31: The Highlanders

Before Watching

Here we are at the last Historical. (Alright, “Black Orchid” has a Historical setting without Science Fiction elements, so if you want to call it a Historical, then feel free. It isn’t linked to either a specific real figure, or a specific real life Historical event – but then you could say the same about “The Smugglers” as well. But for all intents and purposes, The Highlanders does represent the end of an era)

Bearing in mind what we saw with “The Smugglers” and the post-Culloden setting, I expect this will also draw on fictional sources, in this case things like ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Rob Roy . It’s a 4 parter, so at least there should be a minimum of padding. I’ll be interested to see just how much Fraser Hines’ Jamie McCrimmon features. He’s going to go on to do a mammoth stint of no fewer than 21 stories, including this one and 1985’s “The Two Doctors”, and not including a brief cameo in “The Five Doctors”, where he is, after all, only a phantom.

No episodes are known to exist of this story, and to be honest the first two seasons of Patrick Troughton are going to be very much a case of death by recon, since of 75 episodes, 45 are missing. Compare this with Hartnell’s first two seasons, where only 11 episodes are missing, 7 of which all belong to the lost classic “Marco Polo”. All in all just over 30 Hartnell episodes are missing, compared with a total of 28 missing from Troughton’s first season alone.

Oh, one more thing. I have to say that I do hope that we’re not going into shortbread tin Scotland territory with this. I’m not Scottish myself, but I’m certainly of Scottish descent, and still have a sizeable number of Scottish relatives. In my experience real Scots can get quite annoyed with this rather stereotypical all bagpipes, kilts and haggis representation of Scotland. Case in point. My Mastermind final was filmed a few months after the death of Magnus Magnusson in 2007, and so as a tribute the final was filmed in Glasgow Caledonian University, which had been very dear to his heart, and of which University he had been the Rector. The final was due to be filmed later in the afternoon, so I had arranged to meet my cousin Margaret from Gourock for lunch, and then she’d be my guest for the final. I met her at the bus station, and as we were walking along Buchanan St. we saw a chap in full tartan get up, kilt and all, busking on the bagpipes. Margaret, it’s fair to say, was scathing – I think her exact words were, “Honestly! Making a spectacle of himself!” Joking, I replied that she ought to be proud, as he was presenting the passers by with a chance to enjoy real Scottish heritage. She sniffed, and replied that there was no way he’d be Scottish if he was doing something like that. Intrigued, I went up to him and asked. She was right – he was from Prague! And on that note, let’s go and watch the show.

After Watching

Having watched “The Highlanders” now I think I’m not unhappy that the Historicals have come to an end. This one just didn’t work for me, and I have to say that I wasn’t unhappy that it was only 4 parts long.

In synopsis then, the TARDIS lands on Culloden Moor shortly after the battle has wound to its bloody conclusion. The Doctor, Ben and Polly are captured by Alexander and Jamie – watch out for him – and taken to a cottage where their wounded laird, Colin Maclaren, and his daughter Kirsty, played by Hannah Gordon, are in hiding. Hannah Gordon was a well known actress of the 70s and 80s. I remember her appearing on a Morecambe and Wise show once . (Ernie – Hallo Miss Gordon, I watch all your shows. Eric – Hallo Miss Gordon, I drink all your gin.)I wonder how many actors and actresses who appeared in Doctor Who were also guests on Morecambe and Wise? Answers on a postcard, please. Back to “The Highlanders”, Alexander is killed when they are captured by a party of redcoats and the men are taken away to be hanged. Yes, the obligatory splitting up of the crew happens here as well.

The plot then revolves around the plan of a corrupt solicitor, Gray, to capture all the Jacobite prisoners, and ship them off as slaves to the North American colonies. The Doctor, Kirsty and Polly conspire to arm the rebels on the ship, who then set sail for France, allowing the Doctor and companions to make their way back to the TARDIS, after another encounter with slimy Solicitor Gray. Jamie decides to escort them back to the TARDIS, and since he has missed his ferry to France, the Doctor invites him to join the crew.

What’s so bad about this Historical, then? Well, nothing actually bad as such. For me, I think that the problem is that it comes just a week or so after I watched “The Power of the Daleks” and there really is no comparison between these two stories. Alright, maybe I shouldn’t be comparing a Historical with that great story, but even if I just compare it with the Hartnell Historicals for me it comes up a little short. Let’s look at just a couple of aspects of comparison.

The story itself. In some of the best Historicals, those which are not primarily played for laughs like “The Romans”  there is an underlying moral dimension to the story. In fact, in “The Aztecs” the moral issue of human sacrifice is foregrounded. Now, “The Highlanders” isn’t primarily played for laughs. However it is difficult to see a real moral dimension to the story. Now, I wouldn’t mind if the story was deliberately going out of its way to present the Jacobites as brave, doomed tragic freedom fighters, giving their all in a just cause, and I wouldn’t have minded if the story had presented them as evil traitors to the rightful king. This story does neither. Now, if it was presenting some overview of the Jacobite conflict and saying – well, that’s some of what happened, make your own mind up about it, then that’s actually not a bad way of presenting Historical drama. But it doesn’t do that. I said before watching it that I hoped that we weren’t going to be presented with the traditional ‘shortbread tin’ view of Scotland, and to be fair, we haven’t. But then we haven’t been presented with much of a view of Scotland immediately after Culloden at all. This story could have been set in another time, and another place, maybe after another conflict, and minimal changes would have needed to have been made.

The Hartnell Historical this most closely resembles for me, is “The Smugglers”. That’s hardly surprising since it features the same two companions, Ben and Polly, and was made by the same team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. “The Smugglers”, though, is not pinned to any specific historical event, which maybe gave more freedom to include the Boys’ Own Adventure serial elements, which worked so much better in that serial. Some of these elements are there in “The Highlanders”, but it all feels a little more uneasy. Trask, the commander of the ship in which the Jacobites are to be shipped to the Colonies is obviously a pirate, but whereas that added colour and texture to “The Smugglers”, with the understated performances of the rest of the cast here, Dallas Cavell’s performance, seemingly modelled on Robert Newton’s Long John Silver, was so far over the top that it just felt out of place here. David Garth’s Solicitor Gray is appropriately cold and amoral, but had he been leavened with just a little touch of humour he would have been all the better and more convincing.

The script for me is the problem. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s that it is not good. Not in any way good. What lighter moments there are seem to come from nothing more than Patrick Troughton putting on an accent as Doktor Von Wer (I’m sure you already know but that’s a sort of German translation of Doctor Who), or dressing up as an old crone, and as a cockney redcoat (why do the words Shane Ritchie come into my head as I type that?). The scenes with Lieutenant Algernon Ffinch in the pub and in the last episode have at least a tiny bit of charm – what a minx that Polly is, eh! – and it is quite sweet the way that he comes to the aid of a damsel in distress at the end to enable the Doctor and companions to escape from Gray. But these are just small moments of light in amongst a lot of fairly grey scripting and acting.

There’s little concession made to the immediate post-Culloden setting – there’s no hint of atrocities being carried out by the remarkably restrained redcoats for example. In fact it only really comes into play at all in the revelation that Kirsty’s father gave her a ring which Bonnie Prince Charlie (who incidentally was named after three sheepdogs) gave him, and only because this is used at one stage to further the plot. There’s a lot of rather lumpen dialogue between Gray and Trask, Gray and his clerk Perkins, Gray and anybody else who’ll listen, and this was a bore, I’m afraid. On the other hand in episode 4, the fight between the newly armed Jacobites and Trask’s men on the ship seems to go on forever. I’ll be honest, I find that sort of thing rather tedious even when it’s live action. In a recon it’s awful.

I am willing to accept that the lacklustre script and story were a consequence of Gerry Davis having to write the scripts himself, and maybe they were done at fairly short notice. I’ve checked in the Television Companion, but all it says is that the writer who was commissioned to script the story, Elwyn Jones, carried out no work on it, which is how script editor Davis was able to receive a credit for the story along with Jones. Well, whatever the case, “The Highlanders” introduced Jamie McCrimmon, and we can forgive it a lot for that at least.

What Have We Learned?

Jamie McCrimmon is a piper, but he only has his chanter with him

Polly is perfectly adept at using her womanly wiles when needs be 

30: The Power of the Daleks

Before Watching

Well, I’ve already mentioned the Daleks on a conveyor belt memory. That kind of dominates all of my thoughts about this story, and I can’t say that I have any great recollections of reading the synopsis years ago. I obviously did, since I read synopses of every Hartnell story and every Troughton story, but it just hasn’t stuck.

I’ll be interested in a couple of things particularly. The way the Doctor’s relationship with Ben and Polly develops is one of them, as is the way that the first Dalek story not to be scripted by Terry Nation works out. OK – The Dalek’s Master Plan did have episodes scripted by Dennis Spooner, but this is the first complete Dalek serial in which Terry Nation didn’t script any of the episodes at all. A quick check in my trusty “Doctor Who : The Television Companion” – David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, first published in 1998 by BBC Books – reveals that the story was scripted by David Whitaker. Now, with a Terry Nation script you pretty much know what you’re going to get. My impression of David Whitaker’s stuff, though, is that he’s far more difficult to pigeonhole – he wrote both “Edge of Destruction” and “The Crusade”, for example, and it’s difficult to think of two Doctor Who stories by the same writer that are as different as these two.

I think it’s a shame that this is a full recon. It would have been fascinating to actually see Troughton acting for the first time as The Doctor. You can only get so much from voices and photos, at the end of the day.

After Watching

That was a great story by anybody’s definition. Here’s the basic idea: - the newly regenerated Doctor lands the TARDIS on the planet Vulcan. Yeah, it’s a bit of a coincidence that Star Trek would use the same name for a planet at around the same time (I think that Doctor Who came first, just) Having said that, though, it’s no great surprise considering that Vulcan is a Roman God, and all the planets in our own solar system are named after Roman Gods and Goddesses, with the exception of Earth. The human colonists on the planet are expecting a visit from an Examiner from Earth. Who, unbeknownst to most of them, has been murdered, and dumped in one of the planet’s mercury swamps. All this in the first few minutes of the first episode, mind you. The Doctor is mistaken for the Examiner, which handily gives him the run of the colony. He meets the scientist Lesterson. Lesterson has found and retrieved an ancient capsule from the planet’s mercury swamps. When the capsule is opened, they find three deactivated and cobwebbed Daleks. That’s a great cliffhanger on which to end the episode, only slightly spoiled by the fact that you knew the Daleks were coming because of the title of the story.

Lesterson and the other colonists fail to see the deadly danger they are in. Instead, some of them see a great tool to help them in their mining, and some of them see them either as a weapon to use for their rebellion against the colony’s government, or a weapon to suppress rebels. Despite the Doctor’s warnings, Lesterson powers up one of the Daleks, who pretends to be his servant. This enables him to reactivate the other two Daleks, and then to obtain raw materials and power to begin manufacturing more Daleks on the previously mentioned conveyor belt. Once the Daleks are ready they attack the humans, rebels and government forces alike, and only the Doctor can save the day.

This brief synopsis doesn’t really do this story any justice, but then you ought to watch it yourselves to prove or disprove this. Anyone who thinks all Dalek stories are rather simplistic and samey really should. So, what’s so great about Power of the Daleks?

The first ‘difficult’ regeneration

Patrick Troughton acts extremely oddly at times in the first episode especially, speaking of The Doctor in the third person, as if he really isn’t the Doctor himself, ignoring Ben and Polly largely, and playing that flipping recorder. The fact that this is a six parter for once works in the show’s favour as it allows Troughton the time to grow into the part, and start to develop a relationship with his companions by the end of the story. It’s such a shame that this is a recon, which means that apart from a few very brief fragments we don’t get to see Troughton move, and it’s difficult to tell how much screen presence he has. It’s worth noting that some of the little pegs on which he seems to be hanging his portrayal of the Doctor will gradually fade away in time. I’m thinking of his silly hat fetish, for example, and his overuse of that flaming recorder.

The way that the Daleks are used

This is very clever. Every time we have met the Daleks so far they have been two dimensional malevolent killing machines. This story explores what happens to them, what they are like, when you take their guns away from them. There’s a beautiful use of dramatic irony in this story. Lesterson and his fellow colonists don’t really know the Daleks at all. All they have to go on is what the Doctor says, and they ignore that largely. We, the audience, like the Doctor, know exactly what the Daleks are like, and know that it’s not a matter of IF the Daleks go on the rampage, just when. This makes scenes like those where the three Daleks chant ‘we are your ser-vants’ even more effective. The story adds another facet to the Daleks, since we see their cunning, and their ability to manipulate, which is something we’ve only really seen before in the original Dalek story.

The Political Drama

Yes, underpinning the reappearance of the Daleks is a tense political drama. “The Power of the Daleks” is an obvious title for the story, since the Daleks need power to reactivate and then start reproducing themselves. However it is also an ironic one, since much of this story is about the power of the humans, or rather the human desire for power over fellow humans. These colonists are a nasty bunch, the smart ones are amoral, and the decent ones are fools. The leading Dalek at one stage asks Lesterson “Why do humans kill humans?” What a brilliant piece of scripting that is. Think about it. If the Dalek had just said words to the effect of – you are no better than we are – it wouldn’t have had the same effect, yet essentially that is the conclusion that the Dalek is inviting the viewers to draw for themselves. Lovely writing.

It’s telling that the Doctor advises Ben and Polly that they should all leave quickly at the end of the last episode, since rather than thank them for ending the Dalek menace, the surviving colonists are far more likely to present them with a bill for all the damage that was done in destroying them. That’s just the last example of the wonderfully cynical edge this story has, remarkable considering that it was made in the mid 60s.

Very Good Acting

Bernard Archard brings a touch of class to any production, and he would go on to play Marcus Scarman brilliantly in one of my all time top 10 stories, Pyramids of Mars. You just knew that his character Bragen was going to turn out to be a villain. His self-delusion that he can still control the Daleks once their attack has started is played to perfection, and totally convincing. Robert James as the misguided scientist Lesterson has his own descent into madness, and does so very convincingly, and Pamela Ann Davy puts in a good turn as the rebel turncoat Janley, who is gunned won brutally by the Daleks without warning. It’s hard to think of anyone who doesn’t put in a good performance in this story, helped, no doubt, by the excellent script that they were working with.

Is “The Power of the Daleks” perfect? No, not quite. The only obvious deficiency of the script is in the denouement. It’s just not clear how the Doctor has managed to destroy the Daleks. He has installed something onto the power console, and messes about with the switches, but it’s not clear whether his success was by design or accidental. It’s not explained in any great detail exactly how this works – there’s a hint that the Doctor has overloaded them with power, but it’s not clear, and that’s a bit of a shame, especially considering the excellent if somewhat downbeat end to the episode.

It’s interesting, if ultimately rather pointless, to speculate how “The Power of the Daleks” might conceivably have been done as a William Hartnell story. This may be rather controversial, but I reckon that Hartnell could have pulled it off as well. He’d certainly have had some good confrontations with Lesterson and Bragen. But it would have been a different story, and that’s the point. Doctor Who has now embarked upon a different course from what we’ve seen before, and judging by this first story everyone involved embraced the change whole heartedly.

What Have We Learned?

Daleks can convert electric current into static electricity, but need a large amount of it to really get their motors running.

Daleks can reproduce exceptionally quickly given enough power, raw materials and equipment.

Dalek capsules, like their own time machines, are dimensionally transcendental.

The kind of human being who’d willingly live and work on a colony like Vulcan is a very nasty piece of work.

You don’t have to be Terry Nation in order to write a classic Dalek story, in fact the evidence from this story suggests that it is probably helpful not to be. 

Patrick Troughton

I must have already mentioned somewhere along the line that I have a very early memory of watching Daleks being manufactured on a production line, which can only have been from the end of episode 4 of The Power of the Daleks, or the start of episode 5. I would have been 2 and a half when they were broadcast, so how I remember it I don’t know, especially when my next clear memories of Patrick Troughton’s era come from his last series, two years later. Still, you never forget your first Doctor, and it is during these 21 stories that we’re going to move from stories I never experienced first time round, to stories I have very vague memories of, to stories that I have clear memories of, and which made a real impression on me at the time.

                                                                             

What do I expect from the Troughton era as a whole, then? Well, the second story, the Highlanders, is the last Historical – at least until the Davison two parter, Black Orchid. It’s a bit of shame considering the generally excellent standard of scripting in these particular shows, but the writing was on the wall, I suppose with The Smugglers, which clearly seemed to be taking the genre in another, more classic adventure story direction. As a consequence it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there will be less light and shade in a season than we’ve come to expect from the show during the Hartnell era – a far cry from the first season when 4 out of 8 stories were actually set in Earth’s past. There’s only two Dalek stories, the first and last of Troughton’s first season, and neither of these is scripted by Terry Nation, which is an interesting development I will be looking at as and when. The Cybermen, on the other hand, move into the void left by the Daleks, and feature in no fewer than four stories. They are backed up by the Ice Warriors, who appear in their first two stories, and the Yeti, who feature in two stories in the same season.

With regards to companions – well, if we accept that Sara Kingdom was a bona fide companion even though she only appeared in the one story, then Hartnell had no fewer than 10 companions – 9 if you don’t include Sara. Troughton only has 5, two of whom, Ben and Polly, are carryovers from Hartnell. There is bound to be a new dynamic between the Doctor and his companions, and even though Patrick Troughton wasn’t the most physically impressive specimen, there’s no way that he’ll get away with being the doddery old gent that Hartnell chose to play sometimes. Even allowing for that, though, I expect that we’ll still see Ben and Jamie taking on most of the physical stuff.

I was surprised how much I got to like Hartnell’s Doctor, especially considering how much he was sidelined in his last 7 or 8 stories. I already know that I liked Troughton’s Doctor – not just from the couple of stories I remember from his last season, but also from his performance in The Three Doctors. But that was from when I was a kid. I just hope, really hope that this Troughton total immersion over the next few weeks isn’t going to change my opinion. At which point it is probably appropriate to start our journey through this era of the show.

But that was from when I was a kid. I just hope, really hope that this Troughton total immersion over the next few weeks isn’t going to change my opinion. At which point it is probably appropriate to start our journey through this era of the show.

The William Hartnell Era: A Retrospective

The purpose of watching all of William Hartnell’s stories in order was firstly to experience quite a large number of stories which I’d never seen before, and secondly, as close as possible to replicate the experience that original viewers would have had when they watched them.

The second aim was only ever going to be partially achieved. The inhibiting factors were: -

I had already seen at least part of five stories in the past

I had read Target novelisations of some of the other stories

I wasn’t going to be able to watch them at the rate of one episode per week, watched at the same time on the same day of the week

I wasn’t going to wait several weeks between seasons.

I already had experience of watching other doctors, which the original audience wouldn’t have had the benefit of.

So, allowing for the inhibiting factors, what observations should I make about the experience?

Firstly, William Hartnell

William Hartnell was a terrific choice for the lead role. The fact that he makes your feelings about his character transform the way they do throughout the first season is testament to the levels and facets he brought to the character – and remember, he had no predecessor to either draw upon or react against if he so chose. In my opinion he excels in the small emotional scenes, when a character is leaving for example. The way he develops the Doctor’s relationships with his companions and some of the guest stars is terrific – the developing relationship with Barbara through the first season is one of the reasons which would have kept me coming back for more had I been around at the time the stories were first broadcast.

The fact that William Hartnell managed to become the undoubted star of his own show is another demonstration of the gifts he brought to the table. By the time that Ian and Barbara leave he will clearly miss them, but he doesn’t need them in the same way he did in the early stories. And although new companion Steven does come to be foregrounded in several stories, there is a subtle difference between the way that he is used, and the way that Ian was used. He acts heroically, but he is not the hero in the way that Ian certainly was in the earliest of the early days. 

I’ve already mentioned in some of the reviews of third season stories that I do find the way that Hartnell’s Doctor was sidelined for parts of the third series to be rather shabby treatment. “The Massacre” and “The Celestial Toymaker” are only two examples. It is true that Hartnell fluffs his lines in quite a lot of stories, but these ‘Billy fluffs’ as they are known I always find rather endearing, and actually they serve as another facet of character. I’ve read explanations of why the last two production teams of his time seemed to want to sideline him, and even to replace him, but what the plain truth is I don’t know. But I’ve found that I’ve developed a bit of an affection for his Doctor, in a way that I never thought I might. This was a time when we didn’t know who the Doctor was, or what the Doctor was, or why he left his people, or why he couldn’t go back, and there’s this quality of pathos on the occasions that he muses about going back.

Secondly, the Companions and the supporting cast

Starting with the Companions, considering that the title of the first episode was “An Unearthly Child”, Susan pretty quickly got bumped out of the series. I can understand why to some extent. It’s natural that the relationships that the writers/ script editor/ producers would want to explore was the Doctor’s relationships with the intelligent and gutsy Barbara, and the heroic and physically able Ian, both of whom just want him to take them back where they came from, something he is unable to do. Both William Russell and Jacqueline Hill were very well cast, and in Jacqueline Hill they had as fine an actress as any who were ever cast in the role of companion to the Doctor.

Things were never going to be the same once Ian and Barbara had departed, but Maureen O’Brien’s Vicki made a decent contribution to the show during her tenure, as did the underrated Peter Purves as Steven. Poor old Jackie Lane has come in for a fair bit of stick in her role of Dodo Chaplet, and I can understand why. This may just be the scripting, but Dodo only ever runs the gamut of emotions from A to B, and she is not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer by any stretch of the imagination.

To return to speaking of fine actors, I was a little surprised at the number of ‘name’ actors who do actually appear in Hartnell stories. George Colouris in “The Keys of Marinus” was the first, but there were a surprising number of others. “The Massacre” alone featured Andre Morell and Leonard Sachs. Michael Gough was ill used, or under used in The Celestial Toymaker, but he was there. Amongst the maybe lesser known names there were some great performances in different stories too – I’m not going to mention all of them, but if we pick on just one story, John Ringham and Margo van der Bergh in “The Aztecs” come to mind. Then there’s Bernard Kay, Julian Glover and Jean Marsh in “The Crusade” I could go on.

Thirdly, the Historicals

When we talk about the true Doctor Who Historicals, as opposed to the sci fi stories which use a historical background, like The Time Meddler, then almost all of them belong to the Hartnell era. Only Troughton’s “The Highlanders” and Davison’s “Black Orchid” are true historicals in the rest of the whole of classic Doctor Who. I don’t know if this is sacrilege to say it, but if you look at the list of Hartnell historicals –

Marco Polo

The Aztecs

The Reign of Terror

The Romans

The Crusade

The Myth Makers

The Massacre

The Gunfighters

The Smugglers

- they contain some of my absolute favourite Hartnell stories. I love both “The Aztecs” and “The Massacre” – and like “Marco Polo” very much too. All scripted or co-scripted by John Lucarotti, it’s worth noting. Even looking at the ones I didn’t like quite so much, Dennis Spooner’s “Reign of Terror” and “The Romans” it’s not that they weren’t well written or well acted, it’s just that they didn’t happen to light my particular candle. I’m not entirely sure why they stopped doing them. If you look on the surface, there were 3 historicals in the first season (4 if you include An Unearthly Child) – 3 in the second season, and 3 in the third season. That seems fairly even, until you consider that it was 3/8 in season 1 – 3/9 in season 2, and 3/ 10 in the 3^rd season, a season in which a massive 12 episodes were taken up by the Daleks’ Master Plan. So I suppose that they were on decline throughout the Hartnell era in real terms.

I suppose – and I don’t know – but I suppose that they could be a little slow moving and wordy for the younger members of the audience, drawing as a lot of them do on the rich BBC heritage of period and classic serial dramas.

Fourthly, the Daleks

Like them or loathe them you can’t ignore them. With “The Daleks’ Masterplan” Terry Nation has penned his last black and white Dalek story. I respect the Daleks for making the show the success that it was, and for the fact that my 8 year old self found them very scary, in a good way. But as for my 50 year old self, meh. I just find them very two dimensional – in some stories literally so since some of them were obviously cut out blow ups. The thing about the Daleks is there’s a real lack of depth about them. They want to control the Univese, that much is clear. But why? Their leader is the Dalek Supreme at this point of their history. OK – but how did he get to be Dalek Supreme? I never voted for him. What’s in it for the other Daleks under his control? There doesn’t seem to be any promotion or demotion in the Dalek world. So what’s in it for them?

Well, anyway, I enjoyed The Dalek Invasion of Earth – my best Dalek story so far. I also liked bits of The Chase, although frankly a lot of it was very silly. As for the Dalek’s Master Plan, well it had a lot of magic moments throughout its marathon run time, but few of these involved the Daleks.

Fifthly, Sci Fi

It’s difficult to point to a Hartnell sci fi story which really holds water as a piece of hard science fiction, or even as a piece of good, tightly scripted television drama. Let’s leave the Dalek stories to one side as they have already had special consideration. That leaves : -

The Keys of Marinus

The Sensorites

Planet of Giants

The Rescue

The Web Planet

The Space Museum

The Time Meddler

Galaxy Four

The Ark

The War Machines

The Tenth Planet

In terms of concept, the first two episodes of the Ark come closest to an interesting piece of well plotted hard sci fi, and I also feel that the first episode of The Space Museum is worthy of a mention. Both of these stories become mired in traditional shoot-em-up space opera plotting, though, after their early promise. The Time Meddler succeeds because of the concept of another Time Traveller with a very different agenda to the Doctor’s, and the chemistry between Hartnell and Butterworth. The War Machines does well with its contemporary Earth setting, but for me it really doesn’t quite match The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Web Planet deserves marks for trying, and I didn’t mind the Sensorites. The rescue was a bit of a bore, and Galaxy Four was just dire. But I have to say that I loved Planet of Giants, though maybe more for the effects than anything else. Which brings me to –

Sixthly, The Special Effects.

The conception of classic Doctor Who as being riddled with ‘rubber suit monsters and baco foil scenery’ is a cliché, and obviously you can’t judge the effects used in a story made in 1964, against one made 50 years later. But it is difficult to judge it by the standards of its time, simply because it was so long ago. For what it’s worth, my observations are –

Scenery/Interiors/Exteriors – There is a heavy reliance on painted backdrops, which I really don’t mind so much. They probably do have a tendency to look better on stills than in live action, which may be why the recons of Marco Polo look as good as they do. Generally the Historicals fair better for this then the other stories, although the jungle planets, and the jungle interiors in The Ark are very good indeed. Spaceship interiors are less convincing though – thinking of both the Sensorites and The Rescue the spaceship interiors just look like 1960s offices. The Dalek city interiors in “The Daleks” created a template with their endless shiny corridors, and their assymetrical doors which disappeared into the walls (highly impractical) which would recur, with some variations, throughout the show’s run.

A word about the TARDIS interior though. There are very few stories which showed as much of the TARDIS interior as “The Edge of Destruction” and it’s worth watching for that. The TARDIS interior, the control room especially is much bigger and more impressive than it would be from the Pertwee era onwards.

One story which stands out for me due to the quality of exteriors/interiors was Planet of Giants, which probably had a budget of tuppence ha’penny, but actually looked every bit as good as Hollywood movies such as the Incredible Shrinking Man – which actually had the money to do it properly.

Costume/Alien Design Again, the Historicals fair well, possibly because the designers didn’t have to rack their brains thinking about what people in this situation would actually look like, and historical costumes were fairly easy to source. The show owes so much to the Raymond Cusick realization of a very basic Terry Nation sketch of what the Daleks might look like. Next up were the Voord. Full marks for making us say – they look like men in diving suits, then showing us that they were actually in diving suits, but no marks for not showing us what they looked like under their helmets. The Sensorites’ masks are actually rather good, but their very basic costumes and those ridiculous feet are distracting. I can’t make up my mind whether having the robomen in those ramshackle headpieces in The Dalek Invasion of Earth is just shabby, or a stroke of genius. As for the Web Planet – well, where do you start? So much time , effort and energy – and possibly money as well – was spent on this show, but the technology just wasn’t available to do it justice in the 60s.

If you’re designing aliens for a show like Doctor Who, then you have basically two choices. You either use machines, or you use actors in suits. As for machines – well the show hit paydirt with their first attempt with the Daleks. There were others in the Hartnell era – but somehow the Mechanoids, the Chumblies and the War Machines just didn’t make the same impact. I quite like the Mechanoids, but it’s difficult to see how they could really have hurt the Daleks with their lack of weaponry.

As for men in suits, well, the trouble is that it’s very difficult to make a man in a suit not look like a man in a suit. So you have an impressive number of men in different suits in The Daleks’ Master Plan for instance, but they all look like men in different suits, apart from one who looks like an evil Christmas tree (not an original observation, but I can’t think of a different way of putting it). In the Ark, the Monoids represented a genuine attempt to get away from a basic humanoid shape, and it works in the first two episodes when they don’t speak. When they speak in episodes 3 and 4, though, the illusion is shattered. Maybe that’s what makes the cybermen in The Tenth Planet such a potentially good idea. Their shape is humanoid, because that’s where they started from. The realization on screen isn’t brilliant, but then there was only time and money to virtually thrown the first cybermen costumes together anyway, according to David ‘Cyberleader’ Banks’ book, published in the 80s. They would develop throughout the coming Troughton era.

Space Hardware/Models – While I was watching each episode I can’t say that I was sitting with a jotter in one hand and a pen in the other, noting down whenever I saw a nifty bit of model work, or space hardware, so this is just based on my recollections. I liked the start of Keys of Marinus, where the mini subs were approaching the Keeper’s island. I thought that the crashed spaceship in “The Rescue” was well up to the standard of what Gerry Anderson was producing at the time – and remember that he had the services of Derek Meddings to call on. There’s a couple of shots in “The Ark” – where we see the burning Earth, and where we see the Monoid statue being effected from the spaceship which don’t look bad now, and must have seemed highly impressive back in the day.

Seventhly, Interfering with Time and History

Well, can you or can’t you? If you take the Hartnell era as a whole, the picture is a confusing one. The first season Historicals all tow the party line, outlined clearly in “The Aztecs” that you cannot change History. The we get The Time Meddler. In The Time Meddler the Doctor has to stop one of his own kind from meddling with Earth history, so that Harold can eventually win the battle of Hastings. Why does the Doctor have to do this if it’s impossible for the Monk to actually change History? For that matter, why does the Doctor have to stop the War Machines? That’s part of Earth History – or it will be, as will the Dalek Invasion of 2064.

The doctrine that you can’t change History is untenable for the series in the long run. A more sensible attitude is that there are events in History that you absolutely shouldn’t change, and this is pretty much the attitude that the series will go on to take, leading to the post 2005 concept of fixed points in Time.

Finally, Legacy

William Hartnell’s era gradually established a template for the show, and while different teams and different writers would push the envelope, a lot of the show’s quintessential values are already apparent before the end of the Hartnell Era. The Doctor’s eccentricity, his cunning, his basic decency and his willingness to stand against injustice, and help those who need help are all seen at different times. It’s clear right from the start that the Doctor will never travel without a companion. (Alright, he does in The Deadly Assassin, but that’s a special case) This hints at the essential loneliness which is a part of every Doctor’s character – even Jon Pertwee’s and Tom Baker’s.

29:The Tenth Planet

Before Watching

Well, here we are then. William Hartnell’s 29^th story – his swan song. An important last, but also an important first too. The first regeneration scene. The first appearance of the Cybermen – I’ll say a bit more about them later. The first ‘base under siege’ story – that’s a Doctor Who staple that’s going to recur, especially through the coming Troughton Era. If you look at the four Patrick Troughton Cybermen stories – The Moonbase – The Tomb of the Cybermen – The Wheel in Space and The Invasion – two of them – the Moonbase and The Wheel in Space – are both ‘base under siege stories.

Cards on the table – I always loved the cybermen more than the Daleks – you’ve probably picked up my mixed feelings about Skaro’s finest as you’ve worked your way through previous reviews. This is partly just an accident of History. Although I have a very early memory of Daleks being assembled on a production line from The Power of the Daleks, I only really remember watching whole stories from Patrick Troughton’s last season, and thought that the Cybermen in The Invasion were amazing.

My first exposure to the Tenth Planet was in the Target novelization. Now, one of the first Target novelizations made from the early years was Doctor Who and the Cybermen, which was based on The Moonbase – and I loved that one. Yet when I read the novelization of “The Tenth Planet” I didn’t think it was a patch on the later story. Add to that fact years of reading about cybermen with cardboard chest units and Swedish accents, and you’ll understand why I can’t help approaching this one with more than a little trepidation.

After Watching

The story turned out to be set in 1986. It looked like the production team were deliberately going out of their way to stress the multicultural nature of future society. On the base itself there seemed to be more Americans than anything else, but also a British boffin who looked like a bearded Elvis Costello. There is also a terrible Italian cliché. It was interesting to see that the two astronauts were a white Australian, and black American, who seemed to be the commander. I felt genuinely cold during the scenes set outside the base during the snowstorm. So far so good.

Right, the cybermen. There’s nothing I can probably say that hasn’t already been said. The hands were conspicuously still human. As for the voice. Well, maybe it is just me, but they didn’t sound the least bit Swedish to me. There was some electronic treatment of the voices, but they weren’t as highly treated as I thought they would be, and the first cyberman to speak actually has quite a posh English accent, for all the fact that he is varying the rhythms of his speech as far away as he can get from the rhythms of normal speech. In fact, if anything it his voice reminds me just a little bit of Michael Palin playing the leader of the knights who say Ni. Which just isn’t threatening. Their voices needed to be both deeper and more mechanical. Although having said the fact that there is not the slightest irritation in the cyberman’s voice when he keeps repeating his question about the humans’ names and ages does underline the fact that the cybermen have no emotions. In fact these are the most emotionless cybermen we will ever see. They are less instantly threatening than they will become, but actually far more convincing in what they claim to be. As regards their appearance, it’s nowhere near as bad as some have claimed it to be. Having cast tall actors works, and this is emphasised by the light on top of their heads I didn’t realise from stills photos I’d seen that the big circular thing on the bottom of their chest units was actually a detachable weapon, and that’s actually an important plot point, since it enables  Ben and the base personnel to use them on the cybermen. In fact Ben is almost in tears when he fired on a cyberman. I think that on reflection the decision not keep the cloth masks for their next appearance was the right one, though.

Having read up on this since watching the whole story, I now know that William Hartnell was taken ill at the end of episode 2, which is why he spends all of episode 3 spark out on the floor. It shows how much of a template this story was for much of what would come later when there were scenes which looked very familiar to me from later stories – taking back the base and holding off the invaders – crawling along a ventilation shaft (to be fair it was the male companion who did it in this story. The commanding officer (General Cutler in this story) going off tonto and losing it completely is something which will become quite a familiar motif as well. Cutler’s solution is to try to nuke Mondas, and the wrongness of being so ready to bomb what you don’t understand is another motif which will recur.

As regards the story, it really helped that it was only 4 parts. Any more and it would have needed some serious padding. As it was, though, this story surprised me since the Doctor did little or nothing to save the day. The main plot point is that Mondas, the home of the cybermen, is Earth’s virtual twin, having left the solar system a very long time ago. When it comes back, it automatically begins absorbing energy from earth. It seems that this is a natural process, since the cybermen cannot turn it off when they realise that Mondas is going to be destroyed if it keeps absorbing energy. The only solution they can come up with is to destroy Earth to stop it. So basically all the people on the base have to do is to stop them destroying Earth long enough for Mondas to absorb enough energy to destroy itself.

I was struck also by the way that the goalposts have continually shifted in the destroying a cyberman stakes. In the book of The Moonbase – and I’ve no doubt, in the show as well – the cybermen’s chest units are destroyed by a cocktail of chemicals including nail varnish remover, and the army of cybermen are destroyed by a  gravity device which is used to control Earth’s weather. In “Revenge of the Cybermen” they have a previously unknown susceptibility to gold. In this first cybermen story it’s radiation, the slightest hint of it and they start dropping like 9 pins. Well, some of them. For the rest, they are apparently drawing all of their power from Mondas, so when Mondas dies, so do they. Pretty convenient, I’d say.

The great irony of the current situation with The Tenth Planet is that the first three episodes exist, but the 4^th, containing the first ever regeneration scene, does not. Footage of the regeneration does, but that’s all. Still, it must have come as a hell of a shock when it happened without tons of warning and pre publicity which is the norm nowadays.  Off the point completely, watching the animation of episode 4 it struck me how much Michael Craze’s voice is like Bradley Walsh.

Overall, then, it’s remarkable how far the show has come by the end of this story.

What Have We Learned?

Earth had a twin planet called Mondas

Originally cybermen were not evil, in fact they had no concept of good or evil, just survival.

The original Mondas cybermen were susceptible to radiation.

Whatever species the Doctor belongs to (we didn’t know at the time) he can change and regenerate

28: The Smugglers

Before Watching

I could say much the same as I said before The Savages. Except then, at least , I did know that Steven was leaving. Now, well, no. It’s the last Hartnell Historical, in fact the penultimate Hartnell of all. There will be one more pure historical in the Troughton era – The Highlanders which will be notable for the introduction of Jamie if for nothing else, and then the rather strange Black Orchid when we get to Peter Davison.  It’s got Ben and Polly, who impressed me in The War Games. The wind of change is blowing across the face of Doctor Who . . .

After Watching

The first thing I noticed was that this one was scripted by Brian ‘Ice Warriors/ Celestial Toymaker’ Hayles. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been scripting a historical, I suppose, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting. I suppose that I was influenced by my disappointment over The Celestial Toymaker, which is silly really considering that what was seen on the screen was at least a couple of drafts removed from Hayles’ vision of the story.

Speaking of the story, Ben and Polly weren’t actually invited on board the TARDIS, but the Doctor dropped his key and they nipped in to give it back to him just as he was setting off. I loved the way that he admitted openly that he couldn’t control the TARDIS and had no idea where it was going to land. How often have we seen other Doctors in a state of denial over this?

I noticed that they didn’t go overboard on the disbelief from the companions angle, which was probably wise – it had already been done in The Time Meddler, and they weren’t going to top that. There’s some nice location shots in Cornwall in this story. It was mildly amusing to see the church warden Longfoot deciding that Polly was a boy. Was he blind? He gets his anyway. There’s not a lot of film of this one left, but one of the sequences clearly shows Cherub, played by George A Cooper – Billy Fisher’s Dad in Billy Liar – throwing a knife into his back, surprisingly graphic, that. Actually reading about this story after watching it, I think that the film that survives are all bits cut out by the censors in Australia, which kind of makes sense with the knife throwing bit anyway. Cherub is great. I always think that with a pirate, you have to lay it on with a trowel, and Cooper gives Cherub full throttle. All in all it becomes quite an eventful first episode. Cherub has been watching the Doctor talking to Longfoot, and is convinced he tells the Doctor a secret he wants. He accosts the Doctor in the inn, kidnapping him and taking him aboard the pirate ship of Captain Pike, and wounds Ben in the process. To add insult to injury the Squire turns up and imprisons Ben and Polly under suspicion of murdering Longfoot.

Pike seems to have a very nifty swiss army hook on the end of his arm. Alright, it’s not a hook, in fact, it’s like the end of a pikestaff, no doubt hence his name. He also does a nice line in pirate dialogue, saying to Cherub as he does, - one more word from you and I’ll slit yer gizzard, right? – Is David Blake Kelly, who plays Kuper the innkeeper the same David Kelly who played O’Reilly the Builder in Fawlty Towers? Absolutely not – hence the helpful middle name. Having convinced dim witted yokel Tom to let them out of their cell by pretending they are going to do some voodoo on him (honest to gosh)  Ben and Polly return to the church to investigate, knocking out Blake the Revenue man whom they mistake for the real murdered. And who is Blake? Why, it’s our old mate, Tlotoxl from the Aztecs – or John Ringham as he was otherwise known. Fine actor, and he gives just as convincing a turn as in his earlier appearance, albeit in a totally different, and at the end of the day, rather heroic role.

In the third episode the whole thing became for me just a little tedious. The pirates and the Squire make an alliance. At least we could see how the Doctor’s moral compass has developed. Ben and Polly work out at one point that it looks like an ideal time to return to the TARDIS, and the Doctor tells them that he can’t, that he feels moral responsibility for the fact that the whole village may be destroyed if he doesn’t act. That’s the Doctor! Basically the whole denouement of this shaggy dog story revolves around looking for the gold of the pirate Captain Avery. The Doctor was passed the secret by Longfoot. Which brings me to another observation. Looking at it I can’t help feeling that we’ve seen in “The Smugglers” is a real departure from everything we’ve seen in the Historicals so far. Up to now, ever when the Historicals haven’t featured real historical figures – like The Aztecs – or have only featured them briefly in the background, like “The Reign of Terror” – they have been based on real historical events, even when they’ve taken a few liberties with them. “The Smugglers” is different. It isn’t pegged to a specific and documented historical event, rather it has its roots in literature. The smuggler linked with a church is taken directly from Thorndyke’s Doctor Syn books. OK – they’re set in Kent, and Syn is a vicar rather than a church warden, but it’s a clear parallel. It also has echoes of Treasure Island as well. The more I think about it the more this seems to be a conscious choice on the part of Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis. Perhaps this sounded the death knell for the Historicals, since it’s a clear abandonment of the educational intention that the series set out with.

Coming back to “The Smugglers” it all ends up with a bit of a free for all up in the crypt of the church, and I couldn’t help thinking that I didn’t really care what happened, and who ended up with the treasure, if anyone. Nice to see John Ringham getting the chance to do a stint as a goody, mind, and it’s he who saves the day in the end.

Overall I enjoyed the first couple of episodes, but it lost my interest after that. 

What Have We Learned?

It looks as if the production team have run out of steam with the Historicals

Season Three

Was Season three the longest season ever? I wouldn’t be at all surprised. It was a massive 10 stories long for a start, and even if you say, yes, well, Mission to the Unknown was only 1 episode, the fact is that the Daleks’ Masterplan was 12 episodes!

Season three for me saw the best of the comedy historicals, in Donald Cotton’s clever and funny The Myth Makers. John Lucarotti’s “The Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve” was right up there with his own “The Aztecs” as the most enjoyable of all of the historicals, and maybe even better. If we’re trying to characterise Season Three, I think I can discern at least a couple of trends, namely –

A hefty turnover of companions. Yes, this season saw the Doctor say goodbye, for one reason or another, to Vicky, Katerina, Sara and Steven. Alright, Sara was maybe never conceived as a long term companion, and Jean Marsh has gone on record as saying that she had no intention of carrying on the role even if they had asked her to. The haste with which Katerina was discarded, though, smacks of a lack of foresight and planning. Somehow as well I get the impression that nobody really sat down and worked out what Dodo was going to be like either. So I don’t know whether Dodo was just poorly written, or poorly acted by Jackie Lane, but she never convinced me. What was she doing on the TARDIS? She just sort of arrived. What did she get out of being on the TARDIS? Probably exactly the same as what she would have got out of sitting on a chair in Wimbledon Common for a couple of months. Stupid is as stupid does.

The sidelining of William Hartnell. – In both “The Massacre” and “The Celestial Toymaker” the Doctor disappears for much of the story. In “The Savages” he spends a whole episode comatose. By the end of the third season William Hartnell only has 2 stories left as the Doctorand it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that for producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davies this wouldn’t be a moment too soon.

Stories that had interesting concepts, but were not properly realised on screen. Of course I’m referring to the Celestial Toymaker – I’ve already seen how cuts affected the script and what eventually appeared on screen, but it’s also largely true of the Ark, which started so brilliantly, but finished as a rather tame piece of space opera.

I do think we’re in a position to make some reflections on the Hartnell era as a whole, but as there are two stories still to go it is only fair that we watch them first. So let’s have a look at how the stories of the third season rated.

Mighty 200 Positions

The Daleks Masterplan – 42

The Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve – 86

The War Machines – 108

The Myth Makers – 126

Mission to the Unknown – 133

The Celestial Toymaker – 151

The Ark – 154

The Savages 162

Galaxy 4 – 172

The Gunfighters – 175

Now my rating

The Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve

The Myth Makers

The Daleks’ Masterplan

The Savages

The Ark

The Gunfighters

The War Machines

The Celestial Toymaker

Mission to the Unknown

Galaxy 4

The War machines so far down? Well, this is a personal list, and it comes down to enjoyment. The fact is that the last two episodes of The Ark are poor, but I enjoyed the first two episodes so much that I can’t honestly put it any further down the list even though the last to episodes are rubbish. Am I really saying that I enjoyed The Gunfighters that much more than the War Machines? Too right I am. The Gunfighters has it hands down for me. I’ve already put on record how much I enjoyed the Massacre, and while The Daleks Masterplan has some wonderful moments, it is uneven, which is only what you’d expect from such a mammoth twelve parter.