17: The Time Meddler

Before Watching

I watched this one for the first time a good few years back, when UK Gold were showing a complete series on a Friday night. My memory of it is sketchy – I remember enjoying a lot of the Doctor’s dialogue with the Monk, and the scenes with the Monk’s TARDIS, but that’s about all. The Saxon and Viking stuff is a blur to me – I know that there’s Saxons and Vikings in it, but that’s about as far as it goes. The first on screen meeting with another Time Lord, though – that’s got to be worth watching. It’s scripted by Dennis Spooner, so there are going to be some laughs along the way too, I should imagine.

After Watching

What a smart move it was casting Peter Butterworth as the monk. I can imagine the director saying to him –

“Pete, you know that character you play in the Carry on Films?”

“Which one?”

“All of them. Can you play the Monk like that, only tone down the lasciviousness?”

So what you get is a wonderfully mischievous character, who you find it no trouble to forgive for locking William Hartnell in a cell – let’s be honest, we all wanted to do that at one time or another during the first season. The point of the Monk is that he is not a two dimensionally evil character. In fact, he’s not an evil character at all. What he is, it seems, is a character whose moral compass is skewed differently to the Doctor’s, and to the viewers’ and this often makes for an interesting personality.

Compare the Doctor and The Monk. According to their dialogue, the Monk left – Gallifrey presumably – 50 years after the Doctor did. Yet the Doctor is scrupulous about towing the (Time Lords’) non-intervention party line. Sort of. Whereas the Monk, he does it blatantly. Sometimes for personal gain, but more because he ‘wants to help’ – he envisages jet airliners by the 14^th century – and gloriously – because it’s fun! What a wonderful reason for doing anything. What I like about the Monk as well is the contradiction in the fact that although the Monk claims he is only meddling in order to make things better, when Vicky and Steven enter for the first time they find that his TARDIS is full of treasures and works of Art he has purloined from across History. So ‘helping’ obviously means helping himself to a great extent.

At this point shall we remind ourselves about how Steven has come to be in the TARDIS. He turned down the chance to run with the others into the TARDIS when he realised he’d left his little fluffy panda behind him in the Mechanoid City. Having fetched it he just managed to run back into the TARDIS – before the doors closed – without anyone noticing he was there. Really? Well, apparently so. Actually this does allow a lovely scene with the Doctor and Vicki trying to convince Steven that he is actually on a space and time ship. Speaking of which, what is it with Steven and the panda? I mean, am I missing something?

Alright then, to the plot. There are two distinct strands to this story which run together by the end. The most interesting strand is of course, the story of the Doctor’s first meeting with one of his own kind, and his battle of wits with the Monk. The second, less interesting story is the one involving the Vikings and Saxons. The TARDIS has materialised somewhere on the coast of what I presume is North Yorkshire, just prior to the Viking invasion of 1066. The villagers are understandably jittery about strangers, especially when they have to fight off an advance party of Viking invaders. I’ll be honest, I found this part of the story a bit of a bore, and a distraction away from the things I was really interested in which all involved the Monk.

Way back in the mists of time I studied Old Norse Literature and Old English Literature, and some of this involved gaining a pretty useful understanding of English History up to and including the events of 1066. This story does actually raise the interesting question – could Harold Godwinsson have defeated William of Normandy had he not made the lightning march North to defeat the Viking invasion of Haraldr Hardrada in the weeks preceding the Battle of Hastings? Well, since he could have won the Battle of Hastings anyway with just a little change of luck the fairest answer is, yes, maybe he could. The Monk’s plan is to use modern military hardware to defeat the Vikings and save Harold the trouble, and maybe this would have worked. Precisely how this would lead to jet airliners before the end of the 14^th century, though, nobody quite explains.

The Saxons and Vikings in this story are, I’m sorry to say, a rather sorry bunch. At least none of the Vikings had horns on their helmets – there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence that real Vikings ever did. Mind you, when the crew leave the TARDIS in episode 1 they immediately find a helmet with horns on it – still, that was a necessity since it enabled the disbelieving Steven to lead the Doctor to make his quip about it possibly being a space helmet for a cow. Steven’s disbelief that the TARDIS can travel through space and time actually leads to some other good lines in the first episode, “Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry dear boy. Now please stop bothering me.” Going back to the Saxon milieu, though, both Saxons and Vikings are both rather scruffy, and at the same time rather unconvincing. It is rather shocking when the advance party seize Edith, the wife of village headman Wulnoth. When next we see her she is in a hell of a state, and adult viewers can’t help thinking that the Vikings have been practicing one of their favourite occupations on her – by which I don’t mean pillage. Very schocking in what is otherwise quite a light hearted romp for the most part.

Worthy of consideration is the contribution that this story makes about the issue of whether you can change History or not. At no time does the Doctor actually tell the Monk what he told Barbara all those weeks ago. If you really can’t change History, not one line of it, then the Doctor does not need to do a thing, because the Monk will be unsuccessful. The fact that the Doctor does take action to stop the Monk suggests that now he knows full well that you can change History – it is just that you mustn’t. . . Unless it’s absolutely necessary. Now, ok, the series still has several true historicals to go – the Myth Makers – the Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve– the Gunfighters – the Smugglers and The Highlanders – but this story seems to signal a significant sea change in attitude towards Earth History and how it can be used in the series – off the top of my head I can think of The Evil of the Daleks – The Abominable Snowmen – The Time Monster and The Time Warrior which all use Earth’s past as a setting, while essentially being Sci Fi rather than Historical stories.

The ending was a bit rushed, and it’s interesting to see that the Doctor uses the removal of the Monk’s Dimensional Stabiliser to immobilise his TARDIS. In the Pertwee era he immobilises the Master’s TARDIS by removing the dematerialization circuit. This has the effect of shrinking the interior of the Monk’s TARDIS so that the inside actually fits into the stone sarcophagus that it appears to be. Which means that it is too small for the Monk to be able to get inside now. It’s rather cruel too, since the note the Doctor leaves for the Monk does hold out the hope that he may one day return and free him. Yet earlier in the same story, when Vicky and Steven found that the TARDIS had disappeared – actually it had just been covered by the tide – she made a point of saying that the Doctor wouldn’t have moved it, because if he had then he would never have been able to come back, the TARDIS being so erratic.

Overall, this was a new direction for the show, and it was one I rather enjoyed. Which is just as well since, as far as ‘Doctor Who’ was concerned, this was the future, baby.

What have we learned?

The Monk is of the same planet and species as the Doctor

The Monk’s TARDIS is not the same as the Doctor’s. For one thing, his works. For another, it has a drift control which allows it to materialise in space. Hmm – I’ve seen the Doctor’s TARDIS do this later on. Anyway, presuming that the Monk’s TARDIS is later than the Doctor’s (a reasonable assumption since he left Gallifrey 50 years after the Doctor) then on Gallifrey – mark 4 comes later than type 40. Go figure.