience only to come out stronger, because now he’s willing to take others’ ideas and run with them, too.

Billy excels with his re-emphasised leading role, coming up to the camera with his hands on his lapel as he wonders if this is the end, working it all out in soliloquy against the TARDIS console as the camera slowly zooms in, then endearingly nervous and hesitant as he tries to make things right with Barbara once the danger’s past. It’s an outstanding performance.

“If only I had a clue,” exclaims the Doctor, exasperated, prompting Barbara, brilliantly, to suggest that “I think, perhaps, we’ve been given nothing else but clues.” And, of course, she’s right. What a fantastic team they make.

Billy gives a powerhouse performance here, but if you’re in the right mood, he’s also very entertaining at times without quite meaning to be – “You’d be blown to atoms by a split second!” at a deadly serious moment is one of his finest fluffs.

The Doctor’s soliloquy as he stands in front of the console, he and it lit in the dark, the camera slowly closing on them as if they’re part of each other, his seriousness and then delight as he realises that they’re at “A new birth of a sun and its planets,” something wonderful as well as destructive to them… A magnificent scene.

Unusually, William Russell’s been the least of the performances this time, but after Barbara and the Doctor have worked out all the difficult bits between them, Ian’s the one who asks the key question – where was the Doctor sending them? And, despite all his grumpy intransigence, it turns out he really had been trying to take them back, and that’s what got them into all that trouble. As he finds what’s gone wrong and fixes the spring, the power rises, the lights rise, the camera rises and your heart rises in what’s a glorious moment, ideally without listening to the dialogue.

The resolution seems at odds with itself, both ‘failure of limited computer literalism’ and ‘this isn’t just a machine – it’s alive!’ The ‘it can’t show us on the fault locator because there isn’t a fault (er, except for the broken spring)’ is familiar, now, as an example of ‘the computer can only say exactly what it’s programmed to say’; but all the weird shit is saying that, actually, the TARDIS can say all sorts of other stuff. Is this the TARDIS struggling towards sentience, finding roundabout ways to overcome its limitations, or is the fault locator an entirely separate machine which is dumb, while the TARDIS has a language all of its own, deeper and stranger?

The Doctor explains the anticlimactic climax to Susan in mid-hug, congratulating her on her bravery, only for her to prompt him about the others. Enchantingly, he hems and stammers, is instantly forgiven by Ian but, gathering himself, pays fulsome praise to Barbara – only for her to walk off. As he speaks admiringly of her to “Charterhouse” and tries to work out which control to try next, Ian laughs. And we realise that, in the crisis, he not only knew exactly which control was which but also got Ian’s name right…

The Doctor and Ian making up, one embarrassed and the other magnanimous, is lovely. And he pays a generous tribute to Barbara who, realistically (and as she did last week) finds it very difficult to forgive immediately. But both in his praise and in his genuine nervousness in approaching her, he’s utterly charming, charming us as well as her.

“As we learn about each other, we learn about ourselves.” And it’s all in Billy’s delivery – delivered less engagingly, he’d just have been summarising the point of the plot!

After being sinister and threatening for most of the story, it’s lovely to have the Doctor bashful, generous and charming at the end, desperately wanting Barbara to forgive him. With the help of a little homespun wisdom, some definitely not homespun fashion items from Susan, and at last the Doctor calling Barbara “very valuable” – that’s exactly what he said about the Ship! Bless him – she cracks into a smile, letting him genteelly hold out a coat and offer his arm. He really does apologise beautifully, and you can see the respect they have for each other from that point on.

Is this the TARDIS struggling towards sentience, finding roundabout ways to overcome its limitations, or is the fault locator an entirely separate machine which is dumb, while the TARDIS has a language all of its own, deeper and stranger?

Wonderfully, even the cliffhanger into the next story is just a minor part of another character piece. The Doctor and Barbara emerge arm in arm to find Ian in yet another enormous coat and to see rock and snow through the TARDIS doors with, blissfully, Susan chucking a snowball at them. Barbara rushes out to join in, and the Doctor links arms with Ian instead. How fab is that? Who needs Susan to find a giant’s footprint to tune in the next week? I would anyway with that lot.

That was absolutely gripping – I’m glad it was so short, though. The tension would have collapsed if it really *had* gone on as long as a night at the theatre. At such a perfect little length, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Brilliant as the New Adventures were, this story reaches a crisis for the TARDIS crew and resolves their relationships in much the same way the novels repeatedly did then, er, un-did. It’s much more settled here (though the forced beginning of The Reign of Terror is a bit of a drop back, isn’t it?).

After this, they all get on – when on occasion the Doctor’s paranoia and determination to put them off the Ship suddenly resurfaces in more shallow scripts, it just seems silly.

Sure, the explanation at the end is bafflingly mundane, but what ending could have justified all the weird shit? Isn’t it more disturbing that even a broken spring could trigger so much strangeness? Imagine what something really going wrong could do.

Richard asks: “It’s never really developed in the series, but is the ‘console’ the machine for communication with the TARDIS rather than the TARDIS itself – though in one sense you could end up thinking of that as a horse’s bridle or a ox’s goad? Then the bit of broken spring isn’t so glaring, as the ‘bridle’ is a considerably less complex machine than the ‘horse’.”

Whatever I think of the ending, I love the twists along the way. The threat moves from possession, to the Doctor’s plotting, then it seems certain that the Ship is threatening our heroes, and all the while it’s screaming at them in its own language that there’s an unimaginably big threat outside and it’s really not happy about it.

What suspense! How many ‘stuck in a lift / bottle’ shows have lighting that wants to be Hitchcockian, a Twilight Zone concept and acting for experimental theatre?

This is so often dismissed or overlooked, yet it’s the overlooked link between J. B. Priestley and Sapphire and Steel.

It’s a good job they decide to do this story while the console room is still huge! It looks how it always is in my head, less from being a small boy captivated by a smallish black and white telly with poor reception than from reading those marvellous descriptions and poring over those fabulous photos in The Doctor Who Monster Book.

Whether this was a planned piece of character development, a cost-saver to counter the overruns on stories either side, a rush-job to fill in when the next story wasn’t ready, or commanded by the BBC high-ups while they made up their minds whether to continue the series beyond its initial quarter-year, by accident or design it ended up like no other piece of Doctor Who. And I always side with an experiment.

It takes a long time before there’s anything quite as experimental as this again, but in Twenty-first Century Who there are similar forty-five-minute slices of formula-breaking oddity, and hurrah for that (“Don’t Brink!” shouts Millennium). But, still, imagine them doing anything like this today! …That’d look a bit like Midnight, wouldn’t it?

What a masterstroke to take the time travellers to prehistory, then a half-ruined, half-shiny future world, their threats lulling us into seeing the strangest space in the universe as our safe place – then make it haunted, surreal and just plain weird. It is not a space rocket with Batman at the controls.

Marco Polo will in some ways be the first ‘ordinary’ adventure, once the series has found its feet (or giant snowshoes); it’s easy to see the first thirteen episodes as one big story, the story of how our heroes come together, through time and space travel, and how they come to realise that even what they travel in is stranger than anything they know.

Nonsense though some of the end may be, it’s hugely influential on some terrific later stories: Logopolis making the TARDIS a strange and scary place again; Christmas On A Rational Planet showing the TARDIS’ deep intelligence; right through to this century, where Boom Town and The Parting of the Ways finally deliver on how dangerous the power under the console could be.

On this day thirteen years ago, Time Waits For No Man (oh, all right, the TV Movie) was first broadcast. And that has far less drama along the way, despite being nicked from this and The Deadly Assassin, and an infinitely less well-established and more rubbish TARDIS deus ex machina, where rather than the Ship being unfathomable, it’s soppy.

The Doctor’s Story

Reinforced as the undoubted lead by setting the whole story inside his Ship, the Doctor’s the focus of this story, and William Hartnell gets to showcase many facets of his character: first helpless, then deeply sinister, then brilliantly working it all out, before showing a side that we haven’t seen before – humility, generosity, and charm. After this, the Doctor’s much more willing to listen to other people. I say more willing… Perhaps the moments most to look out for are his utter discombobulation at being chewed up by Barbara, his fascinated concentration as soliloquises his way to working out what the threat must be, and his irresistible offering his arm to Barbara at the end. Perhaps the moment most to avoid is his confiding in Ian that they’re all going to die sooner than he’d told the women, to protect their girly heads, though the two men act ‘unconvincing’ rather delightfully. Still, at the end of this story, it’s clear that Barbara’s the member of the crew for whom the Doctor has the greatest respect. After this, the Doctor and other characters are that much more vanilla, but the series’ future – and formula – is more assured.

For those who’re obsessed with Billy Fluffs, of which there are several here – some evidently scripted, like his endearing stammering when trying to apologise, some evidently not – DWM’s Special Edition #7, from 2004, tells us that William Hartnell, rather marvellously, ad-libbed his line to Susan that “You know, my dear child, I think your old Grandfather is going a tiny little bit round the bend.” He’s only as bonkers as his Ship.

What They Said…

Time Team, Doctor Who Magazine 280, July 1999:

“‘It’s rather like a Samuel Beckett version of Doctor Who,’ observes Richard. ‘Everyone seems to be viewing the situation in a different way and although they’re talking to each other the flow seems very disjointed – almost as if they’re living in their own little world, unaware of the others around them. It’s all rather confusing.’”

“‘It’s terrible,’ says Jac calmly. ‘It’s certainly done like a stage play – but a terribly boring one. It reminds me of improvisation classes at school drama club – not too bad for the participants, but hell for anyone forced to watch.’”

“The malfunctioning time machine takes our travellers to The Brink of Disaster, which is apparently a more unpleasant place to be than merely The Edge of Destruction. The panel seem to agree.”

Hurrah! It’s only three stories in, and already I’m disagreeing with them entirely.

“You attacked us. And when we were lying helpless on the floor, you tampered with my controls.”

“But why would we? For what reason?”

“Blackmail, that’s why. You tried to force me to return you to England.”

“How dare you! Do you realise, you stupid old man, that you’d have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian hadn’t made fire for you?
“And what about what we went through against the Daleks? Not just for us, but for you and Susan too, and all because you tricked us into going down to the city.
“Accuse us? You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us! Gratitude’s the last thing you’ll ever have, or any sort of common sense either.”

Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles’ About Time 1:

“And, joy, oh rapture unconfined; it’s the debut of Barbara’s ‘battle-dress’ of big jumper, capri-pants and court shoes (this isn’t just us being facetious. The production team called it that, and Ian says so on screen in The Chase).”

And it’s unsurprising that the author of Christmas On A Rational Planet should zero in on the role of the Ship:

“The ending seems risible because we’re looking at the wrong thing; the twist isn’t, ‘d’oh, the fast return switch was stuck’, the twist is that the Ship has been communicating. For anyone who grew up in the ’70s, the idea that the TARDIS might be conscious is natural and normal, yet here… We’re not supposed to notice that the Ship itself is a suspect.”

A Review by Geoffrey Glass

“Nothing can be taken for granted -- not the nature of the menace, not the decency of the characters, and certainty not their sanity. That is what gives the story its edge: this seems more like an excerpt from Psycho than a Doctor Who story.”

Paul Clarke’s Review

“Susan does well here – the scene with the scissors is both disturbing and dramatic and is well-acted by Ford; she has never seemed so unearthly. Her paranoia is more unsettling than the Doctor’s, precisely because she has been so trusting of Ian and Barbara up until this point and it is interesting that she seems more sensitive to the TARDIS than he does at this point – possibly part of the same theme developed further in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ and ‘The Sensorites’. She is also generally surprisingly likeable and is instrumental in cementing this first TARDIS crew together, as the natural link between her grandfather and her teachers (it is she, remember, who prompts the Doctor to apologize properly to Barbara, and he always seems more stung by her disapproval than that of others).”

Radio Times teasers for The Edge of Destruction

The Edge of Destruction
“A new adventure begins for the mysterious doctor and his companions.”

The Brink of Disaster
“Further adventures aboard the strange spaceship.”

Available In All Good Shops?

The Edge of Destruction has previously been released on VHS and published in an expanded and rather fun Target novelisation by Nigel Robinson which is worth looking out if you can find it (despite being a little too prosaic in terms of the characters at times, and sheepishly glossing over the spring), but the best way to enjoy it is on the DVD release, spruced up and with plenty of extras. On the downside, it’s the only complete story with no commentary, which is irritating, but it’s packaged along with two other stories as part of the splendid box set Doctor Who – The Beginning, and together those first thirteen episodes make up a larger story in some ways unmatched in the rest of Doctor Who. You can sample the story via a trailer that someone's put together for YouTube – I love the closing credits, though I'd put at least Verity Lambert, David Whitaker and the directors in big letters at the end…

Why Is This Brilliant?

It’s quite unlike anything else; Doctor Who as an experimental stage play.

Every one of the time travellers alienates us at some point, but Susan gets the prize disturbing moments – getting the series into trouble (for the first time?) by going crazy with the scissors, and looking like an evil nun as she does her best to creep Barbara out.

Barbara’s magnificent face-off with the Doctor, where she slices his argument and authority to pieces but, like any humiliation, that doesn’t really solve anything straight away.

William Hartnell and the brilliant use of light and shadow make the Doctor seem more alien and more compelling than ever – then he stammers bashfully when trying to apologise.

The TARDIS coming ‘back to life’ as the sound and light rises makes your heart soar.

“Dr. Who and the Daleks”

2009-05-04T17:00:00.003+01:00

There was a time when Bank Holiday Mondays always seemed to see a dodgy Dalek movie stuffed into the schedules of BBC2 or Channel 4 so, in the strange absence of a showing today and having written about the original The Daleks last week, here’s a holiday treat. Don’t say I haven’t warned you. While I won’t pay this quite as much attention as the TV stories, there’s still something hypnotic about “Dr. Who and the Daleks” – with its slightly better sequel, perhaps the sort-of-Doctor Who seen more often than any other, and isn’t it interesting that the first two stories got about two goes each, in very different ways?

This film is now extraordinarily easy to track down on DVD, having been released in multiple editions, in multiple countries, and with the reels in multiple order (though less noticeably than the second Dalek movie). It’s best to pick up one of the ones that package both films with the lively Dalekmania documentary and groovy trailer narrated by Earthbound “science professor” Dr Who, with its big glowing letters that are SO CLOSE, you can feel their fire, and which blatantly gives away the end in case by some miracle you’d not seen it all before. When I was a boy, though, I’d been thrilled by the novel and had seen the sequel – Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. – several times, so when each time I managed to miss a showing of this one on TV it grew in stature in my imagination. By the time I eventually got to see it, we’d even got a colour telly, so I’d been waiting years and years. And I have to admit, the whole farrago and the green Thals in particular were the first time that Doctor Who(ish) seriously disappointed me. These days, of course, I have no problem with camp men in the woods, and I can appreciate it for what it is: rubbish. On the bright side, the TV series since 2005 has made kids across the world thrilled by great big Daleks with great big ‘ears’ more than this film ever did.

But enough grumping. Though they’re not a patch on the telly versions, I’m very fond of warm, friendly Dr Who and Barbara Who, and of Susie Who (who gets all the best bits), though a pit of starving alligators would be too good for Ian Not-Who. As far as DWM goes, Time Team put off having to confront the movies for a while, but enjoyed them when they did; rather than covering them immediately after the originals, or with the 1965 and 1966 stories that were airing when the films were released, they were well into Patrick Troughton’s stories before doing these as a special. So, jumping ahead to that issue, they’d gone from one page of Time Team to two some time before, and they’d long been printing a selection of readers’ views at the side. By then, I’d started sending in my own contributions – though they didn’t pick any for this particular movie – so the one-liners below were the ones I actually fired off at the end of 2000 (I’ll be travelling back in time again for my next post), along with a handful of others from watching it today. See if you can spot how I cobbled together my 2004 review by the brilliant notion of sticking some of my (de-bowdlerised) Time Team one-liners together with daytime TV-style links! Enjoy.

My ‘The Review all Doctor Who Challenge’ posting in an online discussion, January 2004:

Yes, it’s my first DVD-style special feature, IN COLOR…

All right, this film remake of The Daleks isn’t ‘proper’ Doctor Who, but a lot of people will know it much better than the ‘real’ version. On the surface, the vastly larger budget and colour film instead of monochrome telerecording mean it both looks and sounds far better than the original, so a lot of people would watch it that wouldn’t touch the old black and white one with a barge pole. And it deserves kudos for its constant screenings helping to keep the series in the public eye. The trouble is, if ever there was one piece of “Doctor Who” that gave people the impression that it was a load of silly running about in corridors, this is it…

It’s both over-coloured and a pale imitation; it badly needs a theme with the punch of the fantastic TV version and an exciting look instead of a blurry mishmash, though the rest of the score is as memorable in its own bombastic way as the disturbing music concrete of the telly. The leads are very odd – Cushing is definitely a cuddly human inventor called Dr Who, and marvellous actor as he was, he just didn’t give it the same edge as Billy the Brilliant Bastard. Barbara is just a ‘dolly bird’ whose only common feature with her TV counterpart is big hair, though Jennie Linden is quite good – just given nothing to do. Roberta Tovey’s Susan gets a role that TV’s Carole Ann Ford would probably have killed for, mainly at the expense of Ian, who’s downgraded to lobotomy victim and comic relief, responsible for all the worst scenes.

The TARDIS set, meanwhile, achieves the extraordinary achievement of looking an absolute mess and much cheaper than the TV version. Sets in general are a huge problem – they’ve clearly been built bigger, and had money flung at them, and some of them (the Dalek control room) actually look terrific. They just don’t have much imagination – TV’s budget meant models, design and careful camerawork all contrived to give the impression of small sets aiming high, trying to trick you that they’re big. The film has comparatively enormous sets that only try to look as big as they are, from the ‘part of the city’ exterior that’s all you see to the Daleks’ ‘Nazi rally’, which has a lot more Daleks than the telly, but is still trying to do Nuremberg in… a room. There’s just no sense of scale. Even the Daleks themselves are bigger and thus less effective, as it makes it easier to notice there are people inside them – though it makes more sense of the weakest part of the original script, where Nation undermined his aliens by having the tallest member of the cast climb inside one! Here, at least, the Daleks are bigger and Ian smaller.

There are just so many things that go wrong. I’m less horror-struck by the camp green Thals than I was as a boy, but I still think the short-range clouds of vapour the Daleks shoot out are rubbish (what are they trying to do, freeze off their enemies’ verrucas?). At half the original length, there are huge cuts, but not enough to the pointless clamber through the mountains, and we get the ghastly soft-centre of the cowardly Thal’s sacrifice turning into a “What a relief” cop-out. It would be a shoe-in for worst scene, were it not for the closing scene in the TARDIS, not just slapstick but totally inept slapstick, with Ian at the centre of it so the film ends not with a bang, but with a wanker. Ian’s attempt to convince the Thals to abandon their pacifism certainly works; I’m a non-violent man, but Roy Castle’s so irritating here I’d have struck him.

OK, some bits are good; there are sinister moments in subdued lighting, and the spectacle of big rocks splitting and Daleks shouting is great, if completely barmy. The climax still doesn’t really work, but that looks far better than the TV version, despite relying on eye-poppingly stupid, suicidal Daleks. It ends up entertaining and irritating in almost equal measures, but far more blatantly talking down to the kiddies than the series ever did on TV, and pretty colours aren’t a patch on cheap, scary black and white.

The trailer is the grooviest thing about it. Who could resist those big, glowing letters – “SO THRILLING you must be there!” But for me, it remains a warning that Doctor Who is much better off with an imagination and no budget than the other way around, while the definitive version of this story remains the book by David Whitaker…

And I Said…

The trailer is the grooviest thing about it. Who could resist those big, glowing letters – “SO THRILLING you must be there!”

From Ian’s opening pratfalls, it’s instantly clear which character has suffered the biggest downgrade from TV, and despite appearances, it isn’t “Susie”.

Ian has devolved from brave science teacher to idiot, slightly cowardly comic relief (ironically the only lead with no apparent interest in science at all), and is responsible for all the worst scenes.

Barbara is just a ‘dolly bird’ whose only common feature with her TV counterpart is big hair; a shame, as Jennie Linden is quite good – just given nothing to do (her first scene reading The Science of Science is her only sign of intelligence in the film).

Roberta Tovey’s Susan is the real eye-opener, gaining from the deficiencies of the other leads to be actually rather strong – in some ways, stronger than on TV – and an unusually watchable and unpatronised child actor. Cushing plays very well along with her, constantly encouraging her, too.

When they arrive in the petrified forest, things finally look good; the blue ‘night’ lighting is quite eerie, and for the first time “Dr Who” in colour really works. Why does Susan recognise a “lily amphiladelphicum” on an alien planet, though?

Oddly enough, as the set is clearly much larger, the Dalek City appears much smaller. Perhaps the larger-scale sets like the City and cliffs look more like sets with fixed limits and edges. Without claustrophobia inside, too, the sets aren’t able to be big enough to be really grand. Oh, and Ian has more desperate slapstick with the doors. How very entertaining.

For no apparent reason, the dastardly Daleks choose the Doctor to search, and so, of course, they immediately find the fluid link in his pocket and confiscate it (but not Babs’ lipstick, or Ian’s string?).

These Men of Steel have a major tendency to talk amongst themselves to show us they’re evil – discussing the drug, ooh, Mr Callous Dalek exclaims, “Let them die.” Then they decide, again for no apparent reason, to search our heroine by sticking her on the plinth under the big light, and find the extra drugs. But now she can keep them anyway. Make your mind up, can’t you?

The Daleks’ rally is well-staged, but as with the big-with-edges City set, and the high-with-edges mountain set, the relatively bigger budget exposes its own limitations. By trying to look bigger with more money rather than more imagination, it looks better-made but more blatantly small – it’s not an army of Daleks, just a roomful.

Throughout the film, Daleks always plot out loud, and they can’t help blabbing. They tell Susan that now they’ve got her note – to say nothing of English, why would the Thals know her writing? – they’ll kill the Thals anyway, so nerrr!

The high shots of the Thals entering the City are very effective, and at last there’s a really good bit of music. Very grand and ponderous! Shame it all peters out slightly as the Thals run in every direction, but at last there’s been an impressive bit of melodrama.

Cushing plays Dr Who not as a grandfather but a sort of kindly uncle, with that reckless schoolboyish quality – endearing, but no presence. There’s no way he could ever convince in the “Take her to the Daleks!” scene, even without another big panto wink. Someone should have told him.

The Daleks’ rally to “Destroy the Thals!” is rather well-staged, but as with the big-with-edges City set, and the high-with-edges mountain set, the relatively bigger budget actually exposes its own limitations. It tries to look bigger with more money rather than more imagination, and so looks better quality, but more blatantly small – it’s not an army of Daleks, just a roomful.

The movie works much better in subdued lighting, as really quite sinister shadowy Thals creep up to the City walls with their silly mirrors. It also helps make the blazing lights as the big rocks split to reveal the front of the City looks very impressive, as are the shouting Daleks, shot from below. Shame it’s completely barmy, but hey, don’t knock the film’s best spectacle!

Drama in the mountains of terror is cruelly undermined by Antodus’ plunge to his death being called off. After his heroic slice of the knife, his cry from the ledge of “Hey! Get me out of here!” is a terrible anti-climax. “What a relief,” says Barbara. No, we don’t think so. It’s probably the worst cop-out until The Trial of a Time Lord 14.

The climax still isn’t as good as it could be, but much better than the TV version, with Daleks shooting each other and some satisfying bangs. Shame the Daleks have all turned fantastically stupid, though, not spotting the Thals (I mean, how could you miss them in those outfits?), constantly shooting each other and even ganging up to destroy their own controls – though that console blows up jolly nicely.

The closing scene provides more of Ian’s woeful slapstick with a stupidly waggling lever, but the real let-down is the careless selection of a completely different film grain, angle and general appearance for the Roman soldiers seen through the doors, which I knew looked very bad even on a little TV as a child. So, the film ends not with a bang, but with a waggle.

It’s entertaining and irritating in almost equal measures, but far more blatantly talking down to the kiddies than the series ever did on TV – even if the most ‘childish’ part goes to the ‘male lead’, while the usually sidelined girl part is serious and effective. Not a bad stab at colour, at least when it’s dark, but not a patch on cheap, scary black and white.

And I Didn’t Say…
(but would have done if I’d thought of it at the time)

Perhaps the terrible TARDIS set is meant to be an endearingly ramshackle contrast with the highly organised Dalek control room, but while the Dalek City has a certain tacky grandeur, you can’t help noticing that the fluid links are just hung on hooks on a board, and don’t actually link anything to anything.

Some of this version is impressive, but too often bigger seems smaller: showing everything rather than hinting with close-ups and the TV series’ ‘bigger, further away’ model makes the movie compare surprisingly poorly for sense of scale. On TV, the sets were small, but trying to trick you that they look big. In the movie, the sets are bigger, but they only try to look as big as they are.

It’s hysterical that they only realised after shooting Dalek scenes that their ‘indicator lights’ were supposed to flash in time with speech – sit back and gape as the bored Dalek operators flash very slowly indeed, then decide to flick their finger on the button really quickly for a bit, so that the dialogue attempting to fit the pattern paces out as “One… of… you… four… must… go… out… side… the… ci… ty… Whichwillitbe?”

Susan in the big, dark, scary forest builds quite an effective atmosphere… Until that pan up from Alydon’s split elfin boots to his outrageous make-up. Barrie Ingham, bless him, tries to recover a little dignity by playing it dead straight. Or as straight as you can in that eyeshadow.

While Ian and Babs go off on a bit of a trek (which seems to take no time at all in this version), Dr Who does some entertaining. He burns the cakes, nabs the silly jagged mirrors (they’ve invented a polishing machine for getting a reflective surface, but no heavy-duty sanders to file off the sharp bits, eh?) and cries “Madam!” in a hugely amusing way. It’s fun, but it doesn’t exactly pile up the tension.

You just know that the Thal cloaks the time travellers are given at the end will only be worn if the Thals come for tea.

What They Said…

Time Team, Doctor Who Magazine 300, February 2001:

“The lights are already low as Peter struggles to his seat. The air is crackling with anticipation and the floor is crackling with spilled popcorn. Clayton is sucking on a beaker of Fanta roughly the size of delegate Beaus, while Richard is cradling a hot dog so large that Vicki would probably have given it a nickname and adopted it as a pet.”

“‘They’re superb, aren’t they?’ agrees Richard. ‘So imposing, and the tone of the voices is deep, echoey and menacing. They’re actually scary!’”
“‘Their voices are very slow, though,’ adds Clayton. ‘You wouldn’t want to be cornered by that Red Dalek at a party.’”

Unsung ‘compiler’ Gary Gillatt has really got into the swing of things by this point. Track down a copy of that issue’s Time Team for the full context of his mention of Ann Widdecombe.

“The film does demonstrate that the strength of the BBC broadcast was in the characterisations of the regulars… The most intelligent of the TARDIS crew is young Susie, played by Roberta Tovey as smug and humourless and far too bloody clever for her own good. Not so much an unearthly child as an ungodly one.”
Rob Shearman, London

Rob was for a long time the undisputed king of the Time Team readers’ comments – for some reason, they stopped printing what he said when his own Dalek stories started being made – and I have a suspicion that he didn’t warm to Susie.

“Hey! Get me out of here!”

The Daleks

2009-04-30T23:00:00.048+01:00

The second Doctor Who story becomes the series’ archetype – not least because, like any good archetype, it’s a story told over and over again, in homages, in novelisation, on the big screen, and in so many of the author’s later scripts. It’s shallow at times, but I still think it’s terrific, and if it hadn’t looked and sounded so amazing – well, we’d none of us be here writing about Doctor Who four and a half decades later, would we? Still less writing dozens of bizarre one-liners that I might have written a decade ago if the magazine I would have sent them into was asking for them back then (yes, this blog is as strange as that sounds).

Like many others, I first got to know the story through David Whitaker’s fantastic book, so I was delighted to find this striking piece inspired by the novel from a very talented chap called Colin Brockhurst, who’s kindly allowed me to display it here. Take a look at his site, and especially his sublime mash-up (after my previous entry) of The Dead Planet and Planet of the Dead… And, given that four years ago today the Radio Times had Daleks on the front for what’s been voted the best magazine cover of all time (heh), Colin’s also created a very special Radio Times cover of his own.

Ian Chesterton In An Exciting Adventure With A Glass Dalek

My ‘The Review all Doctor Who Challenge’ posting in an online discussion, January 2004:

The Doctor gradually evolves into a moral hero, opposing the Daleks’ genocidal plans, and the whole thing looks extraordinary. Designer Ray Cusick does amazing things creating the petrified forest, the city, corridors for once that don’t look built for humans and, of course, the Daleks themselves.

The plot, on the other hand, starts off intriguing but runs out about three episodes early, and the climax is a mess. The dialogue and characterisation also seem very clunky after the previous story.

And I Said…

Today’s the fourth anniversary of Dalek (even that seems old, now) – is this the story that Christopher Eccleston watched when he talked about how scared the Daleks were inside their shells?

Of all the reasons to pay eternal homage at the shrine of St Verity, the BBC’s youngest producer defying the one high-up who actually wanted her there in order to keep the Daleks ranks with casting Bill Hartnell as a decision that would make the programme last for ever.

Even more than the first story, how do you approach reviewing this one? By introducing the Daleks and rocket-boosting the ratings, it’s just about the most important Doctor Who story ever made. And we all know it so well, though not usually from actually watching it but by reading the book and watching the film instead…

Hooray! It’s the Doctor as a young man again. Makes a change from that old git we saw running around with Michelle Ryan the other week.

An Unearthly Child is great drama and expands your mind, but this story expands the canvas – it says, ‘The first time wasn’t a fluke, and wasn’t the limit. There’s much more weird shit to go.’

Though the characterisation is considerably shallower here, this still continues the first story as an ongoing narrative to a remarkable extent – thank goodness the regulars are still developing, as the conflict between them is much more interesting than the Thals. Then we get echoes of An Unearthly Child in a tribe, a forest, a dead animal, a monster’s-eye-view – and, perhaps most strikingly, mass killing being the thing that brings the Doctor out of his detachment to make a moral judgement.

Did David Whitaker carefully plan ahead for the second story in the first by breaking the Doctor’s hand-held Geiger counter?

Though the first story had perhaps the most brilliant first episode the show has ever created, The Dead Planet is the perfect template for a part one – miss the scary details on arrival, go exploring, see all kinds of strange things and hear all kinds of strange noises, build tension, throw a monster at the cliffhanger and, ideally, show us the TARDIS crew and nobody else (which isn’t the same as having fake arguments in the TARDIS while the story goes on without you)…

The newly formed TARDIS crew are still fighting each other, but throwing an almighty threat against them helps; the cavemen showed the Doctor that Ian and Barbara aren’t so primitive, while the Daleks show the teachers that the Doctor’s not so disagreeable.

Barbara’s not nearly such a strong character this story – except, curiously, when feeling vindictive towards the Doctor. She turns from nervous subservience to Ian to exploding, “Don’t you ever think he deserves something to happen to him?” She clearly feels like they’ve been with the Doctor ages.

Like the first story, this has at its heart one genius concept and design – though the genius here is tilted more towards the latter. But bless writer Terry Nation and designer Ray Cusick for showing what amazing things this show could do!

The most immediately impressive thing about this story is how completely it takes you to another world. The sweeps of electronic ‘music’ are eerily effective in getting you off-kilter and building tension, but the visual design – good as Barry Newbery was – is an incredible step up. The petrified jungle is superb, and the City, extraordinary. For really striking worlds, forty-five years later, there’s Planet of Evil, and… Very few others compete.

I know if you notice the scenery a show’s meant to be lost… But what fantastic scenery! Surely it’s all right to admire something that’s not ‘a nice office’ but a whole alien vista. In this show, the scenery can be a star, too.

This story’s Terry Nation at his best, with so, so many of his favourite elements already in place yet with some freshness to them here, action, adventure and above all a strong central concept… But already much more interested in a travelogue than in characters.

Here, Susan is absolutely confident that the Ship can go where they want it – they just need information. And Grandfather’s so forgetful, you see… I used to believe that, to start with at least, the Doctor was just missing data rather than unable to direct the Ship, but it becomes ever clearer that Susan’s regurgitating his excuses rather than making statements of fact.

This week, it’s Susan who’s being dismissed as an hysterical fantasising female. She’s right, of course, just as Barbara was in prehistory.

While the Doctor’s suddenly vulnerable pleading is endearing, Barbara’s manner on going in to see Susan on his behalf is distinctly schoolmarmish.

Ian bombarding the Doctor with awkward questions and the Doctor choosing just to answer “What are we going to eat?” out of the barrage with “That’s a very good idea – I’m hungry” is great. He’s very endearing, with Ian rolling his eyes, then getting his own back as the Doctor gets testy over his jokey complaint that the bacon’s a bit salty – but all that just gets you relaxed enough to miss the portent of Barbara’s headache…

Somehow the two eyes on stalks of the Magnodon – can you believe it, the series’ actual first monster – look a bit silly, while a single one for the Daleks isn’t. Is it because a pair looks more B-Movie? And did all the Dals and Thals, like other Skaroine life, have eyes on stalks before they mutated?

The City looks extraordinary from that first long-view from the cliff edge – thank goodness the first episode had to be re-shot, and they took the time to improve the model! The doomy chord as we see it, wreathed in mist, is hugely effective and rather creepy, followed as they make their way down by the different angles and distances until they’re into those curved, short doors of the set itself.

Of all the reasons to pay eternal homage at the shrine of St Verity, the BBC’s youngest producer defying the one high-up who actually wanted her there in order to keep the Daleks ranks with casting Bill Hartnell as a decision that would make the programme last for ever.

The Doctor, noticeably, only lies because he doesn’t want to argue with Susan – that way, he can both appear to accede to her pleas, and get his own way. His obvious darting under the console to fix it and playing innocent while Ian glares, plainly not believing a word, is a scream. Particularly when the Doctor, affecting concern at his stranded Ship, can’t help but giggle.

The Doctor’s just like a stroppy kid coming up with any wheeze to get his own way – he must have given the children watching fabulously unsuitable ideas!

Barbara lost and increasingly desperate in the City is harrowing precisely because she’s both been so strong, and because it could be any one of us – the way that the walls themselves seem to be spying on her, from her own distorted reflections to her putting her hand across the camera as if it’s within the wall, makes it chillingly claustrophobic. Herded by doors, forced down in a lift as if the City’s coming alive, no wonder that something closing in is the final straw…

The lights are turned way down in the radiation meter room, with just that low lighting from below and their sweat on their faces. It’s a horribly real griminess as the atmosphere takes its toll on them.

Though the Doctor and Ian clash throughout this story, perhaps the most interesting point is on the form that that the City people’s intelligence will take – “Oh, as if that matters!” exclaims the Doctor testily, and the question remains open as to whether they’re talking about physical or moral forms, and perhaps each lead’s answer would be the same in each case: one emotionally involved, the other an academically interested observer, more open-minded but perhaps not seeing the potential for evil.

Though the Doctor does the right thing in confessing about the fluid link to protect Susan, it’s shocking that that same urge suggests abandoning Barbara. “It’s time you faced up to your responsibilities!” thunders Ian. So, Russell T Davies wasn’t quite the first person to introduce that concept to the series… You can see where he gets his love of vertical storytelling with lifts, too.

When the Doctor hears the word “Dalek” as they talk of their forefathers, Richard watches his expression – it could easily be one of alarm, not as something he’s never heard of closes in, but as something he’s heard of all too terribly does.

It strikes me that kids watching the black and white here won’t be imagining the Daleks in silver and blue, but brass and gold…

We see Barbara huddled on the floor of the cell in long shot; it’s to make her look as small and vulnerable as possible. But, if physically more helpless, it’s Barbara’s keen mind that first hypothesises that there’s something inside the Daleks.

Exhausted, ill, thrust into the Daleks’ interrogation light, the Doctor’s still extraordinary to watch, his eyes darting as he races through deductions about drugs and the history of Skaro. He’ll answer a question, then mutter another to himself as an aside; his body may be weak, but his mind’s working hard (and, Richard points out, every bit of that is Billy’s doing).

Cornered by the Daleks, it’s the scientific observer the Doctor who makes the proposal to send one of his party out, with the emotional guarantee that the others will be surety for their return. He’s already learning to put aside his detachment.

Blimey, Alydon does declaim. It’s because all the acting’s been relatively naturalistic so far in the series; is the series’ first ‘bland alien’ also the first example of incredibly posh ‘Doctor Who acting’?

That dirty load of cave people couldn’t last, could they? It’s only the second story, and suddenly it’s a nice received pronunciation BBC tribe in the jungle!

“I’m not quite so blind,” says Alydon of Dyoni’s attraction to him. “Though you do look like you’ve got dressed in the dark,” says Richard of his lack of attraction to Alydon.

How does Susan signing her name work? Even if the TARDIS enables you to read alien languages, it can’t work on the Thals when the message is simply sent along to them – it’d have to translate for everyone on every planet where there’s a TARDIS, and wouldn’t we all notice if we could suddenly read Chinese when the Doctor’s about?

The first near-appearance of the Daleks’ catchphrase comes in the third episode, and it’s doubly jarring in retrospect: not only is it “Extermination” rather than “Exterminate!” but it’s actually a question, “Extermination, then?” Ever since, you’d expect a Dalek talking about death to make it a demand or a decree, not a mere possibility that they turn down.

Kids used to flying Daleks must be very surprised by ones that have to stay stuck to the floor. And infra-red that can’t see through mud.

Though the ‘womenfolk’ are ‘protected’ from seeing the Dalek’s interior, though Ian climbs inside despite complaining that it’s cramped, though we get the first bad nasal impression of a Dalek… None of that really matters when you have such a cracking cliffhanger of bubbling noise, horrified reactions and a crawling claw.

Why on Skaro does Ian – the largest member of the party – get into the Dalek? Is it because he’s the man and has to do all the action, reflecting more of the sexism that’s much more noticeable here than in An Unearthly Child? And even if they’d more sensibly tucked Susan inside, isn’t it stupidly early to lose the illusion that there can’t be a man in there?

There’s not a lot of characterisation in the Thals – Alydon is stiff and very posh, Temmosus laid-back and even more posh – but at least there are a couple of flutterings of rivalry. Dyoni is spiky about Susan, which Alydon doesn’t notice or understand until he has it pointed out to him, while Ganatus is rather fey and cynical, lounging about laughing at Alydon. Which is exactly what the man needs!

Most of this looks brilliant, and far more successful than almost any other alien world and alien race in Doctor Who. The Thals, unfortunately, are pants: their ‘characters’; the episodes where we’re supposed to care about their adventures in the tunnels; and, perhaps most of all, their pants.

There’s a slight problem with the moral that “dislike for the unlike” is bad when the whole story relies on the viewer going ‘Uurghh! Ugly means evil!’ The anti-fascist message is undermined by the ‘good’ race being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices.

Temmosus spouts home-made wisdom about fate and not struggling against the inevitable, but interestingly for the leader of the pacifists uses the metaphors of victory and defeat. I’d still rather watch him being beastly to Robin Hood, though.

Ganatus and Alydon are suspicious of the Daleks, suggesting that some of the Thals’ old warrior attitudes still remain; Temmosus hopes that “Perhaps we can exchange ideas with them, learn from them…” It’s a very Liberal free trade of ideas, as opposed to the Daleks’ (and some Thals’) xenophobic insularity. The Doctor, more scientifically bent than in almost any other story, seems like the Daleks if they had Temmosus’ attitude.

Ironically, Alydon is thinking like a Dalek when he fears and hates the unknown, after the Thals, too, have just found themselves no longer alone on the planet. “Or are they shocked and horrified? Perhaps insanely jealous?” He has no reason to think that, says Temmosus. And it’s true: this is the first Doctor Who story like that, so the formula is only being made as they speak.

The Daleks are callous and unpleasant, they wound Ian and keep our heroes prisoner, but it’s the TARDIS crew who kill a Dalek by cutting off its power and then blat another down a lift shaft – that’s two Daleks dead before they’ve actually killed anyone…

The lift floor indicator’s on a sort of binary-related notation of ones and zeroes, establishing a suitably strange and hi-tech ambience. Shame the Geiger counter was in English, really.

Two Daleks have died, but there’s no emotional connection to that when they announce that our heroes are to be exterminated: it’s seemingly because they’ve escaped out of Dalek control and are of no further use, rather than because they’ve killed.

When it’s Susan who won’t desert the Thals rather than Ian refusing to leave Barbara, Ian suddenly arbitrates and makes the decision. It’s as if Terry Nation thinks he’s the leader for this story – his first, but not his last, misunderstanding of the series!

They may both have been part of a terrible war that laid waste to their planet, but on the nicer side, both races are shit-hot at gardening.

Temmosus’ death is an extraordinary moment – his speech demands attention, the Daleks massing behind the doors with those gun-sticks twitching eagerly are horribly malevolent, and the eerie scrapes and low booms of the music heighten the tension brilliantly.

The Daleks are brilliant architects, have striking technology, can watch what everyone else is up to and can change their plans each time they’re foiled to come up with something better. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that their carefully-arranged ambush against the whole Thal people, who they have surrounded within an unfamiliar City, kills a whole two Thals. That makes the TARDIS crew far more successful mass murderers against the Daleks.

In response to Alydon wondering why the Daleks hate them so much, Ian brutally tells him “they just aren’t human” – begging a question – and it must be a dislike for the unlike, afraid because they’re different, this is presented as a moral that singles the Daleks out as evil, yet it’s exactly how Alydon had judged the Daleks before seeing them.

The racial morality of war and reform is tangled all over the place. Aggression is a choice, but evolution is an inevitable destiny. Judging people by their race is evil, except for the race that you can judge as a whole because every one of them’s evil. The former aggressors become nice, so you should be on their side – but the only way to deal with the current aggressors is to destroy them utterly! It’s as if Terry Nation couldn’t decide whether to forgive the Germans or damn them to eternity, so he did both.

Terry Nation would go on to tell us all that ‘We Are the Daleks!’ but here the connection is much more specific. While the Thals used to be warriors, the Daleks used to be Skaro’s teachers – yes, kids, years before The Dr Who Annual asked ‘Is Your Teacher An Alien?’ it’s they who’ve inevitably become genocidal monsters here. Ian and Barbara are the Daleks.

There’s a slight problem with the moral in that we’re told “dislike for the unlike” is bad, yet the whole story relies on the viewer going ‘Uurghh! Ugly has to mean evil!’ The strong current against fascism is just a little undermined by the ‘good’ race being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices.

When the TARDIS crew make for the Ship at the end of The Ambush, nowadays it feels like unfinished business and we can tell it won’t end there, but after the first story ended with ‘what a horrible situation – let’s run away’, viewers would expect that to be the finish. This is where the series suddenly becomes more than that.

Right from the start, the Daleks are the personification of war in Doctor Who: the Cold War nightmare of nuclear apocalypse underlies this story, but there’s no doubt that they’re fascists, too – their desperate xenophobia, their desire for extermination, Ian’s suggestion of experimentation and, most startlingly, their stiff-suckered salutes are all immediate Nazi allusions.

It’s all very watchable, but it does feel very like the first half’s one story – ‘The Dead Planet and the Metal City’ – that comes to a natural end, but is resurrected for an immediate sequel, ‘Attack Against the Daleks (In the Most Roundabout Way Possible)’, which runs out of all steam save the swamp mist.

It’s rare for one of the Doctor’s companions to show any sexual interest unless her contract’s expired and she’s about to be improbably married off, but here both Barbara and Susan suddenly get the hots for Thals. Babs has some understated, grown-up flirting with Ganatus – but, on first seeing Alydon, Susan’s eyes go wide as saucers and she gets to her knees in front of him. Strewth!

Why does Babs hit it off with Ganatus? Because she’s stuck on a hellish other world that she can get no handle on and, as she says of dating in the first story, “It would be so wonderfully – normal.” Mind you, in the caverns Ian appears to be managing any incipient jealousy by chatting Ganatus up too when they’re jumping the rocks, all “coming” and “quite firm”.

Though this story is both more sexist and has more of a hint of sex than most, the very set-up of the TARDIS crew still defies any comfy ’50s sexism or heterosexism – they might be called a family, but they’re not a traditional one, are they? A mixture of chosen and thrown together, a potential couple that flirts with others, and a single grandparent. So even a Doctor who on the face of it seems heterosexual never seems ‘just like everybody else’.

The Doctor prompts the Daleks to conquer, and they prompt him to resist. With him characterised by his scientific intelligence before his moral outrage, here their utter faith in their own technological ability over all other life makes them seem devised as evil versions of the Doctor.

To this day, the Daleks set the standard for Doctor Who aliens – breaking up the human form rather than making them just like us, but green or a bit pointy. Here, though, they’re much more like people than ever afterwards – having discussions, getting worried, even growing food. These Daleks are people in tanks rather than tanks with gloop inside. The Daleks as we know them really start in their next story.

The Daleks are hugely resourceful here, constantly switching to another plan or piece of technology when one fails – you can’t help feeling the Thals are a bit rubbish by comparison. Their solutions to problems are first ‘go on a very long walk,’ then ‘die’. You can see how the original script was meant to bring them together, but I’m glad it didn’t. That would have been an even bigger mistake than killing the Daleks off – making them suddenly nice, going all Planet of the Ood!

The Daleks’ “Control” springs straight from Daleks unable to work to deciding they must be dying, and straight from their reaction to the drug to their being dependent on radiation. It turns out he’s right, but a couple of leaps, there! And shouldn’t they have spotted that they’re weakening as the radiation dies away?

Ganatus says they always do what the leader decides, but he never decides without their full approval. No wonder they never make a decision.

It’s a shame that the Doctor’s walking straight into the City with a technological distraction is, by its very nature, so swift – “Well, we mustn’t diddle about here!” His beaming that “We’ll show them a thing or two…” is so much more diverting to watch then endless clomping about in caves.

This is perhaps the most thoroughly imagined alien planet design in the show’s history, so it seems churlish to point out the few points when it looks a little iffy. But if I didn’t warn you that when they talk about the forest being “like stone” and not moving in the wind, you can see the petrified fronds waving gently, or that when Ian helps Barbara cling to the smashing rock face, not all of it remains in place, you’d only be disappointed that I’ve oversold it, wouldn’t you?

Having been absolute pacifists for generations, the Thals really take to fighting. They’re rubbish at it, admittedly, but suddenly they’ll throw a punch at the drop of an improbable plastic hat – even Antodus and Ganatus have a very small punch-up in the caves.

The Doctor’s vandalism at the Daleks’ junction box is hugely entertaining, not least for him, but after what we’ve heard about the Ship’s insanely complex locking process, isn’t he nutty as a fruitbat to use the TARDIS key to cause the short circuit?

Blowing the Daleks’ fusebox, the Doctor’s taken with his few simple tools and superior brain. Unfortunately, both are then taken by the Daleks.

The Doctor defines himself against extermination, the first stage towards later opposing oppression – he pleads with the Daleks to use their brains to find a way for both races to live, but is horrified to find that intelligence can also mean wilful slaughter: “That’s sheer murder.” “No. Extermination.” Though Billy doesn’t have anything like as much of a role as Ian does in these episodes, he still steals the show: no other moment has the force of his brilliant, passionate close-up against “This senseless, evil killing…”

The Daleks draw from the Doctor a moral outrage against killing, but our heroes remind the Daleks there’s more out there by simply showing up, inspiring, too, their desire to stretch across Skaro – the Doctor prompts them to conquer, and they prompt him to resist! With him characterised by his scientific intelligence, here their utter faith in their own technological ability over all other life makes them seem devised as evil versions of the Doctor.

“I have some experience with these corridors… They all look alike,” says Barbara. Crikey, that line came in early!

Lifts! Daleks! Travelogues! Cardboard characters! Sexism! Radiation! The TARDIS immobilised! The Second World War! Countdowns! Monsters! Everything! I’m not the world’s biggest admirer of Terry Nation’s writing, but he brings a huge amount to the series. There’s very little of it he exactly invents – HG Wells, Dan Dare, war stories – but most of it sticks, doesn’t it?

After so many episodes, the ‘climax’ is all over the place. With most of the Thals stuck way back down the corridor, they just rush in with, what, a stick and a bit of rope? Is that supposed to defeat the Daleks? Somewhat astoundingly, it does. Oh, my mistake – Babs has a rock to bung!

Oh dear. A Dalek is trapped just by grabbing it, and they’re rubbish at using their superior weapons; Ian pulls a magnet off the Doctor and throws it at a Dalek just for some action. Then the Dalek counting down handily stops at four, as – with the power not cut by what appears to be a Dalek bumping into a wall for another 32 seconds – continued narration would have called attention to an unfortunate timing malfunction.

A Thal abseils in from the roof, hilariously, and is shot. Then gets up and hits the Dalek that shot him. Equally hilariously, ‘dead’ Daleks lie on their backs, like beetles or dogs with their legs in the air, except the last one, which raises its eye-stalk.

“It’s finished – the final war. Five hundred years of destruction end in this,” declaims Alydon. “No doubt you will have other wars to fight,” says the Doctor cheerily, while poor Ganatus sighs, “Yes. If only there’d been – some other way.” Did you hear that, Johnny Byrne? I bet you did.

Ganatus gives Barbara a bolt of cloth to make a dress. That happens a lot in the early stories, and is perhaps more dated than anything else in the series.

The closing cliffhanger, with some sort of an explosion and the TARDIS crew falling away from the gleaming console, is brilliant – you immediately assume that the fluid link’s blown up.

Despite this being the first William Hartnell story I could re-watch on proper video, other versions keep competing in my head. But, then, with the magnificent book, and the not-so magnificent film, and all those images in your head, there was more of this to play with than any other story. In whatever version, I always remember the dead world, the Dalek City, and the Doctor’s lie…

“I’m trying to imagine what sort of people these are.”

“They’re intelligent, anyway, very intelligent.”

“Yes, but how do they use their intelligence – what form does it take?”

“Oh, as if that matters!”

The Doctor’s Story

He’s slightly less centre-stage here, and perhaps for that reason William Hartnell’s performance is slightly less blazingly memorable; he’s given much less to do. Despite that, his desire to explore sparks off the whole story, he’s as wicked at the start as he ever is – and, imprisoned by the Daleks, his studied neutrality cracks wide open and his moment of moral horror at the previous story’s slaughter flourishes into full-scale outraged confrontation. It’s one of the Doctor’s finest moments, and the most gripping scene in this whole story.

For those of you who go on about “Billyfluffs,” when Mr Hartnell occasionally seems to stumble over his lines, there’s a famous early example here when the Doctor momentarily confuses the words “gloves” and “drugs” – but, as he’s meant to be delirious at that point, and as he also gets Ian’s surname wrong in this story for the first (and second) time yet that’s clearly scripted, I wonder just how much of it’s deliberate. Not all, by any means, but I suspect rather more than we tend to think.

Dalek Wannabes

This is the one everyone wanted to be. Particularly throughout the ’60s, you can find any number of Doctor Who stories trying to tell the same story – not least those by Terry Nation – and even more that devise a monster that’s destined to be ‘the next Daleks’. Unlike evolution in a Terry Nation story, though, that destiny turns out to be very evitable indeed. Just watch them as they come up.

What They Said…

Time Team, Doctor Who Magazine 279-280, June-July 1999:

“Peter is distracted by his eight-month-old son Harry, who is teething – his anxious bawling rings through the house. But then a strange thing happens. As the Doctor Who theme echoes back to the baby, he falls instantly and deeply asleep. Peter notes this development with interest.”

“‘Then again,’ Clayton adds, ‘Why are the Thals attacking the Daleks with planks? And why is it working?’”

“‘Can we rewind that bit?’ asks Peter. ‘I blinked and missed the moment that the Daleks were defeated.’”

Peter’s son Harry and his other children are, ten years later, now well-established as the junior version of the Time Team, previewing every new Doctor Who episode for the BBC website’s Fear Factor.

“But if we need radiation, we can never rebuild the world outside.”

“We do not have to adapt to the environment. We will change the environment to suit us.”

“Nothing can live outside if you do that. Nothing!”

“Except the Daleks.”

A Review by Richard Radcliffe

“There is also a very strange and unsettling sound effect running through the story. It’s as if the Dalek city is alive, the hum of the electricity coursing through its veins. Such is the power of great sound effects though that you are pulled into the mystery of it all.”

Not only is that Dalek ‘heartbeat’ still being used today, but that idea of the whole City being alive makes The Daleks all the better a follow-up to the story which introduced the TARDIS. The Doctor and the Daleks really are symbiotic, aren’t they?

Gareth Roberts in DWM’s 2004 Special The Complete First Doctor:

“The movie softens and sanitises all the more harrowing aspects of the story; the Doctor’s malicious sabotage of the TARDIS, the effects of the radiation sickness on the crew, even the pacifist stance of the Thals, making it a sort of Who-lite – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang played against a post-holocaust background. No, the original is still the best… Terry Nation’s lack of faith in the series that was to make him millions is legendary, but if this is hackwork, he’s a top drawer hack.”

“In fact, a happy accident makes this adventure echo the themes of the previous story. ‘Fire will kill us all in the end,’ warns Old Mother, and if she were to see Skaro she’d think she was proved right.”

Radio Times teasers for The Daleks

The Dead Planet
“The space-ship travels to ‘The Dead Planet’.”

The Survivors
“This week’s story is ‘The Survivors’.”

The Escape
“This week’s adventure is ‘The Escape’.”

The Ambush
“This week’s story is ‘The Ambush’.”

The Expedition
“This week’s story is ‘The Survivors’.”

The Ordeal
“This week’s adventure is ‘The Ordeal’.”

The Rescue
“‘The Rescue’ brings another adventure to an end.”

Look, they’ll get the hang of this next time, OK…

Available In All Good Shops?

Well, gosh. The Daleks has been published as a Script Book, released on VHS twice (the cliffhangers were so exciting that it was the first story they brought out unedited on video) and, remarkably, even made into a movie, of which more later. And that became a comic adaptation, and a colouring book, probably. If you want to experience it at its best, though, there are two options to choose between.

I’d certainly recommend the DVD release, cleaned up to look the best it ever will, and that means pretty extraordinary. You’ll also get a partial commentary and rather a good documentary on the creation of the Daleks, but you’ll get more, too – it’s packaged along with two other stories as part of the splendid box set Doctor Who – The Beginning.

This is also, though, one of those stories where the novel is almost as remarkable as watching it – David Whitaker’s brilliant first-person novelisation, giving the series an alternate beginning and making Ian solidly the hero, was the very first Doctor Who novel, first published in 1964 by Frederick Muller and launching the Target range in 1973. It’s been published by many companies, in many editions, many languages, and even several titles – usually Doctor Who and the Daleks or Doctor Who – The Daleks, but originally and most thrilling as Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. And why not?

These days, you can even get it on CD, evocatively read by William Russell – Ian Chesteron himself – with, appropriately, the first Target cover, some of Chris Achilleos’ most iconic work. Technically, it’s not a very accurate TARDIS. Or Dalek. Or even a great likeness of William Hartnell. So what? It’s still one of the most striking covers in the range, eye-catching, highly stylised, with thrilling flaming guns, and while it may not look exactly like the actor, it’s a great picture of the Doctor, making him mysterious, dangerous and unforgettable. The illustrations within the book are a different matter; in the Target and most other editions, they’re clearly based on publicity stills and are reasonably accurate if dull, making the Doctor sometimes look more like a nice old lady. If you can find the 1965 Armada edition, that has a unique set of internal illustrations where artist Peter Archer lets his imagination run riot, clearly having had reference photos of the Daleks but none of the actors – so Temmosus, reeling back in a blaze of light, dies a muscled hottie, and the climax with Mr Whitaker’s famous glass Dalek gets a vivid action shot brought startlingly to life by Colin’s work above.

Why Is This Brilliant?

The impeccable first episode, from the opening threat, through the exploration, to that scream.

The most extraordinary design, building a world through an unearthly soundscape and simply astonishing feats of visual imagination – the haunting jungle, the magnificent City and, of course, the Daleks themselves.

The Doctor still being a wonderful git, but discovering his morals despite himself – memorably railing in brilliant, passionate close-up against “This senseless, evil killing…”

And the runaway success of this story gave the series a boost with the public that, more than any other, ensured it kept going.

But You Can’t Rewrite History – Naming Doctor Who

2009-04-14T23:27:00.006+01:00

Names have often been a bit of a problem in Doctor Who. What’s Polly’s surname? Or Ace’s? Or Doctor Who’s (clue: not “Doctor Who”)? What does TARDIS stand for, or UNIT, suddenly? But the biggest, and the first one I had to think about once I’d decided on a name for this blog – and that was a surprisingly long story in itself – is about what some of the stories are supposed to be called.

For most Doctor Who stories, the name’s simple. The title appears on the screen, and there you go. That’s it. Except for the series’ first three years, when until the last few of Billy Hartnell’s stories there wasn’t a title for the whole story on screen. Instead, each episode had its own individual title, and any overall name only existed in BBC internal paperwork, or in magazines, or on the novels, videos and DVDs… And a lot of those overall titles don’t agree with each other. Some of the individual episode titles (like Inferno) are used later for the titles of whole stories. Some of the novels have different titles to the overall titles even when they do appear on screen. And, once the series returned to our screens in 2005, Billie Piper’s episodes echoed Billy Hartnell’s, so now any story with more than one episode has people arguing over which title to use all over again.

A Dashed Queer Story

On this day in 1973, the BBC transmitted the second episode of a story called Planet of the Daleks. That’s a nice easy one, surely? Well, yes, it is. Though some would say it was the eighth episode of a twelve-part story made up of Planet of the Daleks and the story before it, Frontier In Space, which I’d call The Master’s Dalek Plan but which will apparently be released on DVD later this year as Dalek War. And it’s not a story about the Daleks’ planet at all, anyway, but just one they’ve occupied; like calling a Second World War story set in Belgium Country of the Germans. But that’s not important right now.

I’ve actually picked out Planet of the Daleks to lead into those stories with titles that sounds confusingly like another. Not only was there 1974’s Planet of the Spiders, but those fans who refer to stories by acronym will be horribly discombobulated; that makes it rather difficult to distinguish from last Saturday’s Easter Special, Planet of the Dead. Which also sounds uncannily like the 1963 episode title The Dead Planet, the name of the episode to first introduce Skaro, the, er, planet of the Daleks.

As it happens, I’m in the middle of making notes to publish here on the second ever Doctor Who story. And guess what? That’s the one that, when I was growing up, was frequently named after its first episode – The Dead Planet. The other name we all knew it by was that of the book: Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks. Then, on video, it was given the title that had most frequently been used in the intervening years – simply The Daleks. The DVD’s taken the same title, and so will I. So that’s settled…

I’m Not Sure, But I Have Some Very Nasty Suspicions

…Except for some TV historians, who argue that, according to the most accurate internal BBC paperwork when The Daleks was first transmitted, it was called The Mutants. To which there are two answers. First, everyone now calls it The Daleks except for about three pedants who call it The Mutants, and as a fair portion of the point of a title is to communicate which story you’re talking about, The Daleks is a more helpful title. Second, also as a fair portion of the point of a title is to communicate which story you’re talking about, it’s not completely helpful that there was another Doctor Who story made in 1972 with the title The Mutants.

The same TV historians consulted the paperwork on a one-episode story – that’s a story made up of just one episode – which was broadcast with the on-screen title Mission To the Unknown, and tell us that it was really called Dalek Cutaway. Because an unambiguous title seen on screen by 8.3 million people is less valid than a description seen by a couple of dozen people on a BBC memo.

The moral of this cautionary tale is that historians who get too caught up in the minutiae can be very silly.

Despite this, for quite some years I stuck to the more accurate titles – excluding those two very silly ones above – that had been unearthed by such TV historians from the BBC archives. Even though people argued about them, and the books and the videos had had different titles, and the titles found in the original paperwork were always less popular, I reckoned, well, they were the titles that the people working on them at the time used, so I’ll go along with them. Never mind that 100,000 BC is almost certainly the wrong date for the story that most people knew as An Unearthly Child; never mind that Inside the Spaceship is a less exciting title than The Edge of Destruction; never mind that The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve would be better-titled The Massacre in the way most people referred to it, because the massacre actually didn’t take place on the eve, but St Bartholomew’s Day itself – I went with what people wanted at the time.

Now, there was a certain amount of sense to this. If you start saying Doctor Who titles don’t count because they’re historically misleading, or a bit dull, or a bit silly, where would you stop? But, eventually, I gave in and changed my mind. Even if these meticulously researched titles were more accurate, what did that actually mean? Even most of the people who worked on them referred to most of them by their individual episode titles, apparently, so a vanishingly small number of people knew these stories by the ‘correct’ title. Then, when the DVD box set Doctor Who – The Beginning came out in 2006, containing the stories An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction, after a couple of weeks’ half-hearted resistance (including trying not to use titles in my review) I thought, oh bugger it, I admit defeat. That’s what those are always going to be called, and even I’m not enough of a pedant to go to the wall over it.

The current issue of Doctor Who Magazine – number 407 – takes the current ‘official’ view that Planet of the Dead is the 200th Doctor Who story (itself reliant on how you break up the stories, and therefore which titles you use; I make it 204 on TV), and asks you to cast a score for every single one. And even in there, some stories are given more than one title, some of them absurdly pedantic, because the pedants are hanging on to some “correct” titles for grim death while the non-pedants want the titles that people can actually find on shop shelves, and no compromise can be reached.

Thank You. That’s What I Wanted To Know

So here, then, are the titles I’m going to be using (very slowly) for the more disputed stories on here, and this is me getting my justification in first, because I know just how much people argue about them.

The first story is ~~The Tribe of Gum~~ ~~100,000 BC~~ An Unearthly Child.

The story that introduces the Daleks is The Daleks, because anything else would be silly.

The little story set inside the Ship is The Edge of Destruction.

The one-episode story which had the title Mission To the Unknown blazoned across the screen is called Mission To the Unknown. If you say otherwise, you’ve got to be kidding, right?

The Massacre is just that.

Doctor Who and the Silurians is indeed called Doctor Who and the Silurians, because even though the “Doctor Who and the…” bit was a mistake, they still stuck it on the screen for seven weeks running, didn’t they?

The Trial of a Time Lord is just called The Trial of a Time Lord on screen, but if you want to describe each of the mini-stories that make up the whole, there are perfectly sensible ones to hand. Cornelltopppingday’s The Discontinuity Guide, despite claiming to use the “democratically elected” versions of all titles, not only failed to explain who voted in this election and who made sure it wasn’t rigged – yes, they just meant ‘most popular’ – but made themselves look utterly ridiculous by giving The Trial of a Time Lord just the one title, but counting it as four stories… Which meant they instructed us in po-faced seriousness that the “democratically elected” titles in common use were the atmospheric 144, the intriguing 145, the preposterously overblown 146 and the doom-laden 147. If you look at the books or the DVDs, The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, Terror of the Vervoids and (even though I used to prefer the more esoteric Time, Inc) The Ultimate Foe are the ones to go with.

The exception to my rule will be The Sensational TV Movie Starring Paul McGann, which some people call by that title because it was on all the publicity at the time, the posters, the video release, the novelisation, the god-awful script book and so on. On screen, it was simply called Doctor Who. But that’s open to confusion, to say the least. Most people call it by some variant of Doctor Who – The TV Movie, which is insufferably boring. The producer was asked a little after it aired what name to give it, and suggested Enemy Within off the cuff, which is so egregiously dreary that almost every series going has already used it. So, though no-one else in the world uses our title, Richard and I always refer to it as Time Waits for No Man, because that was on the posters too, can be claimed to be semi-official with a bit of hand-waving, and is faintly more amusing. On the other hand, Grace: 1999 is much more amusing, but sounds a lot less like a title.

Assuming I get as far as Season 2005 – oh, dear, even the season count gets contentious in the Twenty-First Century, but “Season 27” sounds wrong because there’s such a gap there, and besides, that’s surely the first series of the New Adventures, while “Series 1” is simply wrong, because there are at least 26 others to take into consideration, so despite not all the stories transmitted in a given year being in the same season I’m sticking to the year as the overarching title because it’s the least wrong – then, assuming no ‘settled view’ has broken out, I’ll just make them up as I go along. Calling a whole story by two or three episode titles stuck together would be very unwieldy, so it’ll just be one at a time, and probably the title of the first episode in each story. Except when it isn’t. But I wouldn’t hold your breath about that just yet…

An Unearthly Child

2009-01-25T23:11:00.039Z

I bet you never thought you’d see the day… I’m not sure I did, either. Earlier today, though, I finished my forty-fifth anniversary series of reasons – one principal choice per year – as to ‘Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?’ on my main blog, and having hand-picked so many nuggets of Who, it seemed an opportune moment to go right back to the start, in detail. It’s also, as luck would have it, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the start of the first Doctor Who story I watched all the way from the beginning (The Ark In Space Part One), as well as Hartnellishly the anniversary of one of the episodes of The Daleks (part 6, The Ordeal, which you may or may not read anything into).

Eternal thanks go to many people at the very beginning, particularly then BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman – the main driver behind the creation of Doctor Who – Script Department head Donald Wilson, script editor David Whitaker, scriptwriters Anthony Coburn and before him C. E. Webber, soundscapers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, legendary producer Verity Lambert, and, of course, William Hartnell. The Doctor.

I’ve previously – long, long ago – written a proper review of Doctor Who’s Pilot, which was remade as the first episode of this four-part story. That version was good, but this one’s better. I’m not, however, writing a review of it in the same way. Instead, this blog follows Doctor Who Magazine’s Time Team, which almost ten years ago started reviewing every single televised Doctor Who story, in order, from the very beginning. Before long, they invited comments from readers, which have for most issues since been printed as one-liners at the side of the page. I started this blog (before grinding to an immediate halt) to record the blizzard of thoughts I’ve sent in over the years, and a few others besides. I didn’t start sending in comments to DWM until the end of William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor, so the ones for An Unearthly Child have been done from scratch – probably in even greater numbers, and with even longer ‘one-liners’, given that many of the ideas have been knocking about in my head for a couple of years when I’ve not been writing them.

Anyway, the idea is that this’ll be less a set of reviews than a bunch of eccentric fragments brainstorming each story. I hope they’ll at least be diverting, and a different way approach to what you’ve read on every other site and in every handbook. I still love Time Team and read it assiduously, though I rarely get published in the readers’ comments these days – I hope because many more people are writing in, rather than because I’ve got more rubbish as time goes on. But you’ll get to judge that for yourself, eventually.

I’ve learnt my lesson from rash commitments when I first attempted to start this up, so I’m not promising to post these regularly, or instantly. The next one will definitely not be tomorrow; it’ll probably not be next week; it’ll hopefully be less than a year and a half away. For the moment, then, here are my thoughts on An Unearthly Child – scattered and idiosyncratic, but I hope occasionally original and at least interesting.

My ‘The Review all Doctor Who Challenge’ posting in an online discussion, January 2004:

I’d not seen this for years, and couldn’t believe how good it was. The first episode is an unbeatable introduction to the series, full of mystery, character and amazingly quotable lines, and the rest is damn good, too. I don’t know why people do it down. The actors are all great, Old Mother is fabulous and the Doctor is a git. What more could you want? It’s a bit startling that it displays more emotional depth than we get for the rest of the series, though…

Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 1963 Brilliant?

And I Said…

Wow. Those amazing howlround titles, that incredible music – how many other series tell you how brilliant they are from the first second?

Richard says: “The music in the series today isn’t alien and bizarre any more – back then, the title music alone would disturb the bejeezus out of anyone – but it is still different by being more Technicolor, and dialled up to 11.”

From the 1950s-seeming policeman and the old-fashioned fog, both clashing with the TARDIS’ mysteriously futuristic hum, we hit school and it’s 1963 with a wallop: a haughty, heavily made-up Mod girl bitching about a young Kenneth Williams-a-like.

When Barbara’s a much more capable, together, authoritative young woman than was usually depicted at the time, with a swept-up mass of dark hair, and the Doctor’s an older, eccentric man from another world who’s a law unto himself, you do wonder if Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman’s casting decisions had any personal inspirations, don’t you?

“I know you’re going to tell me I’m imagining things” – Barbara confronts point-blank the stereotyped ‘hysterical fantasist female’ coding which Ian and, more importantly, the 1963 audience might be tempted to put on what she says.

“You can’t only use three of the dimensions” is much better than the Pilot’s “three of the elements” – partly because “dimensions” prefigures the TARDIS, and partly because it sounds more scientific than alchemical…

Barbara and Susan’s outfits both look relatively smart and quite severe, but natural – then Ian comes in, dressed for home, in an enormous coat with the collar up. On its own, it looks a fairly heavy greatcoat, but next to the two young women you wonder if he’s driving home to Siberia.

Everyone always assumes the scene with “John Smith and the Common Men” is mainly to establish Ian’s character as a teacher who pays attention to the pupils’ interests. That’s just the script’s bluff, isn’t it? The scene’s central purpose is to introduce Susan, who – the first time we see her – is in a world of her own, grooving along to an aristocrat who’s masquerading as an ordinary person.

Trendy teacher Ian comes up with pop facts to impress Susan, but what’s her response? Not a 15-year-old’s surprise at his knowledge or embarrassment at his attempt to be hip, but a vocal pat on the head – “You are surprising, Mr Chesterton” – as if she’s the teacher.

What is it about the French Revolution that makes Susan so interested? We find out in a few stories’ time that this is the Doctor’s favourite period of Earth’s history; it seems both are fascinated by the idea of an ancient aristocracy being suddenly toppled…

Predicting the decimal system over seven years in advance is a very bold move – of course people had been talking about it for ages but, like predicting British Euro membership now, it’ll have put some viewers against the series, established it as very modern and, in hindsight, looks brilliant.

When Susan gets confused about whether Britain’s on pounds, shillings, groats or marks, Barbara’s very severe: her reaction is effectively to say, ‘Don’t give me all this alien nonsense, you silly girl, you know it’s not true,’ then think about it later – just as she then does inside the TARDIS.

Although Ian thinks of himself as the laid-back, practical one – as in his attitude to pop music, and his comparative lack of worry about Susan – given a real problem he has even more difficulty ‘taking things as they come’ than the nominally more severe Barbara. It’s she who accepts the TARDIS first, and he who finds excuses and ‘rationalisations’ to cling on to his preconceptions.

Throughout this story, the emotional reactions of each of the characters are entirely true to life, in a way the series will rarely ever show again – not just the sweaty panic against the Tribe, but little things like both Barbara and Ian liking to be in control and getting sharply defensive when they’re not: her when Ian implies she’s a busybody; him when he breaks his torch and feels embarrassed.

Richard observes: “I know it’s a pen torch, but it does look like the very first time we meet the Doctor, he’s using the Sonic…”

The Doctor starts off as a mysterious old git making life difficult for the clean-cut ‘leads’, but even here he gets the close-ups, making them the supporting characters; though Ian seems briefly to be on top as they race about the forest in episode three, by the end of even this first story the Doctor’s (intellectually) wrestled his way to being the undoubted star and hero.

Like the start of the 2005 series, though even more quotably, this begins from the perspective of ordinary people who encounter someone different, then follow them to a strange blue box that’s larger on the inside than the outside and travels in time and space. Except that here the two ‘contemporary’ characters take it in turns to be reassuring or go hysterical at the bizarre turn their lives are taking.

Barbara is mostly a rather strong character but loses it a bit too much here – though at least Ian panics first. It’s a shame Susan loses her enigmatic quality so early, but that’s made up for by how disturbing the Doctor is in his first story, played by William Hartnell as, well, a git with brilliant facets.

Barbara can be friendly and earnest, but is very businesslike – and it’s great to see her controlling her obvious irritation when Ian and the Doctor in turn fiddle with things (a tap and a picture frame) while she’s talking. She must want to give them both lines.

Just as he later does with Kal, and presumably regarding them in much the same way, the Doctor uses his intelligence and understanding of the teachers’ social mores to get the result he wants: suggesting they find a policeman, he’s not unlikeable and very persuasive as he recounts what they’re doing in a way to make them doubt themselves.

“There’s only one way in and out of this yard. I shall be here when you get back.” Both of these statements are lies, of course, but the Doctor brilliantly invites them to form a syllogism based on their preconceptions about the ‘facts’. Although Susan blows the gaffe, he’s on the right track – making the wrong conclusions because they can’t reach outside their preconceptions is exactly what the teachers do throughout the first episode.

First the humming police box is enigmatic, then it’s a danger – Susan’s prison? – then it’s, abruptly, the biggest idea ever, in the smallest box. The world is turned upside-down – for the schoolteachers and for us.

Ian and Barbara lunge into the TARDIS – still one of the greatest moments in television history. Though we’ve both seen it many times, we’re caught up in it: “And the world changes,” murmurs Richard. I breathe “Fantastic” at the same moment.

The first time we ever see Susan, she’s in a world of her own, grooving along to an aristocrat who’s masquerading as an ordinary person.

The TARDIS control room still looks extraordinary; the actors and the direction are terrific as they all suddenly plunge inside. But it’s the dialogue that’s really compelling. This might still be just the most memorable, quotable scene in Doctor Who (or television) history.

From being guarded and attempting to distract the teachers outside the spaceship, once inside the Doctor strides forward, revealed and taking command. He tells Susan to close the doors and puts it down to “that ridiculous school”; but, unlike in the Pilot, here he’s quietly chiding her, like a little bit of family exasperation leaking out in front of strangers.

Ian, so laid back and intelligent in his own world, is nothing but aggressive when faced with the TARDIS. “And what’s wrong with it?” asks the Doctor, and you can’t blame him. The teachers are rude and intrusive, and stupid.

The Doctor getting distracted by a stopped clock and ignoring Ian is very endearing; just as with the dirty picture, he has so many things he can’t keep track of them all but wants to keep them all going, with the added impression that he probably thinks the clock’s as likely to offer intelligent conversation as the schoolteacher.

The Doctor not listening to Ian but instead musing over his clock is both endearing and (to Ian) very irritating. It continues him being a bit of a git as he was outside, but a more human and loveable one.

The Doctor’s simile about inventing television to explain the Ship’s dimensions is brilliant in so many ways, but most of all in how, as Ian might to a child, he kindly thinks of a way within the teacher’s limited grasp to explain something incredibly simple that’s quite beyond his tiny mind.

Ian’s not the lead at all, is he? He may look the part, but he’s introduced as the supporting character to Barbara’s investigation and, though inside the TARDIS he takes over asking the questions, both script and camera clearly make the person answering the questions more important.

Exactly at the point that the Doctor explains the TARDIS with reference to television, the television camera is telling us that he’s the lead character by pointing directly at him, the others backgrounded. It’s a brilliant piece of mutual reinforcement. Billy’s enormously charismatic and frames himself perfectly, but the self-aware declaration that ‘this is all about television, and television says it’s all about me’ is even more important than the actor.

“But you’ve discovered television, haven’t you?” is from the same mindset as the decimalisation scene: ‘Oh, it’s so easy to lose track of just how unbelievably primitive you are… Have you moved up from weight-based barter yet? Have you discovered writing, or television, or fire?’ And, of course, it gives a satirical pre-echo of the ‘primitives’ part of the story. The Doctor’s among primitives already.

Moving from modern London to prehistoric cavepeople is absolutely key to the story. The Doctor regards Ian and Barbara as savages, preventing the audience from feeling too smug about the Tribe; but it also means the Doctor is rapidly shoved together with the teachers against someone much less advanced, with them being useful and, most importantly, on the Doctor’s side of the ‘learning gap’.

Encountering the Tribe immediately after kidnapping Ian and Barbara means the Doctor can start thinking of them as semi-advanced, rather than primitives below his civilisation. If they’d landed among the Daleks and Thals first, he’d probably have dumped the teachers, or at least spo-ken ve-ry slow-ly and clear-ly to them and apologised for bringing a pair of savages to meet futuristic peoples: ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse them, they’re from the Twentieth Century.’

Meeting the Tribe is vital not just to the first story but to the ongoing story of the series – not only does it establish the travels in time, but if the TARDIS had jumped straight from 1963 to ‘The Daleks’, Ian and Barbara would have remained ‘primitives’ and the Doctor would have had no reason to listen to them, much less bond with them.

While the Doctor views his new travelling companions across an intellectual divide, there’s also a moral divide: to begin with, the Doctor’ll do anything to protect himself and Susan but Ian and Barbara are more outward-looking. The Doctor learns from them more subtly, but that starts in the very first story – and even in Twenty-first Century stories, he still has a ruthless streak without human friends to talk him out of it.

The Doctor’s tried his best to explain to little Ian, but he still doesn’t understand, and the Doctor laughs. “I knew you wouldn’t! Never mind.” He turns away, as if from a child tugging at his leg while the grown-ups are busy. It’s a great role-reversal to have teachers being talked down to – every child must have loved it!

This is perfect ‘family’ drama; the role-reversal of authority figures being stupid, but only in relative terms rather than slapstick idiocy, is far more effective than having child leads – though it’s also brilliant that the other grown-up the Doctor keeps discussing their shortcomings with in front of them appears to be a teenage girl.

Barbara tries to patronise Susan about the Ship, but gets back simple incomprehension that she doesn’t get it: when Susan tells her teacher that “I thought you’d both understand” about the TARDIS, it’s a priceless I-can’t-believe-you’re-so-dim moment. The Doctor’s the only person here who can understand the others’ mindset, whether primitive tribespeople or savage teachers, and evidently thinks of them in just the same way he does four decades later, as “stupid apes”.

The Doctor’s question “Have you ever thought about what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles…?” is mesmerising, but Susan’s startled reaction tells us even more about him – it’s as if he’s usually much more guarded with her and doesn’t reveal his secret hope for fear of letting her down but humans, as ever after, prise emotions out of him.

Susan pleads with the Doctor to free the two primitives, but he’s made his mind up. Here, he doesn’t try to persuade her with a flight of poetry; there’s just an icy “No” as he walks away, which is more frightening, more distant, than any of the Pilot’s abrasiveness.

Lights blaze, the room shakes, the grinding sound is heard, and we see ordinary television (Television Centre) being left far behind in a maelstrom of effects. It’s a very postmodern first episode! Just look at it, listen to it… That must have freaked out viewers completely.

The whole story’s terrific, and you need the Tribe to narrow the gulf between the time travellers – but, on its own, the first episode is easily up with the very best of ’60s drama. The acting, the design, the emotion, the inspiration… All of it’s a bald statement, ‘This is a television programme like no other.’

It’s only Ian and Barbara that get knocked out when the TARDIS takes off – we’ve seen flights that rough in the Twenty-first Century series, too, where if you don’t hang onto something, you fall over. It’s partly saying that Ian and Barbara are unprepared for the dangers of time travel, part simply that here they are literally off-balance.

The chaotic take-off knocks Ian and Barbara unconscious, while the Doctor stays standing. If that’s an unusually rough journey, do Ian and Barbara have something to do with it (and does it damage the Ship’s ability to change shape)? Perhaps the Ship’s in tune with the Doctor and is put out by his shock and fear at having to leave so abruptly, and nearly losing Susan? Or is it having to adjust to carrying beings from an alien world for the first time?

As the second episode starts, we see Kal, full-face: the villain’s introduced, and then we get the scary title “The Cave of Skulls” superimposed across him to associate him with evil.

The Tribe set-up, with Za rubbing his bone while people say how unimpressive it is, is very off-putting. It’s very much standing around waiting for the king to, er, produce an heir! ‘Where is his manhood?’ they’re asking. And like all mothers, his is never happy with him.

Za would be a goner at the start without practical Hur as his Lady Macbeth, but he’s the character that changes most over the story. He opens by making demands and repeating pointless cargo-cult rituals, like so many Doctor Who leaders afterwards, but Hartnell’s Doctor inspires him to think, like Eccleston’s will to so many of the people he encounters later.

As Ian and Barbara come to, they’re in medium shot to make them look very small – there’s a big haughty carved bird looming in the foreground to intimidate them, like Professor Yaffle or the Doctor.

The running theme that Ian and Barbara are stupid primitives continues from the previous episode, sketched in without being forced: the Doctor’s “What are you doing down there?” implies he didn’t notice they were knocked out and just can’t understand their being such rubbish passengers, then once again he gives a waspish aside to Susan as if they’re too stupid to listen – “They don’t understand, and I suspect they don’t want to.”

Clearly much more in control now, having left the Twentieth Century’s immediate threat and with Susan very definitely on his side, the Doctor’s no longer rowing with Ian the way he was; Ian’s still trying to pick a fight, but the Doctor keeps having to turn away and smile, evidently unable to keep his face straight as he anticipates the shock Ian has coming to him.

If they’d landed not among the cavemen but the Daleks and Thals first, the Doctor would probably have dumped the teachers, or at least spo-ken ve-ry slow-ly and clear-ly to them and apologised for bringing a pair of savages to meet futuristic peoples: ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse them, they’re from the Twentieth Century.’

Before the TARDIS doors open and Ian is forced to see the facts, he keeps repeating “Yes, I know,” by which he actually means, ‘I know that’s the evidence, but I don’t want to consider it, because it’s too disturbing’.

The Doctor tells Ian not to be so narrow-minded and insular – he has exactly the same effect on Ian, Za and the viewers.

The Doctor asks Ian if he could touch the alien sand, would that satisfy him? Yes, replies the teacher, but it doesn’t. He’s instantly back to denial, with his former pupil triumphant. Outside, the sound of the wind and the view of the TARDIS, bare desert and bits of tree in the background (albeit with the ‘mountains’ the one unconvincing touch) emphasise the stark reality. He can see for miles.

There’s some superb direction, not just in the stylishness of each shot but in the way the camera’s used to tell us who’s telling the truth, or the recurring motifs; skulls, in particular, keep featuring in close-up, from the smashed dummy, through the Cave and several dead animals, to the climax when it all comes to a head. Are we meant to associate them with palaeontological discoveries of early human skulls and therefore past times, or the Tribe’s animalistic nature, or simply the macabre closeness to death in such a dangerous environment?

The travellers finding the animal skull and Susan feeling she’s being watched is paralleled in the next story by the Magnodon and Alydon; was the comparison put in by David Whitaker to make both environments seem as ‘real’?

The whole prehistoric ‘adventure’ is dirty, sweaty, smelly, horrible and terrifying. It opens up the TARDIS crew’s emotions like no other story.

The series’ first really outrageous plot contrivance: the Doctor only smokes so that he can be seen making fire. But it’s such a fabulous, curvy and enormous Sherlock Holmes pipe that you don’t notice.

Though people complain it’s the companions’ role, the Doctor’s our first scream and the first to be slugged out and dragged off, so he doesn’t put others in a position that he hasn’t tried himself. Watch him carefully, though; unlike most of the following victims, on coming round he looks about, sizes up the situation and rapidly starts talking his way out of it. Admittedly, in the previous episode he was the first person to (in effect) lock the TARDIS crew up, too!

Just as he was able to come up with a simile that Ian might understand, the Doctor puts himself into the Tribe’s way of thinking. On waking after Kal’s attack, he immediately adapts to the way of declaiming that all the rest have, with simple appeals. He’s a bright old thing.

The scream that takes us from the travellers to the Tribe is momentarily disturbing, the tension relieved by a camera pull-out to a children’s game. It’s a great touch. How often do we get that sort of thing in the series?

Kal’s been telling the Tribe that he’s often seen men make fire, but also that Orb will soon show him how it is done – the first statement’s obviously intended to add verisimilitude to the second, and none of the Tribe are bright enough to spot that it’s actually contradictory, in that if it’s true he doesn’t need a revelation.

Za’s belated “As lies come out of yours!” comeback to Kal’s sarcasm and then claims about smoke coming from the Doctor’s mouth is pretty good, but most of the time Kal’s tongue is faster. He doesn’t sit on his own and mutter, either, but prowls round the tribe winning over each of them personally.

With Kal humiliated and angry, he turns on the weakest person to blame, and the Doctor really looks worried, his eyes darting around as he wonders what to do. His companions suddenly appearing gives him a distracting moment in which to save himself, just as he then saves Ian – again, as in the first episode (and their final escape), using a masterful bluff.

It’s easy to compare the alpha male struggles between the Doctor and Ian / Za and Kal, but there’s also the different sort of rivalry between Za and Horg, with the old man not liking new things and protesting that he was once a great leader. In the Doctor’s more intellect-led civilisation as opposed to Horg’s muscle-led one, though, he wins his struggle.

Look at the bargaining between Za, Hur and Horg: ‘Marriage. A business transaction since 100,000 BC’. And somehow calling a woman ‘Hur’ seems so much less flattering than ‘She’; ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ beats ‘Hur Who Must Be Traded’.

It’s easy to compare this story to The Daleks, but think ahead to Destiny of the Daleks – that’s got the same plot not just as The Daleks but as this story, too. The Doctor has a technological advantage, and two factions fight over him to possess it. That’s in Marco Polo as well, come to think of it… And surely that’s exactly what the Doctor was afraid of in not letting Ian and Barbara go.

Oh dear. The Forest of Fear opens with a clearly fake skeleton, blatantly strung together, a more plasticky skull, a less punchy line from Ian and a fairly swift fade to the next scene rather than lingering on the dead – it’s the first big post-cliffhanger let-down.

The Tribe are all so piled across each other for warmth that it’s amazing Old Mother doesn’t wake everybody when she gets up to nick Za’s knife and creep out. Then “The Forest of Fear” appears over her hand, which she holds in mid-air for so long she must be preternaturally sensing the caption.

The time travellers reinforce each other in the Cave of Skulls with some superbly structured interdependence; the Doctor loses hope, then gets snapped out of it by Ian’s criticism (shame? Inspiration? Rivalry?) and comes up with an idea once Barbara encourages Ian, after which the old man in turn encourages her.

Hur works out that the Old Woman wants to kill the travellers, then wakes Za, telling him her watchfulness is a mark of his leadership; she’s much clever and more rational than the rest. What can she see in him other than being the power behind the throne, though? Za is very much a brutal and sulky little boy; Hur is more his better mother than his Lady Macbeth.

When the Doctor refers to Ian as “your [Barbara’s] companion,” it’s almost certainly not meant in the way the series uses the term afterwards – but it works if you think of Ian as her sidekick. Here, the Doctor treats Barbara as the important one because she’s the more intelligent and open-minded.

Oh, look, it’s the first hidden escape route from a cell – though it’s plainly not a ventilation duct, as everyone complains about how whiffy the place is.

Za goes down under an unseen animal, and later Who directors saddled with less-than-perfect monsters could learn from what we see next: Hur’s wide-eyed horror and Ian and Barbara staring – it gives you a real sense that Za’s being mauled by something terrible, not through ever seeing the creature but through their reactions.

The Doctor’s framed as callous and inhuman in his attitude to the wounded Za, but that obscures Ian’s attitude when he patronises Barbara with “Your flat must be littered with stray cats and dogs” – the Doctor regards less advanced humans like the Tribe (and Ian) as savages, but to ‘more caring’ Ian, they’re animals.

Some things really do never change: “He’s always like this if he doesn’t get his own way,” says Susan of the sulky Doctor, and over the next four decades, it turns out he always is!

The first hidden escape route from a cell’s plainly not a ventilation duct, as everyone complains about how whiffy the place is.

Ian’s accidentally more like the Doctor than the Doctor himself as he acts to protect history – wanting to take Za to the Ship for antibiotics is less interfering than cancelling the results of their interference, as Za was only wounded because he was chasing them.

It’s a sign of how influential the Target books are that, no matter how many times I watch the scene as recorded, I remember seeing Old Mother not slumped from behind, but propped against pile of skulls, Eileen Way staring into space, even though that was only in my imagination (it must be catching: Kal convinces the Tribe in a similar way, while About Time 1 remembers that scene entirely wrongly, too).

‘Doctor Whodunnits’ rarely work as murder mysteries (too few suspects, too little mystery), and this seems to start as it means to go on – we see the Old Woman’s murderer, rather than working it out from clues. Despite that, there is an element of a famous detective series when the Doctor exposes Kal. He uses his wits to get the villain to give himself away through a combination of psychology and forensic evidence: he’s just invented Columbo!

Rather than having to worry about piloting the case through a court 102,000 years (approx) before the development of DNA tests and blood-typing, Kal’s instantly convicted by the court of public opinion, who go on to bung rocks at him. Hurrah! And then he gets his head bashed in by an even bigger rock. Hurrah! …Well, OK, the legal system has had a few polishes since then.

The Doctor uses intelligence, forensics and a naked appeal to Kal’s vanity and alpha male posturing to snare him, then whispers to Ian to follow his lead as he turns to rabble-rousing. It’s winning his own battle with Ian, too; after Ian was definitely in the lead in the previous episode, now he’s the Doctor’s prop.

Just as with Twentieth-Century humans, the Doctor can get into their mindset and manipulate it, but it’s ironic that he uses a shameless manipulation of Kal’s ego as the way to boost his own over Ian.

“This place is evil.” For the first time, the Doctor makes a moral judgement: that mass killing is evil. So, after the scene where he’ll use his brains to interfere, he’s now got so involved that he starts becoming morally involved, too.

The flickering flames and shocked reactions to the big fight give it a very memorable look, but while in later Doctor Who this would be the end – the villain overcome – the others aren’t civilised enough to realise they’re meant to be nice yet, so there’s still another ten minutes of conflict to go.

The Doctor realises they must find a way to scare the Tribe; Susan devises it; Ian realises how to put it into operation; all showing how the time travellers can now work together. But the Doctor’s inspired Za, too, as it’s he who works out what the ruse is, and how to overcome it – “With fire, it is day.” Mixing with the Doctor does everyone’s minds the power of good.

Though we don’t get the first really full-fledged ‘undead’ story in the series until Billy’s final adventure, most of his first season has some hint of it, and how is the very first story resolved? By using a combination of the idea of the undead and special effects to frighten the people watching, which is what the series will be doing for ever after.

The first story begins with a box that’s bigger on the inside and can take you anywhere, like the television, and which flies through TV feedback – then it ends with a statement that while you might be frightened by what you see, you can’t trust it all. Who said Doctor Who only discovered postmodernism in the mid-’80s?

The Doctor’s exposing of Kal is brilliantly conceived and written, but the director and lead actor run with it still more brilliantly: the way the Doctor goes from flourishing the bloodied knife before the Tribe then gives a quiet aside to Ian shows Billy’s mastery of both theatre and TV, as the style of the scene moves effortlessly from the Doctor putting himself ‘on stage’ to a very televisually conspiratorial moment.

Kal is cast out, but Za orders our heroes back to the Cave of Skulls instead of rewarding them. Is he establishing his authority when he can? Doing what the people want? Silencing the subversive idea of the people being stronger than the leader? Or simply putting them to one side so he can think out the situation with Hur, as the Doctor’s ironically taught him to do – an even more dangerously Promethean revelation than fire.

When Za calls the time travellers “a new tribe,” he means less that they’re a new people than that they have new ideas.

Though people write about the educational intent of the early series, making fire is the nearest there is to a didactic bit here – the schoolteachers are out of their depths. When Ian says everyone should know how to do it, that’s more about democracy than science.

Thank goodness Za and Hur weren’t cast as love-starred teens who the older generation don’t understand, man; these kids have real issues with their parents, Za’s mother always saying he’s not good enough and Hur telling her father “you should lie on the old stone ’til your blood runs into the earth!” It could have been appallingly Cliff Richard.

I love the travellers stonily refusing to respond to Za’s conversational gambits over the food. But, noticeably, he now has conversational gambits in addition to his club.

The tribe’s been obsessed with fire and have used skulls to terrify our heroes – so it’s the perfect con to employ at the climax.

The story’s an extraordinary example of how to set up a series, with the first astounding episode introducing a mystery and then the concepts, while the others throw violence and dirt at our heroes to make them bond. Almost uniquely for Doctor Who, the characters develop and show real, raw emotion that makes what would later just be capture-escape-capture scenes unbearably tense – because they really mean it, and they’re terrified.

It’s not just incredible to look at – it’s not just still more incredible when compared to any other television of the time – but it’s absolutely incredible when you consider the people behind it and what they achieved with so little resources and so little backing from most of the BBC. Nothing else had electronically generated titles like Bernard Lodge’s; nothing else had electronically realised music like Delia Derbyshire’s, which composer Ron Grainer didn’t even recognise as his; no other BBC drama in 1963 had a young, female producer and a young (and gay) Asian director. If it was today, some ‘fans’ would complain about “political correctness” and “agendas”. Back then, several people in the BBC probably did.

I first saw this in as part of repeat season The Five Faces of Doctor Who in November 1981, aged ten, and it was almost unbearably exciting. I’d long-since fallen in love with the first TARDIS scene from an audio recording of the documentary Whose Doctor Who, but to see the whole thing was spellbinding. Now, if I were to choose a story to introduce someone to William Hartnell as the Doctor, I’d hesitate; this is a brilliant story, but shouldn’t I pick one where everyone’s more in their ‘settled’ characters, and the Doctor’s less scary? Yet, really, what other story can be more exciting to discover for the first time?

The Doctor’s Story

Oh, come on. This one’s so significant to the chap it’d take as long again to list everything that’s important about him. But “He’s a doctor, isn’t he? That’s a bit of a lame excuse,” is the first mention he gets, three and a half minutes in, and he actually appears eleven and a half minutes into the first episode. He’s as ruthless and hostile-seeming here as you’ll ever see him, but that’s not the whole story; by the second episode, he’s already saving the companions he’s previously chewed out and kidnapped, then starting to cheer them up, then before the story’s out making his first of many moral judgements. Though his instinct is first to explore then, when that lands him in tricky situations, to escape, he’s already starting to flex his brain to achieve more than that. And you could say that this is where he sets out from contemporary Britain, the time and place by which he’ll forever be judged, and people from that time and place are already influencing him to be more like them.

It is, in any case, an utterly stunning performance by William Hartnell, one of the best from any Doctor. So buy a copy and watch the thing.

What They Said…

Time Team, Doctor Who Magazine 279, June 1999:

“‘Hartnell’s really very good in this and steals every scene,’ adds Clayton. ‘Jovial, condescending and cunning. I’m with him all the way!’”

“Jac: ‘Urgh, urgh, urgh!’”

The “Cliché Counter” starts counting the numbers of deaths on screen, and of times regulars are knocked unconscious or incarcerated. I’m not sure I’ll follow it with any great interest, though, as it’s clearly showing too few on at least the latter two as early as the first issue.

“You are treating us like children!”

“Am I? The children of my civilisation would be insulted.”

“Your civilisation?”

“Yes, my civilisation. I tolerate this century, but I don’t enjoy it. Have you ever thought about what it’s like to be wanderers in the Fourth Dimension? Have you? To be exiles…? Susan and I are cut off from our own planet, without friends or protection. But one day, we shall get back. Yes, one day… One day…”

Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles’ About Time 1:

“Sydney Newman, ‘a Canadian who looked like a Mexican’, whose deal with ABC is £8,500, a free mortgage and a Jaguar; presumably the car, not the cat, but in his case we can’t assume too much.”

1963 AD by Andrew Wixon

“Now, as then, watching An Unearthly Child is a peculiar experience for any fan. To someone reared on Tom Baker's run, only the TARDIS was there to prove this was indeed the same programme, so different is it in every way. The very first episode is, of course, brilliant. It seems to be written to be quoted from. The structure is flawless. These days, of course, it's impossible to know how it would have felt to have the TARDIS's secret sprung on you unawares - but the sequence still carries remarkable power. But it's a brilliance of a kind that's unrepeated anywhere later in the series' run. At a very basic level DW's format is 'hero meets alien' - and here, for the only time ever, the alien in question is the Doctor himself.”

Radio Times teasers for An Unearthly Child

An Unearthly Child
“A new series of adventures in space and time.”

The Cave of Skulls
“The mysterious doctor and his companions visit ‘The Cave of Skulls’.”

The Forest of Fear
“This week he and his companions enter ‘The Forest of Fear’.

The Firemaker
“‘The Firemaker’ is the title of this week’s episode.”
Pushing the boat out, there.

The Radio Times knew who the lead character was from the start, then…

As did the BBC’s radio trailer:

“My name is William Hartnell and, as Doctor Who, I make my debut on Saturday 23 November at 5.15.

“The Doctor is an extraordinary old man from another world who owns a time and space machine.

“He and his granddaughter, Susan (played by Carole Ann Ford), have landed in England and are enjoying their stay, until Susan arouses the curiosity of two of her schoolteachers (played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill). They follow Susan and get inside the Ship, and Doctor Who decides to leave Earth, starting a series of adventures which I know will thrill and excite you every week.”

Available In All Good Shops?

An Unearthly Child has been published as a Script Book (“The Tribe of Gum”); as a rather good novelisation, by Terrance Dicks; and released on VHS, twice. The second edition of the novel and the first edition of the video both sport the same rather stylish cover painting by Alister Pearson, of the Doctor and Susan’s faces merging into each other.

If you’re into reading your Doctor Who, incidentally, see if you can track down Kim Newman’s novella Time and Relative, which is a pretty good little story in its own right and set just before the events of this one. You might also try finding a second-hand copy of Anthony Coburn’s The Masters of Luxor, also published as a Script Book; it’s not a patch on this story, or indeed the one that effectively replaced it and sent the series off in a different direction, broadcast adventure The Daleks, but it’s a fascinating historical curiosity.

What I’d recommend, though, is the DVD release, which is cleaned up to look the best it ever will, includes the Pilot episode, a partial commentary and a great many extras, as part of the splendid box set Doctor Who – The Beginning. If I were you, though, I’d hit ‘Play All’ and then skip forward seven chapters, given that the DVD rather unwisely includes the Pilot first on the Play All option, and you’re probably better off watching the whole story through as broadcast first.

If that doesn’t sell you, try the fun little trailer that someone put together for YouTube – I love the opening caption – or another one for the first season of Doctor Who, in Twenty-first Century style.

Why Is This Brilliant?

So many reasons…

It starts the whole thing – the best concept in the world, brilliantly delivered.

Each of the lead actors is brilliant, and the emotional and physical pressure they’re put under beats almost everything afterwards.

It looks terrific – dark and atmospheric, busy and terrifying, gleaming white and mind-expanding.

It’s meeting the prehistoric savages that makes the Doctor appreciate the 1963 savages, and they him.

So Who is This Doctor Bloke Anyway?

2007-03-31T07:40:00.002+01:00

A new series of Doctor Who begins at 7 o’clock tonight, and what better time to make a new start with this poor old blog? Well, with any luck I’ll soon begin at An Unearthly Child, the real place to start, but if you’ve perhaps just seen the trailers and come new to the whole thing, I’m starting with a potted guide (based on one I wrote last year). But whether you start with the brilliant DVD box set The Beginning, or with tonight’s Smith and Jones…

What do you need to know about Doctor Who?

The Doctor is a traveller in time and space. He goes anywhere he likes – alien worlds, past, present, future… He respects life rather than authority, and obeys no-one else’s rules. He lives by his own joy in exploring new places and times, and by his own moral sense to fight oppression. He prefers to use his intelligence rather than violence, and he takes friends with him to explore the wonders of the Universe.

That’s it.

OK, so that’s the important bit, but a few more questions…

Where’s the Doctor from, and why does he travel?

Well, he’s an alien, and the people of his world watched over all of time and space, but without interfering (though, if you follow the story from the start with this blog, it’ll be a long while before you get to where he came from). He found that just watching bored him, when he wanted to get out to meet people and experience things for himself, and it came to offend his morals, because the more he saw evil the more he wanted to stand up to it. So he took a TARDIS and left. Those he fought most often were the Daleks, alien conquerors in armoured mini-tanks with a hatred for all other races. They too developed time travel, leading to conflict with the Doctor’s own people in which both sides wiped each other out, and now the Doctor looks like the only survivor (that is, if you’re starting with Smith and Jones. Start where this blog’s about to, and you’ve got a long wait to get that far). So he just carries on travelling, making the most of life, seeing the sights, toppling empires, that sort of thing. He also claims to have a really complicated name, so he just calls himself ‘the Doctor’ (‘Doctor Who?’ That’s one of the many questions about him that’ll remain a mystery).

What’s this ‘TARDIS’ that he travels in?

It’s a machine for travelling through time and space, the name standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It was a bit old and unreliable back when he took from his people, and he’s patched it up and customised it many times in around a thousand years that they’ve been travelling together. Just to make it even less likely it’ll go where he wants it to, it’s quite literally got something of a mind of its own, too. It moves seemingly by vanishing from one place, then just appearing in the next, travelling through a strange ‘vortex’ that’s unlike ordinary space. Oh, and the outside of it gives no sign of what’s inside. It used to disguise itself on landing so it wouldn’t be spotted, but when the Doctor arrived in the 1960s it took the form of a police box, a sort of phone booth before the British police had personal radios and mobile phones, and got stuck like that. Inside, though, unfolds into many other dimensions and many different rooms. You’ll have noticed that it’s bigger inside than outside, then. So do most people who go in (unsurprisingly).

A thousand years or so of travelling? He looks good on it.

Well, his people were pretty long-lived, so that helps more than moisturiser. But it’s not just that their bodies live for hundreds of years. When they get too old, or are fatally injured, they’ve got a way of cheating death. Their body changes into a completely new one, giving them a new lease of life, shaking up their personality while remaining essentially the same person underneath. The Doctor’s had quite an eventful life, and the most recent body he’s been ‘born’ into is his tenth. Naturally, it also helps the TV series carry on when the actor playing the Doctor decides to leave, and it’s almost the only TV show that can recast its lead without hoping the audience are blind or pretending it’s something to do with plastic surgery or showers.

You’ve mentioned actors, and admitted it’s not real at last. So what’s special about this TV programme?

It started off in 1963 and lasted three decades, making it the longest-running science fiction series in the world. Kept alive in books, audio plays and millions of imaginations, it was reborn in 2005 and has again been a popular and critical success thanks to its sheer joy, its unique flexibility and, of course, to monsters like the Daleks. The big creative talent behind the new series, Russell T Davies, calls it

“the best idea ever invented in the history of the world,”

and it’s inspired an awful lot of people since, though you don’t need to know any intricate details to follow it. It’s the idea that’s important, that you can go pretty much anywhere and do pretty much anything, that people everywhere are worthwhile, whether they’re people like us or green scaly rubber people. The Doctor believes in freedom, and hates ignorance, conformity and insularity. He doesn’t work for anyone, wear a uniform or carry a gun, making the series both very British and very anti-establishment. It encourages people to think, to have fun, and to take a moral stand, but it’s wary of solving problems by shooting them. You don’t have to believe what you’re told, still less do what you’re told. And it’s spent several decades scaring children with nasty monsters and even the music, which when you put it all together is what family entertainment is about – a show with enough in it to satisfy all ages. Enough action to excite the adults, enough sharp questions to keep the children intrigued… That’s how down the years it’s inspired spin-offs from comics to novels, from Torchwood to the Sarah Jane Adventures.

The best of Doctor Who would include a dash of horror, adventures in history, enough wit to make you smile, enough ideas and strangeness and to make you think, and enough action to get you excited. That’s probably too much to fit into just one piece of television, which takes you right back to the idea that you can go anywhere and do anything, because it’s not about just one piece of television, but different travels. It’s the only show where, if you don’t like where it’s ended up one week, if you want it to be scarier, or funnier, or more thoughtful, or more action-packed, the next week will be in a completely different place and time and probably in a completely different style, but still recognisably the same programme. That’s probably why I fell in love with it, anyway.

How can I find out more?

You can read more of this blog, or all the terrifyingly in-depth Doctor Who articles on my main one, or tens of thousands of other web pages. But I wouldn’t, if I were you, not to start with. It’s probably the best TV programme ever made, so the best way to find about it is to watch it.

The new series starts on BBC1 at 7pm on Saturday March 31st. But – that’s today! It’ll run for the next dozen weeks, and BBC3 may just force themselves to repeat it once or twice should you miss it, too. So if I were you, I’d sit down and watch David Tennant as the Doctor as he meets a young woman called Martha Jones and together they meet some aliens. Thrillingly, I don’t know anything else about that one yet. Or you can buy the DVD box set Doctor Who – The Beginning, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor, and start way back in 1963 with this blog. But watching either will be a better introduction to this fantastic series than anything you could possibly read. So watch one!

What Time Do You Call This, Then?

2007-03-30T19:00:00.000+01:00

I wrote – well, perhaps I shouldn’t count up just how many months ago – that I sometimes make bad decisions. I make bad predictions, too, as in that immediately previous post about what you might expect from this blog, I claimed there’d be proper Doctor Who commentary along shortly. There wasn’t, obviously, but I have good reason to think (I say cagily) that there will be soon.

You’ll have gathered that my past half-year hasn’t been conducive to a lot of writing. Some sad events took place, some other things went wrong, some more things got on top of me, and in the last months of last year, I ground to a halt. When last I posted here, September had just been consumed by Liberal Democrat Conference and related matters, but it was followed by a horrible Autumn. A large part of that involved injuries to my right arm, which made it very difficult to type even when I was feeling sociable. So, my health has been even more ludicrous than usual, but after months of having problems using my arm, the physiotherapy had just got to the point where I could start some proper typing again when my glasses fell apart, a couple of months ago. It took a while to get an optician’s appointment, then for the glasses to be made up… Then the prescription was slightly wrong in one eye, so I had to wait for a re-test, then sent them off to for a lens to be replaced. So while I’ve gradually got back into the flow of writing my main Love and Liberty blog, I’ve not been in the best position to watch old Doctor Who episodes while typing interesting things about them.

I hope all that’s about to change. Although jumping ahead four decades from where I’m up to here, there’s a new series of Doctor Who beginning in 24 hours’ time, and I’m rather excited. It seems an appropriate moment, and my levels of enthusiasm are rising…

No ‘About Time’ Puns Really Needed

2006-09-26T11:24:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I make bad decisions. Everyone does. Sometimes I should be able to see them coming, though, so it’s a bit of a ‘whoops’ that I started this Time Team blog a month ago without considering that I wouldn’t have much time for Whoishness in September. As usual, I was away at Liberal Democrat Conference last week, and though I was expecting to spend a lot of time preparing for it, I’ve not been in the run-up to Conference with a blog before. Having also agreed to write pieces for another site, all my time seemed to trail away into covering Lib Dem policy papers in aggressive red biro and writing long articles about them, and this poor wee bairn of a blog was left all alone. Awwhh.

My plan, initially, was that I’d post on here roughly every fortnight. After all, the Time Team have taken various breaks as they’ve wound their way through Doctor Who, and it wouldn’t do to overtake them (though with the time it takes me to write things, that’s unlikely anyway). However, I notice the last post is only just short of a month ago, so that’s probably being a bit too generous with the gap. Don’t worry, there’ll be some more proper Doctor Who commentary along shortly, but before then, I’ve explained what gave me the idea for this blog but not what you might expect from it.

The main aim of this blog is to start at the very beginning of Doctor Who and publish all the disordered thoughts I’ve sent in to Time Team over the years. That means it’ll be less a set of reviews than a bunch of eccentric fragments which I hope will at least be diverting. There’s a slight problem to begin with, in that I didn’t start sending in comments to DWM until the end of William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor (and there are several others that I didn’t quite get round to submitting entries for along the way). Those stories will, then, be much closer to ‘proper’ reviews than my unvarnished ramblings. Fortunately, a couple of years ago I started a topic on a community site where I intended to review every Doctor Who story in order. I started with one-paragraph opinions which, being me, grew into full-length reviews after a few stories, and to begin with it sparked off an interesting debate. After a while, though, I was the only one still posting to the topic, and I was using the site less and less because most of my friends there had given up on it, along with most of the commentators on my Who thread. So I stopped with The Faceless Ones, as The Evil of the Daleks is a huge favourite of mine and I didn’t want to write about it when it felt like a chore. But, hurrah, that means I have reviews I can republish here for the longest run of stories where I have no Time Team entries, and, double hurrah, if no-one comments on a blog you can still hope people are reading it anyway (and in the absence of an ego-lacerating hit counter, there’s nothing to contradict me on that).

Though Time Team initially rattled through a fixed number of episodes each month, often splitting stories across issues, I’ll be doing one story at a time because I reckon it’s easier to follow that way. I’ll keep to strict order going forward, though if I come up with something I really want to share on something I’ve already done, I may go back to post another article on it. Unlike Time Team, though, I will have a few extra bits here and there. As well as my own comments, I’ll sometimes publish what Richard said about a particular story (though he’ll always be credited when I quote him directly). I’ll occasionally mention stories that weren’t on TV, or pass comment on the DVD or the novelisation of the Who story I’m looking at, and at the end of each season I’ll probably have a look at that bunch of stories together and see how they work as a set. I’ll also say what I thought of some of the Time Team’s views, perhaps displaying some of the best pieces of Adrian Salmon’s striking artwork, and once I reach those stories for which I submitted comments, I’ll mention which (if any) of them were printed.

There’s one other thing I’ll do for each story, though it’ll be easier with some than others… Having missed it for the Pilot episode, I think the answer there’s implicit, but it certainly includes Billy and “You and your companion would be footsteps in a time where you were not supposed to walk”. So what is this extra comment I’ll be adding? Reviews have a tendency to be critical, one-liners still more so, and Richard and I realised about a year ago that one reason most of the Doctor Who guides sprawling across our flat leave a sour taste if you read too much in a sitting is that the authors tend to lose sight of why they find the series fun. So, though no doubt I’ll often seem mercilessly critical, at the end of each story I’ll also answer the question, ‘Why is this brilliant?’

…And It’s About Time Team

2006-08-27T19:03:00.000+01:00

Welcome to my new blog! If you’re familiar with my main blog, Love and Liberty, I’ll continue to post an eclectic selection of in-depth Doctor Who reviews there, but this one will have a different style and a more linear nature. You’ve probably picked up on the clues already, but way back in June 1999, Doctor Who Magazine started an exciting project. They picked four fans, Richard Bignell, Clayton Hickman, Jac Rayner and Peter Ware, and sat them down in front of a telly to watch Doctor Who. The whole lot. Well, all right, eight episodes at a time and one batch a month, but still with the original tag line ‘Four viewers. 696 episodes. 297 hours. No escape.’ They called them the Time Team, and, loving an intelligent or innuendo-stacked review of Doctor Who, they immediately became my favourite thing in DWM.

Seven years later, they’re still going, with the odd break in publication and now sticking to complete stories rather than breaking them to stick with a fixed number of episodes per month. The tagline is now ‘Four fans. 723 episodes. No escape!’ and I suspect it’ll be 724 by the next issue, now that The Runaway Bride has been officially announced on TV (isn’t it great that the amount of Doctor Who on TV is back to growing all the time?). They’ve gone from 1963 Doctor Who stories to the close of 1981 so far, while Clay has become editor of DWM and Jac has done lots of terribly important things in non-telly Doctor Who fiction. It’s still vividly illustrated by Adrian Salmon, and though it’s gone from one page to three and changed from being wittily compiled by Gary Gillatt to being wittily compiled by Michael Pritchard, it’s still just as readable. If you don’t buy it, you should.

I suspect the expansions mean the Time Team has become rather popular with readers, which it deserves to. It’s hugely entertaining for me, but initially it seemed a very minor part of Doctor Who Magazine. It didn’t even get a mention on the cover of its first issue, which was DWM 279:

though, perhaps unsurprisingly, until I checked just now the issue I was thinking of as their first was DWM 280, which looks like this:

DWM issue 279 was much more interested at the time in plugging the first story from new Doctor Who audio drama licensees Big Finish, with a free CD (visible above) of interviews from the stars. BBC7 have, incidentally, just started broadcasting a season of their stories this evening. The other key feature that month was We're gonna be bigger than Star Wars! which looked at ways Doctor Who might be brought back to TV for a modern audience. The writers giving their ideas on this were the suspiciously familiar Paul Cornell, Russell T Davies, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Lance Parkin and Gareth Roberts. I wonder what poor Lance has done not just not to get a new series story to write, but to be given the thankless task of making the BBC’s Eighth Doctor books make some kind of sense in the last one of the range? Anyway, if you can get hold of that issue, it’s worth a read, not least to find Russell’s ideas for bringing the show back. “Well, it would have to be made on film,” he said, and probably with the Doctor trapped on Earth to save money. “I don’t think you’d put a 50-minute film series on during Saturday teatime,” he suggested with almost as much prescience as Steve’s “The core elements are a Police Box, a frock coat and cliffhangers.” On the other hand, who can disagree that “The key ingredient is death,” and Russell closed with “God help anyone in charge of bringing it back – what a responsibility!” But I digress.

The main change in the Time Team format actually came rather early. After starting in DWM 279 with An Unearthly Child, DWM 284 introduced a sidebar of viewers’ comments in ‘And You Said’ with Hidden Danger, the third episode of The Sensorites. I finally got my finger out in Autumn 2000 and managed to get my first comment published for William Hartnell’s last story starring as the Doctor, The Tenth Planet, in issue 297. I’ve put in ideas for most of the stories they’ve tackled since, and had something picked for most of those I’ve attempted. As a result, I’ve been one of the two or three people who’ve had their comments printed the most often (though sadly they stopped using the acerbic remarks of one Rob Shearman after he became a Doctor Who writer, even on the telly). If you’d like to have a go yourself and would like some tips, I outlined most of the ways I try to get published a couple of months ago on my other blog when giving tips on applying the same methods to press releases. Best of luck with your comments, as long as they still pick mine from time to time!

Initially, I’d come up with dozens of ideas on a story, then just send in what I thought were the best six or so. It’s ages since I’ve been along to the Fitzroy Tavern, but on one visit a few years ago I introduced myself to Clay; he told me to send in the bundle instead. Frequently someone will have come up with almost exactly the same idea as one of mine and get it printed instead, while when I do get a comment printed, it’s rarely the one I’d have chosen myself. Since then, the number of soundbites (scriptbites?) I’ve shot off in their general direction has grown to ludicrous proportions (they probably just read one in three), and I’ve taken to copying them to a small number of friends. One of them is Stephen, the biggest encourager in my life after after my beloved Richard – who writes the odd Who review himself at his fluffy elephant’s blog – and last month he told me I should stick them all up on a blog. After a little persuading (well, only a little, I’m not shy of publicising my opinions), here it is…

It’s True, Every Word of It’s True

2006-08-26T14:15:00.004+01:00

…Was very nearly the title of this blog, which would have been wilfully deceitful and was therefore very tempting. It’s a line uttered by Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, in the very first episode of Doctor Who ever made. Confusingly, of the original 1963-1989 series, it was also the last to be transmitted, as it was first shown on the BBC to very little fanfare on August 26th, 1991. This was the Pilot episode of the series, an early version of An Unearthly Child, the first episode eventually shown, and it’s a great – if sometimes very shaky – piece of television. And, after all, where better to start a Time Team blog than with the one piece of broadcast Doctor Who not included in Time Team?

I have to admit, I missed it when it was finally broadcast – the first Doctor Who episode I’d missed on original transmission for about ten years. I hadn’t even noticed it was on, showing as part of The Lime Grove Story, a selection of programmes made at the just-closed Lime Grove studios and at a time when Doctor Who appeared to have just closed, too, with even less attention from the BBC. Back then, as far as I was concerned, the current Doctor Who story was a book by Mark Gatiss called Nightshade, one of Virgin’s superb New Adventures series (and the first Doctor Who to scare me since 1977, but that’s another story), and besides, I’d already seen the Pilot. Somewhat ingloriously, it had been released on video a couple of months before it was finally transmitted – though, as the last third of it was recorded twice, the broadcast and video versions each chose a different take – and I’d actually seen the whole thing in October 1989, when a friend bought a nearly unwatchable 23rd-generation copy from a seedy backstreet Doctor Who peddler in Manchester. Yes, before the internet, there really were shops like that. These days it’s been spruced up and made available in several different versions on the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD Set, which I’d thoroughly recommend, but for a long time it was relatively unknown and very much unloved (even today About Time, usually the most comprehensive guide to Doctor Who in book form and the self-styled definitive work on everything, doesn’t even mention it was ever transmitted).

For most stories I’ll just be diving straight in to what I think of them, but this is such an unusual case that it seemed to demand some background, whether to explain the extraordinary gap between the BBC making it on 27 September 1963 and finally showing it fifteen years ago today, to explain that it’s an alternate version of a ‘proper’ story and so written off by many as ‘not counting’ by definition, or to explain just how many versions of even this attempt at the episode exist. Back then, programmes tended to be made as if ‘live’, even though all of Doctor Who was actually pre-recorded; it was difficult to edit the videotape used and only a couple of breaks in recording a 25-minute episode were planned. One of these breaks comes two-thirds of the way into the Pilot version of An Unearthly Child, just before they go inside the spaceship. The first take of that TARDIS sequence has a great nervous energy to the performances but rather a lot of fluffed lines and some quite astounding technical problems, so, unusually, they recorded that whole chunk a second time (some people describe this as the ‘third take’; as the ‘second take’ lasted about three seconds, I’m just going to talk about the two that went all the way). The DVD includes both versions, plus an edited version mostly using the second take that tries to present it as a ‘finished’ episode (though putting that first if you press ‘Play All’ is peculiar, as it’s immediately followed by the later version of An Unearthly Child which tells almost exactly the same story). Even with the retake, though, Head of Drama Sydney Newman – the main driver behind the creation of Doctor Who – didn’t think it was good enough, ordering changes before they had another go. So, was he right?

The Doctor Who Pilot: An Unearthly Child

It opens with that fantastic music and eerie swirling that are still like nothing else on TV, even when their instantly recognisable descendants are shown for the series in 2006. There’s one significant difference at only about five seconds in, though, as a ‘thunderclap’ sound comes in over the music; because this is the only time it’s ever heard, I always think it’s great, but it might have been a bit de trop every week – as opposed to the high-pitched buzz about to be heard from the mysterious police box sitting in the junkyard, which would definitely have been much too irritating, in contrast to the reassuring hum they came up with for the final version. It’s a shame there’s no fog for the police officer to wander through here, too.

Before we meet Susan, the story spends a good five minutes building up the ‘unearthly child’ in a way the series’ll usually just do for monsters from now on – after the title, Barbara tells her (unseen) to “Wait here,” before talking her over with fellow schoolteacher Ian (whose enthusiastic “Yes – I’ll say,” today can’t help but make me think of Torchwood’s Yvonne Hartman). Though the structure and most of the lines are the same as the final version, particularly during the first half of the episode, here Susan’s far more unearthly from her very first scene, introduced in extreme close-up. The effect’s slightly spoilt when she very obviously fluffs a line, though in the DVD’s ‘full’ edit of the Pilot there’s an extraordinarily clever edit that removes the mistake. She draws a strange inkblot picture of what we can later recognise as the TARDIS console, then, with a hunted expression, destroys it. It’s a cool wilfully enigmatic moment, but her instantly spotting a mistake in a huge book on The French Revolution in the later version is a more subtle way to mark her as out of place. Though I mentioned an actor’s mistake, the direction’s very noticeable; a young Indian, Waris Hussein, was very ambitious to create something impressive and much of it’s far more stylised than the final version, but that stylishness is undermined by so much that’s, well, amateurish. I don’t know if he was too ambitious for the cameras’ capabilities, if the camera operators hadn’t had enough practice avoiding things in the crowded studio sets, or if they were simply incompetent, but you can’t help wincing when the camerawork shifts from stylish ultra-close-ups to make us concentrate on Susan to great big lurches when Ian moves to the door, which only make us concentrate on how badly made some of it is.

There are more problems as Ian and Barbara sit in a car waiting for Susan to approach the junkyard in which she apparently lives, discussing how strange she is in class by means of very badly cued-in flashbacks. Barbara fluffs the word “fifteen,” then Ian slightly overacts “decimal system,” but not nearly as badly as the boy who declaims “Ha ha ha ha ha ha…” rather than actually laughing. The classroom scenes are well-written bits of mystery, with Susan unaware that 1963 Britain didn’t use a decimal monetary system, then knowing far too much about chemistry and finally revealing a completely alien way of thinking about dimensions, but it’s only the last scene that achieves its potential because you’re distracted from the others by the camera bouncing up and down or a cut to the chemical class that loses half of Ian’s introductory sentence.

Again, Susan’s in extreme close-up – with collar pulled high – as she gets to the gate and looks around. She looks great, and it’s very noticeable that none of the other characters have grabbed the camera’s attention like this; when the teachers follow her inside the junkyard, again it’s a mixture of spooky things and eerie camera movement that works brilliantly, counterpointed by other shots the jolting camera operators clearly aren’t up to.

Half-way in, the Doctor appears. Slightly too early, in fact, as we can see him at the edge of the screen and he can’t possibly have missed the two teachers ducking out of the way. Though he’s introduced from way in the background, very soon the Doctor’s getting heavy close-ups, which suggests an affinity with Susan… The script seems to suggest those nice teachers are the leads, but the camera tells a different story. The sound of the TARDIS door opening is even more high-pitched and buzzing than the general ‘interior’, too, making those aspects of the sound design among the most vital changes before the story was redone.

With Ian and Barbara revealed as loiterers, the real differences between this and the final version start to come through. The Doctor’s far more sinister and unsympathetic, and Ian seems far closer to starting a fight. Barbara tries to be the smiling, conciliatory one as she talks about seeing Susan from across the street, but reacts very sharply when scorned –

“I certainly did not imagine it!”

and the Doctor writes her off as a lost cause. He tries literally to separate Ian off from her, taking him by the arm and leading him away in order to appeal to him to be ‘reasonable’. He quickly goes into harsh denials of their rights to be there, but when he’s not speaking, is quietly watchful. It’s a fascinating performance, mixing worry and bluster, and there are some great shots of him in half-shadow, eyes flickering, pictured in the foreground as they talk at the door. Again, the direction is conceptually brilliant, but the camera operators were either under-rehearsed or just couldn’t be bothered.

I know I keep mentioning the TARDIS sound, but once they’re inside the deceptively police box-shaped exterior, to deafening electronic noises… It’s plain terrible. And, irritatingly, this crucial scene change isn’t a chapter point on the DVD (though it is one in the unedited studio footage, which has fewer chapters). It’s still a great introduction to the Doctor’s ship, though the look’s different to the final version as well, with a gleaming metallic platform on the floor under the console and a gleaming metallic tabard on Susan in place of her usual ‘kooky’ 1963 outfits. It’s the script that most changes, however, as while the scenes up to this point will remain mostly the same, inside the TARDIS in this version is a much more hostile place. There’s no commanding “Close the doors, Susan,” from the Doctor here, perhaps fortunately, as the first take is blighted by the TARDIS doors not closing properly and a repeated banging sound as studio technicians vainly try to pull them to. No, really, it’s quite startling. In this version, the Doctor marches straight over to confront and blame Susan for “inviting” this “unwarrantable intrusion”. She asks Ian and Barbara, aghast,

“What are you doing here?”

before explaining

“They’re two of my schoolteachers.”

Here, she’s much more obviously caught between two worlds, as she’s pulled between replying to two opposing parties, each of them is not really speaking to the other. If the Doctor was a bit aggressive with Ian and Barbara a couple of minutes ago, now he’s stepped straight to a slug-out with Susan rather than the protectiveness we might expect. It’s only Barbara’s concern that this bizarre place is where her pupil lives that pulls him up and makes him turn on them for a moment instead.

Barbara wants to leave, but Ian is dazedly trying to work it out.

“Don’t expect any answers from me. You wouldn’t understand anyway,”

snaps the Doctor, and while Susan tries responding to the teachers, he keeps turning from them to shoot out variants on “You see? I warned you,” calling Susan a “stupid child,” which he never would in the series as it finally went out. Ian’s “It’s an illusion, it must be,” a key line in the script for the final version, is just tossed away here while the Doctor’s busy haranguing his granddaughter. He doesn’t want to explain anything, but Ian keeps snatching at odd words to make sense of it all – “Ship?” Though the rewritten script does a better job of establishing Ian’s scepticism, the Doctor here gives his most effective answer, rather than just a put-down:

“This is no trick, young man; you forced your way in here, I didn’t invite you.”

It’s pretty unanswerable logic.

It’s a good thing the Doctor’s toned down for the next go at it, great as his performance is, but at least he’ll get a lead role of equal strength if less abrasiveness. Susan’s the biggest loser from the remount, as she becomes much more of a timid schoolgirl, where here she’s quite eerie at times and almost revels in her casual power; she’s unmistakably alien. When the camera sweeps to her as she stands at the console in her shiny tabard and announces that

“The TARDIS can go anywhere,”

she’s almost exultant. She’ll never seem as powerful again.

“Well, I thought you’d both realise when you came inside and saw the different dimensions,”

she says, unable to grasp how dim her teachers are (a great moment sadly denied to children all round the country). Barbara demands “the truth,” but the Doctor is adamant they’ve heard it. The camera moves from Barbara to the Doctor, who’s taking off his scarf as he gets ready to sit down. It’s at this point that I notice that, under the more endearing scarf and hat, he appears to be wearing an ordinary, businesslike shirt and tie, which is both less interesting and more severe than the slightly antiquated outfit he wears later. I’m glad they changed that, too. As he sits, Susan stands beside him, staring confidently like a disciple. He gives his first great speech, and it’s a cracker:

“We are not of this race. We are not of this Earth. We are wanderers in the fourth dimensions of space and time, cut off from our own planet and our own people by aeons and universes that are far beyond the reach of your most advanced sciences.”

“It’s true, every word of it’s true,” confirms Susan. “You don’t know what you’ve done, coming in here.”

In the first take, William Hartnell messes up the delivery of his last line, the first ostentatious example of what becomes known as a ‘Billyfluff’, and one of the reasons I remember Susan’s line so vividly is that, following a line descending into gibberish, Carole Ann Ford stands tautly and declaims “It’s true, every word of it’s true” with rather more than necessary force, which always cracks me up. She gets a slyly good line straight afterwards, as she tells him

“I know these Earth people better than you. Their minds reject things they don’t understand,”

a rather more subtle insult to the teachers than the shouting match going on between the ‘grown-ups’.

“You can’t keep us here,” says Ian, starting to believe there’s something in it; Barbara is fixated on getting Susan to admit she’s lying, as if that’ll undo the evidence of her own eyes.

“I’m not lying!” she shouts. “I loved your school. I loved England in the Twentieth Century. The last five months have been the happiest of my life.”

And we’re back to “You don’t know what you’ve done” – suddenly, Susan is talking about her life here in the past tense. What they’ve done is forced her to leave, which she recognises here but doesn’t accept in the final version.

“But you are one of us. You look like us, you sound like us…”

Susan is turning away even as Barbara says it, a half-smile on her face. The camera isn’t even on the teacher, but on Susan coming into close-up again, Ian watching her incredulously and the Doctor behind him, stony-faced.

“I was born in the 49th Century,”

she says, calmly. “What?” bursts Ian. “Oh, now look, Susan…” he trails off, looking at her, as she stares him out. While in the early part of the scene it was Ian questioning the Doctor about the technology, now it’s been Barbara questioning Susan about their life, and Ian can’t bring himself to argue on a personal level. Or is it that he can’t disbelieve her, so he has to turn away or he’d have to believe her? “I’ve had enough of this,” he says. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” Or, ‘I’ve lost the argument. I’d better take my ball away before we have to concede, because I’d worry I’m going mad.’ The few specifics about where the Doctor and Susan come from are intriguing, and a bit of a smack in the chops, but still reduce the power of the original ‘Doctor Who?’ question. Again, probably best to have lost them.

The teachers batter at the closed doors, while the Doctor just laughs, suddenly openly malevolent.

“You still think this is a trick?”

“I know that free movement in the fourth dimension of space and time is a scientific dream I didn’t expect to find solved in a junkyard.”

The Doctor’s just smiling and nodding in the most insufferably patronising way, but then, Ian is a primitive being saying ‘Please patronise me’.

“For your science, schoolmaster, not for ours. I tell you that before your ancestors turned the first wheel, the people of my world had reduced movement through the farthest reaches of space to a game for children.”

Ian announces he wants to take “Miss Wright and Susan,” and it’s at that point that the Doctor tells him, calmly but dangerously, “Don’t threaten me, young man” (his tone is more aggressive in the first take). That the stakes have suddenly been raised is shown by Barbara – who’s been silent since her attempt to make out Susan was lying – darting to Ian’s side to say,

“What if it is true?”

“Well, it can’t be, I tell you!”

Ian’s getting more belligerent, and gets electrocuted for his pains. Again, when Barbara flares up out of her calmness it’s not Ian’s threatened-and-threatening bluster, reflecting the Doctor’s, but a moral assertion:

“What do you think you’re doing? How dare you behave like this?”

Susan is now almost in tears, pleading with her grandfather to release them and – in direct contrast to the later version – offering to be taken to another time. “I won’t object, I promise I won’t object.” Again, the Doctor splits someone off to convince them, but this time as he leads Susan off towards the camera (great use of it by Billy) he’s quiet and persuasive, rather than calculating.

“My dear child, you know very well we cannot let them possess even one idea that such a ship as the TARDIS might be possible.”

Susan starts to speak again, but…

“Look. See how they watch and listen as we talk,” he mutters. “If they leave the ship now, they might come to believe at last that all this is possible. Think what would have happened to the ancient Romans if they’d possessed the power of gunpowder; if Napoleon had been given the secret of the aeroplane. No, my child, we both know that we cannot let our secret loose into the world of the 20th Century!”

“But you can’t keep them prisoners here!” she implores.

“You can’t keep us prisoners anywhere,” rumbles Ian mutinously.

“I cannot let you go, schoolteacher. Whether you believe what you have been told is of no importance. You and your companion would be footprints in a time where you were not supposed to walk.”

It’s a great scene, but again it’s a good job they toned down the inability to meddle even by planting an idea in someone’s head; it’s very severe, and a far cry from the guided tours of the TARDIS for any passing villager in, say, Black Orchid (where Time Team is nearly up to now). It’s difficult to decide between the two takes here, as well. The one used to make up the ‘full’ episode on DVD loses the banging doors and is kinder to the actors, with fewer fluffs, but misses some of the liveliness of the earlier take. This speech of the Doctor’s, for example, has a lot more mistakes but is invested with a breathless urgency and ends with “to walk,” which I much prefer to the ‘better’ take’s “to have walked.”

The next four lines, one for each actor, really ratchet up the tension but also sum up their responses when pushed. They’re particularly unflattering to Ian, shoving himself between the Doctor and Susan:

“If I have to use force to get out of here, I will, you know.”

“Maybe we’ve stumbled on something beyond our understanding,” suggests Barbara.

“You see the first faint glimmerings…” whispers the Doctor.

And Susan, near hysterical, pleads “Oh, why did you come here? Why?”

…At which the Doctor walks to the console with implacable assurance and takes off, despite Ian trying to wrestle him away. They’ve hit on that brilliant main dematerialisation noise, immortalised as a “wheezing, groaning sound,” but in this first version it’s smothered with additional effects – the bleeping noise is quite annoying, and there are bursts of something like a gravelly motorbike trying to cough into life, or loud static (appropriately for all the TV feedback on the screen). There’s no question that in this version, the Doctor takes off because there’s a threat to history, but in the later version it’s a threat to family (Lawrence Miles would say that for the Great Houses it’s the same thing, of course).

And, as the TARDIS comes to rest on a prehistoric plain, a sinister shadow looming across it, the rest is history…

I remember when I first saw this through a murky haze of having been copied far too many times, and still thought it was fantastic. I loved the raw edge and Billy’s harshness, and several of the lines stuck with me: Susan rigidly declaiming “It’s true, every word of it’s true” – still there in the ‘main’ version, but delivered in a much less emphatic way and coming just after a truly great Billy line instead of a fluff, so you don’t notice it – and, particularly, the Doctor’s magisterial “footsteps in a time where you were not supposed to walk.” I still love it today, though I’ve got used to its failings.

The scenes in the school and the junkyard are terribly good, but it’s inside the TARDIS that the changes, and the flashes of brilliance, really emerge. The actors are gripping, and with less movement there’s much less opportunity for the camera operators to muck it up, and Peter Brachacki’s TARDIS design is superb. It’s fascinating to compare two (well, two and a half) versions of the same story; if the movie of the second story was far more polished, far more dumb and far less harsh than the television version, one look at the Pilot episode makes the show’s broadcast premiere seem positively cuddly, and underlines just how superbly directed and atmospheric it was. This early attempt is often more stylised than the final version, but while in that you can see what a good director Waris Hussein is, you can’t help noticing what a mess the cameras were making of his intentions. Incidentally, he gives some great interviews on the DVD, and I saw him at Tenth Planet’s ‘Invasion’ convention earlier this year; a thoroughly nice man, and from pictures of when he was directing Doctor Who, blimey, he was handsome too.

However, it’s not just technical competence that makes the final version the better one. Much of the rewritten script is sheer poetry, and though I prefer Susan more ‘unearthly’ (it’s alarming to see just how downgraded her role was before it was even televised), here the Doctor is abrasive rather than enigmatic, and the only thing that makes him seem less than completely unreasonable is an aggressive Ian, who appears to be squaring up for a fight. With the high-pitched, irritating background buzz of this TARDIS driving them up the wall too, it’s difficult to see how this could have lasted; they’d all have murdered each other by half-way through the second episode. A fascinating start, but I’m glad they had another go.

Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient!

Happy Birthday, Billy (and Abnormal Service May Be…?)

The Horror of Running Through Corridors

Doctor Who Magazine’s Golden Treasure

Why Is This Brilliant?

A Peek Inside…

Other Marvellous Moments

The Edge of Destruction

And I Said…

The Doctor’s Story

What They Said…

Radio Times teasers for The Edge of Destruction

Available In All Good Shops?

Why Is This Brilliant?

“Dr. Who and the Daleks”

And I Said…

And I Didn’t Say…(but would have done if I’d thought of it at the time)

What They Said…

The Daleks

And I Said…

The Doctor’s Story

Dalek Wannabes

What They Said…

Radio Times teasers for The Daleks

Available In All Good Shops?

Why Is This Brilliant?

But You Can’t Rewrite History – Naming Doctor Who

A Dashed Queer Story

I’m Not Sure, But I Have Some Very Nasty Suspicions

Thank You. That’s What I Wanted To Know

An Unearthly Child

And I Said…

The Doctor’s Story

What They Said…

Radio Times teasers for An Unearthly Child

Available In All Good Shops?

Why Is This Brilliant?

So Who is This Doctor Bloke Anyway?

What do you need to know about Doctor Who?

OK, so that’s the important bit, but a few more questions…

Where’s the Doctor from, and why does he travel?

What’s this ‘TARDIS’ that he travels in?

A thousand years or so of travelling? He looks good on it.

You’ve mentioned actors, and admitted it’s not real at last. So what’s special about this TV programme?

How can I find out more?

What Time Do You Call This, Then?

No ‘About Time’ Puns Really Needed

…And It’s About Time Team

It’s True, Every Word of It’s True

The Doctor Who Pilot: An Unearthly Child

And I Didn’t Say…
(but would have done if I’d thought of it at the time)