The Reign of Terror

A DVD review for Doctor Who Magazine, from 2013

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“The streets of Paris, strewn with the carcasses of the mangled victims, have become so familiar to the sight that they are passed by and trod on without any particular notice. The mob think no more of killing a fellow man – one who is not even an object of suspicion – than wanton boys would of killing a cat or a dog.

“It’ll be our most Christmassy Christmas special yet,” adds Doctor Who producer Steven Moffat.

Of course not. A little joke. But it’s to remind us how what we expect from our favourite family drama series has changed during its five decades on TV. These days, every fifth or sixth episode is Christmas. When Doctor Who began, every third or fourth serial featured a much-loved mass homicide from history.

The quoted passage comes from the The Times of London, Monday 10 September 1792. It’s a report on the September Massacres, a bloody foretaste of la Terreur; the French state’s attempt to establish control over the population through the legal and largely unfettered use of violence – literally reigning through terror. It’s a revolution within a revolution. “Terror is nothing other than justice,” says the 35-year-old Maximilien Robespierre, President of the National Convention. “Prompt. Severe. Inflexible.” He believes it to be a virtuous form of government. The word of a virtuous man, he insists, should be enough to condemn a traitor. But Robespierre’s licence to murder is not used merely to help hasten the obliteration of the ancien régime. The merest whisper of treachery is enough to condemn any enemy – a business rival, an unfaithful lover, an enviably successful friend – to death by the guillotine, as grotesque an invention as has ever been conceived by man. By the summer of 1794, the air in Paris is thick with fear, paranoia, and the stench of thousands of rotting corpses heaped high at the Errancis Cemetery. Soon, Robespierre himself will be added to the pile. In two virtuous pieces.

Forgive the lecture. But it’s important to bring the ferocious brutality of the real Reign of Terror into focus. In 1964, this was considered a suitable playground for a children’s serial. Indeed, BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman thought bleating bug-eyed robot men to be a far less appealing subject matter. And what makes Doctor Who’s teatime Terreur for tots so remarkable is the fact that it does not shirk from portraying the savagery of life in France in 1794. The first episode, especially, is a masterpiece of slowly unfolding horror.

But it begins with whimsy. The Doctor, in a particularly peevish mood, is convinced that he has brought homesick companions Ian and Barbara back to present-day England. They’re not so sure, and to prevent their pilot abandoning them in what could be anywhere or anywhen, they cajole him into joining them outside. Assured writing meets skilled performance in a lovely scene that would shine in any Doctor Who script from the last 50 years. Over one shoulder, Ian soft-soaps the Doctor. “Of course you’re in control,” he smarms. “And your important research must be completed.” Barbara is at the Doctor’s other shoulder, brushing away invisible dust, or possibly space dandruff. When it comes to Barbara, the Doctor’s a pushover. She’s his first human girl crush – and who can blame him? Meanwhile, William Hartnell hilariously double-takes between them. But despite this left-right charm offensive, it’s the suggestion that they might all go for a drink that finally wins the Doctor over. Perhaps it’s a little reflection of real life. Is this is how Hartnell’s colleagues dealt with his more dyspeptic mornings? “Of course you’re in control, Bill.” It’s easy to imagine many a studio quarrel settled over a lunchtime stout at the White Horse, Shepherd’s Bush.

This bright, optimistic start is designed to lend shadow to what follows, as, from the moment the Doctor’s curiosity takes over, the travellers fall into ever darkening danger. In a farmhouse some miles from Paris, they discover documents signed by Robespierre. “The Doctor’s put us down right in the middle of the French Revolution!” boggles Ian. “The Reign of Terror,” adds Barbara. And that’s our lot. We’re trusted – required even – to recognise the name Robespierre and immediately grasp the implications of this. (More explanation would doubtless be needed today; the Revolution has long been absent from the compulsory secondary school history syllabus. The subset of the population now most likely to know the name Robespierre is DWM subscribers. So, one point to Sydney Newman there.)

We meet on-the-run aristocrats Rouvray and D’Argenson. The militia is on their trail; a bickering band of bloodthirsty soldiers, grinning like Alsatians. Which, given that this is northern France, they may well be. Our bold Rouvray almost talks his way out of trouble. Playing on the memory of his lost patrician authority, he orders the soldiers to stand down. One man surrenders his musket, but our arrogant aristo pushes his luck. In an especially nuanced piece of writing, we’re give a flash of insight into both sides of the class conflict. “You can give them uniforms,” sneers Rouvray, “but they remain peasants underneath.” Without any order from his officer, one of the peasants shoots Rouvray dead. “A desperate attempt,” observes the commander. “And it very nearly worked.” The camera shies away as a second shot is fired. D’Argenson has been murdered. We know this from the soldiers’ gleeful laughter.

Already roaring with power, the episode accelerates toward a truly tremendous climax. Ian, Barbara and Susan are taken captive. “If any of them speaks,” says the commander, “shoot them.” Completely helpless, they can only stand in silence as their fate is decided by the squabbling soldiers. And then the farmhouse is set alight. But the Doctor is still inside! The fire spreads rapidly – through a series of generally excellent model shots – and the Doctor collapses, overcome by smoke. The camera pans up as the flames rise ever higher, and the incidental music – from Stanley Myers, and one of Doctor Who’s finest scores – playfully, sarcastically, quotes La Marseillaise. An anthem for life and liberty, just as death and disaster seem inevitable. Hold on flames. Roll credits. What a cliffhanger! They don’t make them like that any more.

The first episode is all about establishing the stakes we’re playing for. It’s made perfectly clear again at the start of the second, when we’re shown the falling blade of the guillotine. It’s mere moments of stock footage, but no less chilling for it. (And this is not some arcane threat from a bygone age. It’s worth remembering that the guillotine was used in France until 1977, and its blade was still hanging in the air until capital punishment was finally abolished in 1981.) “You have no rights,” barks a judge. He’s talking to Ian, Barbara and Susan, but the director has him looking right down the lens of Camera Two, directly at us. “You will be guillotined as soon as it can be arranged.” And with that, we are dragged away to the Conciergerie prison.

Here, writer Dennis Spooner – a true Doctor Who natural, giving us his first work – looks to leaven this brutal business with a few grains of humour. He’s hardly generous with it – though he will be in future – so perhaps script editor David Whitaker is staying his hand. We meet the lumbering jailer, his working class background conveyed through the broadest northern accent, and Jacqueline Hill does a wonderful comic reaction to his bad breath. But really, it’s the merest gesture toward fun. Although the Doctor and others later run rings round the jailer, he’s still a total horror, motivated by lust, greed and fear in turn. He leches over Barbara, offering her freedom if she – though he doesn’t use these words – has sex with him. Barbara merely turns and smacks him round the face. Marvellous.

“Lock ’em away!” bellows the jailer. “In there. It’s a cell I keep… for my special guests! Har har har!” Barbara and Susan are dragged into Doctor Who’s most bleak and dispiriting dungeon of all time. But it’s Ian who seems to get the premium accommodation. His cell is on film, and comes with a hot and cold running storyline. He’s tasked with finding an English spy, James Stirling. “Ask Jules Renan…” whispers a fellow prisoner with his dying breath. “At the sign of… Le Chien Gris.” But what’s with the sudden French? The TARDIS translation circuit must be on the blink – or, like Siri on the iPhone, doesn’t work well at low volume. (“I do not know what that means. Searching Index File for the sign of Lush He Angry.”)

The Reign of Terror comes with a neat little story of plot and counter-plot. It also gets to the heart of the dreadful irony of that time. Robespierre’s idea of justice was based on trust and duty, but no one could be trusted. However, our Doctor Who serial does seem clear on which class of citizen is the more virtuous. Barbara and Susan are rescued from the guillotine by upper-crust counter-revolutionaries Jules and “my young friend” Jean. They’re a sweetly affectionate pair who insist on calling each other by name with every other line (“I’ll go now, Jules.” “Take care, Jean.”), and they put their trust in the English travellers immediately, just as posh Rouvray and D’Argenson did before them. However, any ordinary working man we meet immediately proves devious, truculent and unreliable. The soldiers, the jailer, a roadworks overseer, a shopkeeper and a physician are all ready to abuse or denounce our heroes for personal gain, in the name of the glorious revolution.

But the story, having given us these rules, then subverts them to work its pivotal trick. Citizen Lemaitre, overseeing the Conciergerie, seems to be working for Robespierre, but turns out to be the English spy that Ian is looking for; our Mr Stirling having surely been dispatched on this undercover mission thanks to his having the biggest hooter north of Boulogne. Meanwhile, Barbara takes a shine to Jules’ friend in the resistance, the dashing Leon Colbert. Attentive and seductive, there’s a whiff of Pepé le Pew about Leon as he kisses Barbara’s hand and plies her with wine (“C’est magnifique, mon belle fromage!” he almost but doesn’t quite say.) But Leon proves a stinker in every sense. He’s a double agent for the State, and it was his treachery that led the soldiers to the farmhouse at the start of our tale. Soon, Leon has Ian chained up and ready for torture, but even he is allowed a sympathetic moment. “If you’d seen what France was like six years ago, you’d understand,” he says. “I do understand,” replies Ian. “But I can’t help you.” Actor Edward Brayshaw gives a wonderful, rich performance as Leon. It’s a tragedy that it’s almost entirely confined to the lost fourth and fifth episodes of this story.

So where is the Doctor amidst all this cruelty and tyranny? Early on, Susan tells us that the Reign of Terror is his favourite period of history. One might wonder how such a bloody time can be anyone’s favourite, but the Doctor clearly has a taste for revolution. It’s fitting, given how many he will go on to foment across the galaxy. He’s already managed a couple in the few weeks we’ve known him.  However, the Doctor’s particular affection for the Terror is also a writerly sleight of hand, and one that shows Doctor Who undergoing a revolution of its own. Up to this point, the Doctor has needed history teacher Barbara’s insights to help him cope with life in the past. But Dennis Spooner requires the Doctor to be able to slip straight into a position of authority. And so it is that his special study allows him to know the lay of the land and be able to bluff his way at the highest level. We’ve long since taken this sort of thing for granted; that the Doctor knows everything, and can charm his way to the top. These days, he even has a piece of paper that can do the job for him. Here, it’s mostly played for fun, and leads to The Reign of Terror’s best gag, and it’s a visual gag. When the Doctor barters for the uniform of a Regional Officer of the Provinces, it seems to be only the matter of a jacket and a sash. But the writer and director are deliberately holding back the rest of the outfit for the Doctor’s big entrance at the Conciergerie. He comes down the steps like a Vegas showgirl, swishing his cape and with the greater proportion of an ostrich fanning out from the top of his head. Hartnell is clearly in his element.

Sadly, The Reign of Terror rather fizzles to a close in its sixth and final episode. Ian recalls another clue whispered to him in prison. “Nothing specific,” he says. “Just something about Barras, a meeting and a sinking ship. No! The Sinking Ship.” It’s hardly short on detail, so we’re left to wonder what Ian might have considered a specific message. Perhaps he expected a phone number. He and Barbara head to the pub in question, where politician Paul Barras is trying to recruit the next ruler of the country. As our heroes dress as innkeeper and wife, it all feels a little like a Morecambe and Wise sketch, or one of those clumsy plays that the contestants used to act out in the final round of The Generation Game. Napoleon Bonaparte turns up – thoughtfully dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte to aid recognition – and he and Barras make a deal for France while staring intently at the tips of each other’s noses, as if they’re about to kiss.

But there’s one last shock to come, one last reminder of the horror. Back in the fourth episode, the Doctor met with Robespierre and debated the merits of his policy of state-sponsored murder. Even Robespierre himself is granted an understanding emotional beat. “Do you think I want this carnage?” he wails. “What a memory I shall leave behind if this lasts!” And here is the memory of it, given back to us in a TV series for children that adults adore. In the final episode, we’re shown fate catching up with Robespierre. He is shot, off screen, but then dragged out before us, still alive, his hand clamped over his shattered jaw, and blood running through his fingers. It’s wildly violent and vivid by Doctor Who standards, and a last, sobering reminder of why the series doesn’t tackle real history any more.

It’s not that history is in any way less exciting than aliens and monsters, it’s just that if you subtract those aliens and their devious manipulations, then we’re only left with humans committing acts of barbarity against other humans, and often for no other reason than greed, envy and plain old-fashioned hate. Some monsters are simply too monstrous for teatime; especially now that Doctor Who looks more ‘real’ than ever. These old episodes, black and white and presented as if from under a proscenium arch, still have a power, but keep us at a safe distance. Today, with single-camera filming – and likely 3D filming coming soon – we’d be right in there; amongst the cruelty and the violence, pushed up against it. It can’t be done. Especially not with Christmas coming round as often as it does. You don’t want Robespierre’s splintered jaw with your sherry trifle.

But then, perhaps it’s right that not every Doctor has been allowed free access to the more grown-up bits of history. It’s certainly fortunate that it was his first incarnation who blundered into Paris at this time, and not his third. The Third Doctor would share a cheeky Beaujolais with the dandy Leon Colbert, and then get the good guys and the bad guys thoroughly confused. “Jehosaphat!” he’d say. “I should have known he’d be behind all this!” Jo Grant would be slow on the uptake. “Who, Doctor?” she’d squeak, and her friend would have rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. “Did you also fail basic French at that school of yours?” he’d have huffed. “Lemaitre, Jo!”

 

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DVD extras

The big bonus promise of this DVD is an attempt to recreate the lost fourth and fifth episodes of The Reign of Terror using animation. This has clearly drawn upon the efforts of many talented and hard-working artists, to whom must go much praise. Unfortunately, the finished product, due to how it has been compiled and directed for presentation here, can only be judged – with a heavy heart – a failure.

The surviving camera script for part four, The Tyrant of France, tells us that there would have been 52 camera shots in an episode of roughly 24 minutes’ duration. So there would have been a shot change, on average, around twice a minute. At one point in the animated episode four, the shot changes three times in one second. Now, this animation shouldn’t follow the original camera script verbatim, and one understands that additional close-ups are necessary to draw our focus. But here, our ‘camera’ spins wildly around the room. Was there no basic storyboard to work from? The result is frenetic, bewildering at best, and thoroughly distracting at worst. You try to follow the story, but each needless shot change is like someone bellowing in your ear.  Early in the fourth episode, Barbara is concerned that Susan is running a fever, but Leon Colbert tells her not to worry. “We’ve done all CUT! we can CUT! Barbara CUT!” says Leon. “Oh CUT! it’s CUT! probably CUT! a chill CUT!” he adds. But Barbara thinks Susan needs a doctor. “You must CUT! know someone CUT! we can trust?” The director seems to have no sense of how many shot changes the poor human brain can cope with. It’s a quiet little character scene.

The animation is also disappointingly inconsistent. In a sequence at the Conciergerie, the Doctor changes face from shot to shot. One moment he looks like an acquisitive turnip, the next a rather crestfallen pufferfish. Within the generous freedoms of the rules of caricature, each of these might be said to be fair descriptions of William Hartnell’s Doctor. But it’s the flicking back and forth between them that’s the terrible distraction; and then there’s the ‘rotoscope’-traced moments of sudden movement, which feel like they come from another place again. It’s as if the director is cutting madly between two or three different animations of the episode, each tackled in a different style.

What most boggles the mind is that, six years ago, the Doctor Who DVD range gave us animated versions of the two missing episodes of The Invasion. It was a production superior to this in every way; calm, consistent and confidently unshowy. Why the huge leap backwards? Some will claim that any reconstruction is better than none, but surely it’s reasonable to at least expect some progress in the field? Some will also say that to call this project a failure is too cold. In justification of that, it’s worth remembering that the sole purpose of Doctor Who is to transport us to another place, even for just a few fleeting moments – to dislocate us from the here and now. It takes a huge amount of work, from every department, to make the entire production process of Doctor Who dissolve away. One misspoken line, one untucked monster costume. An unconvincing model, green screen or unsuitable soundtrack. Any of these things – and a thousand others – will bring us crashing back to our ordinary sofa in our ordinary living room. But this animation makes no effort at discretion. It’s trying too hard to be noticed. It’s just too… animated. For any hope of feeling transported to the summer of 1794 with the Doctor and his friends, then your only option is to, well… close your eyes and just listen to the soundtrack. And if that isn’t a failure, then what is?

The production documentary Don’t Lose Your Head focuses on The Reign of Terror’s sometimes troubled days in the studio, with help from the detailed memories of Carole Ann Ford (Susan), William Russell (Ian) and production assistant Timothy Combe. Director Henric Hirsch suffered a breakdown on the recording day of the third episode, but the identity of exactly who stepped into his shoes remains a tantalising mystery. It’s a shame that Hirsch could never work on Doctor Who again, because the opening episode of this story proves that he knew his business. However, Carole Ann Ford, for one, certainly found him a struggle to work with. Brace yourself for her vivid retelling of the “Why so maudlin?” story on this documentary. It’s not for the faint of heart.

The clips from The Reign of Terror used in the documentary look like they’ve been filmed through a sock and then scrubbed with wire wool, which brings home the miracle of the restoration work that has been done to the episodes as presented on this DVD. When Lemaitre asks for “the execution list” at the prison, so clear is the picture, we can now see through the back of the sheet of paper that it is neatly titled EXECUTION LIST. Later, he asks for “the execution figures”. Equally neatly: EXECUTION FIGURES. Say what you like about Robespierre, but he kept tidy paperwork. However, there is a small price to be paid for this new clarity. Now, for the first time, we can spot a member of the production team lurking in the background of the first episode. Or perhaps he’s another time traveller, more skilled at staying out of trouble than our lot.

The audio commentary brings forth some new voices – Jeffrey Wickham (Webster), Neville Smith (D’Argenson) and the great Ronald Pickup, who plays the treacherous physician – with a well-prepped Toby Hadoke on hand to get the best out of them. Another commentary, fascinating in a different way, runs parallel to the long-lost fifth episode, and features ‘missing episode hunters’ Paul Vanezis and Philip Morris.

Morris sounds like a hero for our times. As with many Doctor Who fans of a certain age, the habit of ticking Target books from a list fostered a natural desire to collect the set, to fill the gaps. But when, in 1981, DWM published a list of Doctor Who episodes missing from the BBC Archive, his world was rocked. We all share the sense of dismay that there are these great holes in our common history, but Morris is resolved to bloody well do something about it. As an adult, his work on an offshore oil rig has taken him around Africa. Now, with that experience, he’s formed a company to work with TV archives around the world to help preserve their material.

A recent article in DWM reminds us that many of these archives are in very dangerous parts of the world. There are Home Office Advisory notices issued against travel to the likes of Libya, Uganda and Ethiopia – all of which once broadcast The Reign of Terror and many other lost episodes. But Morris seems determined to leave no stone unturned. “I don’t believe in a no-win scenario,” he says. There’s such a wonderful emotional through-line to this; from the boy who loved Target books to the man knocking on the door of an old TV station down a hot and humid back street in Nairobi or Lusaka. ‘Raiders of the Lost Archive’ is the old cliché headline for a ‘missing episodes’ story, but never has the heroic, exotic sense of it felt more true than here. You feel that if those episodes are there to be found, it’s Morris who’ll be the man bold enough to find them.

Another tremendous set of ‘Info Text’ subtitles really brings home the magic that was being worked in Studio G at Lime Grove in the summer of ‘64. Doctor Who had been in continuous production for a year, and there were still ten more weeks to go before a break. Every Friday between 8.30pm and 9.45, in a space about the size of a Sainsbury’s Local, another episode would be staged like a play, with even the incidental music played live into the studio. The subtitles take us through every clever trick the team used to weave their adventure in space and time. One favourite detail is that, on Friday 14 August 1964, the day William Hartnell recorded the Doctor’s great promise (“Our destiny is in the stars. Let’s go search for it.”), producer Verity Lambert finally pinned down BBC Controller of Programmes Donald Baverstock and secured a commitment to Doctor Who’s future. 13 more episodes, with an option for 13 more. And – though he never know it – an option for 722 more. And counting.

Doctor Who: The Legacy Collection

A review for Doctor Who Magazine, 2013

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DISC ONE

Many have attempted to complete Shada. But it can never be completed in any meaningful way. That’s because we can never know, for sure, what happens to Skagra’s hat. Similarly, many have pondered whether Shada might have stood as one of Doctor Who’s great, defining adventures. Again, we can never answer that question with any confidence. That’s because we simply don’t know what happens to Skagra’s hat.

First, though, we need to fill in the backstory for any newcomers out there. In 1979, Shada – a wannabe six-part Doctor Who adventure – was abandoned due to industrial action at the BBC, with only its location scenes and one-third of its studio work in the can. In the 1980s, a hooky video of the completed material did the rounds of fandom, copied and re-copied until its contents dissolved into a hissing smear. Lost scenes were summarised in screens of strobing text output from an early home computer. It was a wondrous thing to behold. Then 1992 brought an official BBC Video, the gaps filled with earnest narration from a Tom Baker battling hypnosis by autocue. It’s this version which has been dragged from the brink of obsolescence and cannily tarted up to form the lead feature of this DVD box set. A decade on, 2003 gave us a spectacularly recast BBC Online/Big Finish animated audio adaptation, also available here as a generous extra. And last year brought Gareth Roberts’ superb novelisation, which enriches and improves upon the source material immeasurably. In the future we can look forward to Shada: The Collectible Card Game, and Shada: The Interpretive Dance Experience, performed twice daily in a shopping centre near you. Shada will just keep on coming. And that’s because, far from being cut short, it has secured its place as the story that will never end.

Skagra is the villain of Shada. It’s a suitably unlovely name for an unlovely sneer of a man. Few characters in Doctor Who have ever looked more intrinsically cruel. His babyish face is fringed with curls, but his features are sharp, like a putto; a vengeful cherub. He has a rip of a scar down his forehead and right cheek. The cause of this scar is, with uncommon restraint for Doctor Who, never revealed, but Skagra wears it with pride. He is clearly every inch the scoundrel, from the hem of his long white cape to the brim of his huge white hat.

It’s a sun hat, of sorts; the kind you might have found Jackie Onassis sheltering beneath on a weekend at the Hamptons. For added pizazz, there’s a spattered constellation of sequins. It’s an uncompromising fashion statement; and Skagra, marvellously, doesn’t give a damn what we think about it. When we first see him in present-day Cambridge, he turns to camera and smirks right back at us. “Yeah?” he’s saying. “What of it?” Truly, he is a man to be reckoned with. Unfortunately, all this boiling self-belief can do nothing to distract us from the fact that he looks absolutely bloody ridiculous.

Skagra has come to Cambridge from space, in search of a leather-bound Time Lord plot device: ‘The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey’. He speaks with a precise, clipped voice, like a Nazi from a Sherlock Holmes movie. It’s a measured performance from actor Christopher Neame, who knows he has to take the character a long way up, and then a long way down, from here. “I have come…” he tells Time Lord-in-hiding Professor Chronotis “…for the bok.” He pronounces the word ‘book’ in just the way a chicken might. “Give me. The bok.” And Skagra gets his bok eventually – thanks to rank stupidity on the part of the Doctor, who’s pelting about Cambridge on a bicycle – after which he takes Romana prisoner and steals the TARDIS. At this point, following a brief dalliance with polyester trousers, Skagra’s back in his hat. He’s clearly very attached to it.

And there’s the problem. Due to the structure of the recording schedule, Neame only recorded one other scene as Skagra before the plug was pulled on Shada. It’s his final moment in the story, by which point he’s a ranting, twitching maniac, driven to distraction – round the bend and loop-the-loop – by the Doctor, who becomes the Inspector Clouseau to Skagra’s Commissioner Dreyfus. And here’s the thing: by this point, Skagra’s not wearing the hat. So when does he lose it? Or, more to the point: for how long would he have worn it? Just how many unrecorded scenes might that hat have stolen? We will never know.

Judging by the script, all the best missing scenes of Shada would have featured Skagra. That calm, confident theft of the TARDIS would have been shocking in the extreme. How rare is it that we see someone other than the Doctor at the controls of his ship, let alone a villain? And though Skagra lacks the charm of the best of the Doctor’s rivals, he roundly outclasses the Master and the like in terms of ambition. Skagra’s plan to become “the Universal mind” – a single intelligence displacing every other consciousness in creation – is an absolute belter of a wheeze, and surely one of Doctor Who’s top five most imaginative evil schemes. Two of the others also come with Douglas Adams’ name on their scripts, but Shada lacks the cosy, cheering upholstery of The Pirate Planet and City of Death – there’s no robot parrot or multiple Mona Lisas – and instead looks toward a colder, higher place in the grand scheme of things. In what might well have been Shada’s most striking scene, Skagra outlines his philosophy to Romana: “Billions of atoms spinning at random,” he says of the Universe. “Expanding energy, running down – achieving nothing. Entropy! But what is the one thing that stands against entropy, against random decay?” And here Skagra would have paused for effect before answering his own question. “Life!”

It’s a great irony that, the following year, incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead would claim to be restoring scientific rigour to a Doctor Who that had become too whimsical. He would give us Logopolis; another story about how the exercise of the mind, the power of rational thought, will be the only way to save the Universe from entropic decay, from running down to nothing. But who would have played this theme better in their season finale: Adams or Bidmead? Well, there’s the rub. Skagra’s big speech about the ultimate destiny of existence is all well and good, but it might have been fatally undermined if delivered while looking like Joan Collins dressed to impress the paparazzi.

But let’s put the unseen and the unknown to one side for a moment, and ponder some of Shada’s more familiar pleasures. The trick – as with most things in life – is to not let the familiarity diminish the joy. The revelation that Professor Chronotis’s Cambridge rooms are a secret TARDIS, for example, is a total blinder. And that first appearance by Skagra on the bridge over the river Cam is a brilliant bit of scripting, as we’ve only just seen him draining brains somewhere and somewhen in outer space. His look-to-camera is really intended to say: “Yes, I’m here too! Good, isn’t it?” It’s certainly some cocksure storytelling, as the Doctor and Romana float blithely beneath in an out-of-control punt.

The punting sequence was, of course, co-opted for use in The Five Doctors, and so is doubly familiar. We know it so well we could recite it as a catechism. The leaves, the colours. May Week’s in June. So was the TARDIS. Definitely Newton. The duck that laughs “waak! waak! waak!” along with Lalla Ward and Tom Baker’s erudite banter. The scene is a goosebumpy breath on the back of our necks, enough to make our fan gene shiver to attention. And here, cleaned up for DVD, and in its proper context, it looks achingly beautiful. The leafiness of those leaves, the colour of those colours. It’s a perfect moment of Doctor Who, caught in a timeless bubble of eternal sunshine.

And it’s perfect for a box set celebrating the legacy of Doctor Who, here on the cusp of anniversary year. For, with this version of Shada, nostalgia settles upon us in layers, because it comes to us from so many different times at once. It comes via The Five Doctors in 1983. It comes from Tom Baker’s wonderfully batty museum-set introduction to the 1992 video, where he wittily re-enters Doctor Who from the exit. “I was irresistible in those days!” he says, which is true enough, but he’s no less irresistible in his recalling of it. In addition, this Shada was put together by 80s producer John Nathan-Turner – and it was a hard-fought labour of love, we must remember – who invited one of his favourite musicians, Keff McCulloch, to provide a score, and so our senses are also jabbed by the flatulent synthesizers of the Sylvester McCoy era. Shada is probably the composer’s most agreeable work for Doctor Who; but then, asking this viewer to name Keff McCulloch’s most enjoyable soundtrack is like asking him to name his most enjoyable toothache.

We now also have a whole new context granted to the story by Doctor Who’s reaffirmed mainstream success. What’s most striking, looking at Shada afresh, is how modern it all is. It’s remarkably assured in the way it plays with familiar situations. For example, we’re tickled by being shown the TARDIS in Chronotis’s room some time before we see the Doctor. Later, when de facto companion Chris Parsons is sent into the ship in search of a first aid kit, the wit is not so much in Romana’s lengthy directions, but in the way actor Daniel Hill exits the police box out of breath, having run all the way back. This playfulness trusts to our intelligence, and is much how Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat might flatter us.

Of course, with two and a half hours to fill, there’s more time for characters to talk. They may do that weird, old fashioned thing of sitting down when they do it, but it’s still recognisably the continuing rolling banter of today’s Doctor Who. The Doctor and Romana’s extended chat with Chronotis is so carefully rehearsed by the cast as to be almost sitcom. A favourite moment is when the Professor is asked why he called the Doctor to Cambridge. “It’s a delicate matter,” says Chronotis, and Romana respectfully looks away, as if the problem might be something only to be discussed between Time Lads. She imagines, maybe, that the Professor wants to show the Doctor a worrisome rash he’s found around his old, y’know, Eye of Harmony.

But Tom Baker looks tired. Around this time, by his own account, our star was burning the candle at both ends while taking a blowtorch to the middle. Or perhaps it’s the same ill-health that would reportedly dog his next and final series as the Doctor, rendering it a muted postscript to his glittering reign. Some of his most Doctor-ish lines don’t quite land with their usual seemingly effortless, perfect placement. But perhaps he would have rallied had production continued – and then, what other great moments of Doctor Who might we have lost?

Well… Quite possibly Doctor Who’s most outrageous climax of all time. And, as ever, it all comes back to that hat.

It’s the big Part Six showdown. On one side of Skagra’s bright yellow command centre, we have the man himself, quite possibly glowering from beneath a large sequined brim. On the other side is the Doctor, who has done everything in his power to out-hat his enemy. The helmet that the Doctor would have built to deflect Skagra’s mind power is described in the script as “having a jagged piece of table attached to it”. Imagine, then, the kind of understated performance we’d have got from a Season Seventeen Tom Baker, on the last day of term, with a piece of table on his head. But even that’s not the half of it. The hat that was actually built is described in the production subtitles of this DVD as having “a rotating drum, covered in flashing lights”. As the Doctor himself would have commented: “With this on my head, it won’t matter whether it works or not. They’ll all be paralysed laughing at me.” And so, it’s sequins versus lights. Evil Quentin Crisp versus a one-man walking wedding disco. As battles go, it’s titfer tat. It would have been perfectly glorious. Or exquisitely embarrassing.

Of course, this is Doctor Who; where, much like Skagra’s hat, it’s quite possible to be both at same time. But the unique thrill of Shada is that we can never, ever know for sure. And – for a series that we have all sliced and diced and roundly ranked and rated to six decimal places, several times over – that uncertainty, that mystery, is perhaps the most valuable thing of all.

DISC TWO

There are many kinds of legacy. And Shada comes with no end of them, as some fine DVD extras remind us.

A first-class set of ‘info text’ production subtitles runs alongside the main feature. It is a consummate piece of storytelling in itself, with the sad story of Shada’s demise – at 11.45am on Friday 30 November 1979 – intercut with a wealth of wonderful trivia. We’re told that Tom Baker was busy in the week before location filming helping to launch a new comic. And so, we can infer, that while the Doctor is pursued on his bike through Cambridge by Skagra’s ‘mind sphere’ in Part Two, he cycles past shops in which the first issue of the very magazine you are holding would have been on sale. There’s a legacy for you.

A wistful production documentary takes members of the cast and crew back to Cambridge, while Baker comments from the bucolic bliss of a walk in the woods with his ebullient lurcher, Poppy. It’s a lovely programme as far as it goes, but sadly stunted in its ambition. Could not more effort have been made into giving some sense of the unmade Shada? Designs exist for Skagra’s command ship and for the titular prison planet of the Time Lords, so wouldn’t this have been the perfect occasion to revive the DVD range’s former obsession with 3D computer modelling of old sets? Couldn’t we have finally had a little poke around Shada? We could have opened cell doors like an advent calendar until a Zygon popped out.

The cast and production team talk about how bonded the crew of Shada became during filming. Actor Daniel Hill – surely a shoo-in for the lead role in Steven Moffat: The Motion Picture – tells us of how he fell in love with production assistant Olivia Bazalgette. They went on to marry, and now have three children together. Now there’s a legacy for you.

(However, Shada’s finest legacy – while we’re on the subject – is to be found elsewhere. For that, you need to seek out Lalla Ward’s talking book version of Gareth Roberts’ novelisation. It is, for sure, the very best way to enjoy Shada. Lalla gives her all playing Skagra’s spaceship; a female artificial intelligence who is persuaded by the Doctor to reprogram herself, and is thoroughly seduced by his Time Lord touch. “Ooh!” says Lalla. “Ooh. Ooooh! That hit the spot, Doctor.” And when you stop to think about who is taking about whom, and what they were up to at the time Shada was in production, you perceive that there really is no end to the madness.)

Strike! Strike! is a first-class documentary looking at the effect of BBC union action on Doctor Who, for good or ill, down the years. It’s a sobering reminder of how lucky we were that Warhead – the serial planned to end Season 20 but abandoned due to strike action – was revived for Season 21 as Resurrection of the Daleks. Can you imagine how many half-baked fan productions of that we would have had to sit through? Meanwhile, former Doctor Who and Sarah Jane Adventures script editor Gary Russell recalls how, back when he worked in a more junior capacity at the Beeb in the 1980s, the management would stamp a little picture of a Christmas tree on the staff files of any likely troublemakers. Russell expresses pride at the fact his file came with two Christmas trees. It’s likely that this is because he was seen as a Trotskyite rabble-rouser – the Roj Blake of the BBC press office – but more enquiring minds might wonder if it was just because of his unreconstructed, unconscionable views on the subject of City of Death.

Watching the documentary Being A Girl must be the closest one can get in this world to experiencing Sutekh’s ultimate doom after the Doctor nobbled his time-space corridor. The start and end of the programme telescope away to infinity, until it feels like one has somehow always been watching it. Its stated objective is to explore the role of women in Doctor Who; their empowerment or otherwise. A female production team would have been a nice idea for a project like this, but instead just two contributors – DWM’s Time Team’s Emma Price and broadcaster Samira Ahmed – are expected to carry the whole thing, fending off a series of eye-crossingly long-winded questions as best they can. Ahmed, discussing the earliest roles for women in Doctor Who over some footage of Barbara Wright, says: “The women in it are kind of whiny, and they’re kind of high-pitched in their voices. And they’re kind of going round like Margaret Thatcher… With their kind of set hair, and sort of corsets.” As statements go, it almost fulfils the 1963 brief for Doctor Who itself; reaching forwards in time, backwards in time, and kind of sideways into a parallel dimension where it might sort of make the slightest sense at all.

DISC THREE

The other star feature of this box set, the documentary More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS, would have been within its rights to harangue its agent for top billing. It’s one of the crown jewels of the BBC Video and DVD range, and simply a glorious job of work from director Kevin Davies and his team.

An extended version of a programme originally made for BBC One to celebrate Doctor Who’s first three decades, More Than 30 Years piles joy upon joy, pleasure upon pleasure. Hundreds of skilfully curated archive clips are wrapped up with witty star interviews and then tied with a wonderful ribbon of specially-shot drama, featuring the perilous adventures of an imaginative young Doctor Who fan and a hit parade of old monsters. And now, in 2013, with the documentary itself being 20 years old, it’s nostalgia squared.

“Squeezed between the football results and the Tellygoons, a legend was born.” “An essential belief in the ‘rightness’ of things.” “A real popped-up engine.” “The colour for monsters is gween.” “I screamed my way out of the show.” These are just a few of the phrases that have earned their place in the Doctor Who book of quotations along with any of the Doctor’s own most memorable quips. But this viewer’s favourite will always be from a conversation about 1960s movie Daleks between actresses Jennie Linden and Roberta Tovey. “They shot foam, didn’t they?” recalls Linden, aka Big Screen Barbara. “Fire extinguishers,” corrects Big Screen Susan, politely enough, recalling the belching blasts of carbon dioxide vapour. “Yes. That’s the word I was looking for…” replies Babs. “Foam.” Whatever the mundane truth of the matter, she’s bloody well going to have the last word.

Thanks to this DVD, it’s a pleasure to see again so many who have since passed, looking so full of vim and vigour, piss and vinegar. And there are many others looking so wonderfully young. In his trademark polo neck, Terrance Dicks could be leaning out of the back flap of a WH Allen Doctor Who novelisation. Nicola Bryant, however, somehow looks exactly the same in 1993 as she does today. Here, she appears in her best-ever scene with her Doctor, Colin Baker, making warm and witty repartee as a troop of Cyberman follow them down the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. If they’d been allowed to play Peri and the Doctor like this, without the dead hand of script editor Eric Saward steering their doomed ship, then the history of Doctor Who would have been very different indeed.

But More Than 30 Years’ finest moment comes with its great, final coup de théâtre, as the young boy we’ve been following through the film walks up to the TARDIS, looks back over his shoulder in a seeming moment of doubt, but then smiles and pushes open the door. And then… Oh, and then… For the first time ever, the camera tracks into the control room in what appears to a single, sweeping shot. Accompanied by Mark Ayres’ elegiac music, it’s pure magic, and one of Doctor Who’s most glorious moments. It’s taken another two decades – until our recent Christmas special in fact – for the series itself to deliver a scene for the TARDIS with anything like the same emotional wallop.

More Than 30 Years alone makes this box set an essential purchase. May we dream that the BBC might produce anything half as good to mark the 50th anniversary. However, in an appalling oversight, given the significance of this programme, there’s no commentary from Davies, Ayres or any of the team. There’s a host of tall tales to be told from behind the scenes. How could there not be? One day in TV Centre alone brought together Toyah Willcox, Mike Gatting, Jennie Linden, Roberta Tovey, Roy Castle, Ian Levine and the Emperor Dalek all in a single studio.

Finally, this third disc is rounded out with a few more orphan DVD extras that have drifted in to fill out this already packed release.

Nicholas Courtney Remembered is the least of them; a shoddy tribute to our late Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, based around a few minutes of interview with a clearly very unwell Courtney. The interview couldn’t be completed, and makes for uncomfortable viewing. It should have been abandoned – with regret, of course – but has instead been stitched into this ghastly Frankenstein’s monster of a programme. A tribute compiled purely from archive material, and memories of Courtney’s colleagues, would have been far more appropriate.

One last highlight is Those Deadly Divas, which – as the title alone suggests – does more to celebrate the emancipation of women in Doctor Who than Disc Two’s Being A Girl. It appears to have been on the shelf at 2entertain for some years – probably because of the poor sound quality, having seemingly been recorded in a nightclub toilet.

Kate O’Mara, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Camille Coduri discuss some totemic Doctor Who villainesses. The fun is that they’ve actually watched the episodes in question. There’s a special joy to hearing Jackie Tyler discussing Silver Nemesis in some detail, or the Rani expressing envy of the potent sexuality of Captain Wrack. Shada novelist and TV writer Gareth Roberts entertains with typically droll asides, while former DWM editor Clayton Hickman floats the idea that, in creating Tracy-Ann Oberman’s Doctor Who character – Army of Ghosts’ flamboyant Torchwood boss Yvonne Hartman – writer Russell T Davies was giving us a female version of himself. It’s a persuasive theory, but it only raises another question: has Steven Moffat also written his anima – his suppressed feminine unconscious – into the series?

Hmm… Scots firebrand Amelia Pond, you say? Don’t be silly. It has to be Madame Kovarian. She gets things done. She favours season finales. She’s got the hairdo. If Daniel Hill’s not available for The Moffat Movie, then surely Frances Barber’s a cert.

The Ambassadors of Death

A review of the DVD for Doctor Who Magazine, from 2012

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‘Exile’ is too grand a description for the sentence handed down to the Doctor at the end of his original trial. Aside from changing his face – which admittedly could be argued to be a form of capital punishment – all the Time Lords really do is wheelclamp the Doctor’s ship and so deny him access to his favourite of his usual four dimensions. However, while our hero can no longer trip through time, his new incarnation still thrusts out unceasingly in every remaining direction. The first thing he does is to take a vehicle without the owner’s consent – a crime for which he has form, to say the least – after which he barely sits still for a moment. And in the seven-episode adventures that dominate his first year on Earth, we see him explore, in turn, all three dimensions still available to him. To meet the Silurians, he plunges down into the ground. Later, he’ll shimmy sideways into a parallel reality. And this week – to meet the Ambassadors of Death – he rockets straight up into the sky.

These three seven-parters are some of the most measured and mature Doctor Who you can find for your money, although there’s no denying that Ambassadors is the least of them. In being obliged to do more than merely vamp their way to a deferred climax, these longer-than-usual adventures each bridge, like a sonata, to a middle development section that takes us somewhere new; into a darker, minor key. Think of The Silurians and Inferno, with their sidesteps into plague and fiery apocalypse. Ambassadors flips the form. Much of the story is as gloomy and grounded as Doctor Who gets. But in its central digression, it’s all spaceships, hypnosis, trippy Chromakey and a wafty alien who means well but is tragically misunderstood. At this point, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks must have shared a look of mutual understanding. The counterpoint for Ambassadors goes on to become the major repeating refrain for the rest of the Third Doctor’s era.

We have to be careful about describing any Doctor Who adventure as realistic, especially if it tells the story of manned missions to Mars launched from Hampshire in the depths of winter, controlled by a staff roughly the size of that you’d find in a Tesco Metro. But Ambassadors was imagined as taking place a good decade after the time it was made; and in 1970, the idea of delivering an Englishman to Mars would not have seemed so wildly optimistic. Sadly, the world has rather let us down on that score, but the vision of the day-after-tomorrow offered by this adventure remains more readily believable than the T-Mat network, the Gravitron or UNIT’s flying flagship Valiant. Indeed, Ambassadors would prove plausible in an immediate and unique way. On the 13th of April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded on board the service module of Apollo 13, the USA’s third manned mission to the moon. The world held its breath as Commander James Lovell and his crew fought to improvise a new air filtration system and bring the command capsule safely back to Earth. Episode 5 of The Ambassadors of Death, broadcast five days later, saw the Doctor blast off into space, and to his seemingly inevitable death in a sabotaged capsule. These days, it would be surely pulled from the schedule for too closely mirroring a real-life tragedy. It’s a peculiar tribute to Ambassadors’ spirited struggle for realism; a struggle that gives this story a special charm, and makes it a refreshing diversion from Doctor Who’s more familiar forays into the fantastic.

This struggle for realism isn’t shared by every aspect of the production to quite the same degree, however. Take British Space Command for example, where controller Ralph Cornish is in charge of the Recovery 7 mission, dispatched to rescue the crew of the ill-fated Mars Probe 7. Cornish is played by Ronald Allen, who become better known in the 70s as Crossroads’ dishy David Hunter; a performance that would go on to inspire the character of Mr Clifford in Victoria Wood’s tribute to TV melodrama, Acorn Antiques. And so it is that one can’t help but relish a retrospective whiff of Mr Clifford about Mr Cornish (“Did you get bored of Geneva, Brigadier? Or did Geneva get bored of you?”). While issuing commands, Allen keeps his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, as if in steadfast expectation of a bus that’s never going to come. Later in the story, when choosing fuel for his rocket, he has to say: “What about reducing the G by mixing K and M3?” and Allen is so endearingly earnest, we truly believe he’s formulating the next giant leap for mankind. Somewhat less convincing is the mission’s chief scientist, Dr Bruno Taltalian, who comes with an outrrrageous Franche eggsant and facial hair so evidently false that when he first removes his glasses you expect his beard to go with them.

The Doctor is watching the Recovery 7 mission on TV at UNIT HQ. He’s ripped out the TARDIS’s control console for a good tinker in his laboratory. Or at least we assume this is the case. The more whimsical might note that there’s nothing to say that this isn’t a new design of the TARDIS control room. With its flock wallpaper, stained glass and Meissen porcelain, it has a Jules Verne, fin de siècle decadence that rather suits our time traveller. It’s certainly a more homely environment for the Doctor than the TARDIS’s current TV incarnation, which looks like the inside of a migraine. Also offering a new look is his assistant Liz Shaw, who this week is exhibiting a wig of such extravagant proportion she could surely be slingshot head first into the offside of the Hoover Dam and walk away unscathed. Without doubt, Liz is the most glamorous research scientist ever to have graced the corridors of Doctor Who. One of her five degrees from Cambridge must have been in Applied Funky Fashion. After she’s kidnapped later in the story, the Brigadier reports: “I’ve issued Miss Shaw’s description to every police force in the country.” That must have been some conversation. “What’s that? Any distinguishing features? Well. A huge white hat. Miniskirt. Knee-high white boots… Yes, like Yoko Ono on her wedding day. Last seen in the sort of car you find the clowns driving at the circus. Oh, and she can look surprisingly mannish from a distance. And did I mention the big ginger wig? Hello? Are you still there?”

A screeching transmission from Mars Probe 7 brings the Doctor to Space Command and straight into the story’s best scene – well, its best non-action scene – as the Doctor insists that the signal is a coded message, and bullies Cornish through to the logical conclusion that a second signal must be a reply from Earth. The Doctor is so wildly pompous you want to stand up and cheer, and the Brigadier gets to play what will become Jo Grant’s role, hinting to the Doctor that he might get further by at least feigning some manners and respect for the local hierarchy. Set against the resolutely modernist backdrop of the control room, the Doctor seems positively reactionary. “I never did trust those things!” he huffs about Taltalian’s computer. And when the Frenchman – revealed to be a double agent – demands a vital data reel, the Doctor even seems to call upon supernatural powers, as the tape vanishes before our very eyes. “Zis is no time fer conjerin’ tricks,” insists Taltalian, and you can’t help but agree. “That was simply transmigration of object,” smarms the Doctor. “There’s a great deal of difference between that and real science, you know.” It’s one small moment, but so contrary to the spirit of Doctor Who that it makes you want to climb into your television set, crawl back 40 years, and give everyone involved a firm slap about the face with a stiff halibut. What’s especially galling is that Episode 1 has already offered a plausible set-up for this tomfoolery, thanks to a faulty TARDIS component which has the Doctor and Liz vanishing and reappearing in exactly the same way. Couldn’t the Doctor have had that in his pocket?

Perhaps this was a detail lost in the serial’s troubled journey from story to screen. The scripts for Ambassadors are the work of four writers – the credited David Whitaker, plus Malcolm Hulke, script editor Terrance Dicks and his assistant Trevor Ray. It’s thanks to Dicks in particular that the thing coheres at all, but due to this troubled development Ambassadors never quite comes into focus, never quite builds a momentum. But while it fails to make the most of its potential, it certainly delivers its share of kinetic energy, principally in three wonderful action sequences cooked up by director Michael Ferguson and Derek Ware’s stunt crew Havoc.

In Episode 1, UNIT tracks the source of the transmission to Mars Probe 7 to an abandoned warehouse. The baddies, though briefed not to kill anyone, come out all guns blazing, and soon bodies are crashing through tea chests as stuntmen boldly trampoline hither and yon. Somewhere in the Home Counties must be found the Tomb of the Unknown UNIT Soldier; a massive cenotaph topped by a simple relief of Pat Gorman. Meanwhile, as bullets ricochet around the Brigadier, he falls into a kind of blood frenzy, blasting away in all directions, before it all ends in a wonderfully butch and sweaty stand-off. This probably wasn’t the evening when the Brigadier went home, bounced daughter Kate on his knee and told her his hippy idea about letting the science lead the military.

There’s more action, and better, in Episode 2. Recovery 7 has crashed back to Earth – supposedly with the rescued astronauts aboard – but the villains hijack the UNIT convoy taking the capsule back to Space Command. A helicopter swoops in. Smoke bombs boom and belch. Riders are thrown from motorbikes as they slew sideways in the mud. A soldier briefly clings to one of the skids of the chopper and, while in flight, tries to wrench open the door – but then drops and tumbles down a ravine. In our modern era, Doctor Who, with generous budgets and all the artistry and processing power of The Mill, delivers many a thrilling action sequence. But we still know green screen when we see it – in 2012, just as in 1970 – and so it is that no one else, to this day, has managed to convey the same sense of true and present danger as Havoc at their most fearless. In Episode 3, Liz Shaw is chased pell-mell across a rugby pitch by two heavies, and then, played at key moments by stuntman Roy Scamell, along a weir. For the cliffhanger, Liz tumbles to her seeming-certain doom in the torrent of water below. It all looks mind-bogglingly dangerous, and we shall never see its like again. It’s also the moment when Liz Shaw proves herself a premier league assistant; by keeping her hat firmly jammed on her head throughout, and for giving one of her pursuers a proper wallop of a backhander.

But for all that Ambassadors enjoys getting out and about, it certainly chooses some gloomy terrain. It’s all mist and mud, slurry pit and slag heap. In one chilling scene, two grey-faced corpses are taken to a concrete works, dragged from the back of a van and slowly buried under a landslide of mixed aggregates. However, despite all this gritty action, even by Episode 4 there’s barely been enough plot to fill an egg cup, and what there is seems to pull in every possible direction. The villain of the piece is revealed to be the cold fish General Carrington, who is at times underplayed almost to nothing by John Abineri, which is what makes him so forgettable. The General, we learn, was part of the Mars Probe 6 mission – presumably to investigate the effect of zero gravity upon toupee tape – and saw his crewmate killed by aliens. Exactly how the cause of this death was explained away is anyone’s guess; certainly UNIT knows nothing about it.

Carrington has gone on to kidnap three alien ambassadors as part of a plan to provoke Earth into launching a pre-emptive strike against what he believes to be possible invaders, but who the Doctor knows to be essentially benign. Carrington’s chief lackey is Reegan – a more engaging performance from William Dysart – whose principal ambition seems to be to use the alien ambassadors as history’s most high-maintenance team of bank robbers. Quite why Reegan and Carrington cart the space-suited beings back and forth in a van just to commit the odd murder is entirely unfathomable, but it does give us the story’s signature visual moment as one of the ambassadors stalks towards us out of the low evening sun, the light flaring and spotting across his sinister silhouette. Michael Ferguson had pulled the same trick with an Ice Warrior on Hampstead Heath a year earlier, but here he nails it. It’s as beautifully contrived a shot as any you’ll find in the whole history of Doctor Who.

The disconnection of motive and action is, again, the result of the fractured writing process. It’s also why time seems to move at different speeds in different places. At one point, Liz escapes her captors merely to run straight into Bruno Taltalian, who has just appeared in the previous scene, set many miles away. But here he is in a car, suddenly dressed as Sherlock Holmes, and with nary a hint of a French accent.

When the end comes, it comes in a rush, and not with a bang but a whimper. Carrington is poised to unveil his aliens to the world, until the Doctor and UNIT pile in to stop him, and then the General simply hands over his gun and submits himself for arrest. His motivation turns out to be madness brought on by extreme xenophobia – or possibly vice versa – and though this might explain his wildly illogical scheme, it’s not exactly satisfying. From the aliens themselves we don’t hear another peep. And although our hero shows suitably Doctorish compassion toward Carrington, even he seems entirely indifferent as to what might happen next, and casually saunters off the side of the set.

This lack of engagement with the emotions of its characters is why only the swagger and flash of  Ambassadors tends to linger in the memory. Or perhaps it’s the fact that so much of the story features hopeless conspirators waving guns and shouting things like: “I need you to raid a number of isotope stores!”

Ambassadors is a fundamentally schizophrenic adventure. With its guns and gangsters on one side, and rocket ships and exploding briefcases on the other, it can’t seem to decide if wants to be The Ipcress File or Joe 90. But, in much the same way as The Mind Robber, The Happiness Patrol, Love & Monsters, or any of our other favourite eccentrics, The Ambassadors of Death pushes at the boundaries of what we might normally expect of Doctor Who, and should always be cherished for that.

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DVD EXTRAS

The production documentary, Mars Probe 7: Making the Ambassadors of Death, opens to urgent strings and stock footage of Apollo 13, and seems set to investigate this adventure’s historical context. You’re braced for Dr Matthew Sweet stalking the corridors of the Science Museum in Dr River Song’s spacesuit; but, alas, we are denied that pleasure. Instead, the highlight is footage from a 1970 documentary about Havoc, which, accompanied by new interviews with the boys themselves, delivers a dizzying whirl of masculinity, derring-do and – let’s be frank – unexpected homoeroticism. After a hard day on the Doctor Who set, the Havoc boys would enjoy a right old rave-up. They’d drink together, go dancing together, or merely share a shower and a sauna. Footage from those communal ablutions allows us to carefully assess Derek Ware’s claim that “Roy Scammell has extremely good legs”, and much more besides.

The stuntmen are also the stars of an excellent commentary, where they take centre stage for the action-heavy second episode. We learn that Alan Chuntz – who spent much of the 70s disappearing head first over Jon Pertwee’s left shoulder – also taught kung fu to the Kray twins, had an uncanny resemblance to Charles Aznavour, and drove a London taxi in his spare time. Come to mention it, this section of the commentary, so thick with avuncular Cockney charm, is rather like finding yourself discussing Doctor Who with your cab driver.  “These days, they’re defying the laws of physics with all that CGI, ain’t they?” opines Derek Ware from the driver’s seat, or possibly hanging from the front bumper. You nod in agreement. This is from a man who knows how important it is to respect the laws of physics. They’ll always get you in the end, especially if you’re tumbling head over heels for Jon Pertwee.

Toby Hadoke moderates the commentary with his customary skill and insight. We must be grateful for whatever quirk of scheduling led to it being taped so far ahead of release. The fact that three contributors – Nick Courtney, Caroline John and Peter Halliday – have died since its recording is a sobering reminder of the great blanket of silence that is slowly unrolling over the history of Doctor Who. And then Terrance Dicks refers to The Sarah Jane Adventures in the present tense, and your breath catches once more.

Ultimately, however, the great, great joy of this release is to see The Ambassadors of Death returned to full colour for the first time since 1970. The sharp little cruelty of this story is that while the first episode survives in perfect condition, the rest has had to be recoloured and reassembled from a wide range of lesser material by the Restoration Team and associates. This task required astonishing ingenuity and invention, and untold hours of tedious amendment and correction by hand. The results can never be perfect, and the finished product is, by necessity, a patchwork. In Episode 3, for example, Liz Shaw’s wig gives off a comforting golden glow, like a Belisha beacon on a foggy night. But it’s nothing short of a miracle that there’s colour here at all. And it’s a shocking omission – scandalous, in fact – that those responsible are not credited anywhere on the DVD or the packaging. And so: thank you, Richard Russell, for your dedicated work on colour recovery; thank you, Peter Crocker, for the painstaking effort required in pulling it all together; thank you, Jonathan Wood, for the final grading; and thank you, Mark Ayres, for your exacting sound restoration.

As all these wonderful episodes are restored to us, one is left gawping open-mouthed in awe at quite how bloody clever people can be.

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Nightmare of Eden

A review of the DVD for Doctor Who Magazine, from 2012

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There’s something seriously awry with the laws of physics out on the west side of the Milky Way. Things just don’t move in the way you’d expect. The mighty space liner Empress, for example, instead of gliding on a steady trajectory through space, just kind of… wafts about the place. The cargo ship Hecate, heading in the opposite direction, takes a similarly non-traditional approach to kinetics. Newton never framed a law for this kind of motion, nor Einstein an equation. Both vessels are orbiting the blue-green holiday planet of Azure, which spins silently beneath them. Well, I say ‘spins’. It turns in a series of hesitant twitches, which must have grave consequences when it comes to the conservation of momentum, and render life down on the surface entirely vexing; what with crockery flying everywhere, and the water forever slopping out of one’s bath. And I say ‘silently’. Musician Dudley Simpson – realising that all this interstellar spectacle might appear to be no more than a couple of crudely animated and chromakeyed models – is trying to makes things feel suitably solid and stately by bellowing “Fortissimo, cobbers! Fortissimo!” at his brass section. With a suitably blaring and adventurous main theme, Dudley almost saves the day.

Given how randomly the spaceships bob around out here, accidents must happen. Nightmare of Eden opens with a doozy. The Empress, in a partially materialised form, whacks into the smaller ship and solidifies around it, leaving the little red Hecate sticking out of its side like a tranquilising dart in a hippopotamus. This is all far-out sci-fi fun, but when we step aboard the Empress, life feels far more familiar. Indeed, if we excuse how flimsy the interior of the ship appears at points – and if we can accept that there might ever be a time when it will be considered acceptable for a middle-aged man in a position of authority to wear a glittery lycra top outside of his own home – then Nightmare of Eden will surely prove to be Doctor Who’s most accurate prediction of the future of space travel. It’s all so believably mundane. The Empress flies “the milk run”, we’re told. “Station 9 to Azure. Azure to Station 9.” Given the giddy excitement of the passengers in cattle class, this is a clearly a holiday package tour, probably run by a future version of one of today’s low-cost airlines; EasyWarp, perhaps, or RyanSpace. On booking, our passengers would have been miffed to discover additional charges for loan of protective overalls and glasses. This is clearly exploitation, because none of the crew have to wear them. Later, when Dymond, the aggrieved owner of the Hecate, arrives on board to remonstrate with Captain Rigg, the talk is not of science, but of blame and claim. “We’re fully covered comprehensive on all third party damage,” says Rigg. “The company will compensate you.” When the Doctor and Romana join in, they pose as insurance agents, which is great fun. It’s a bit of whimsy, of course, but so fresh and clever and neat, it kicks the story off with great vigour; an energy it maintains across all four episodes.

As the Doctor sets about separating the ships, Romana heads to the Empress’s first class lounge, where she meets a xenozoologist called Tryst and his dreary assistant Della. Tryst speaks with a thick, slurred accent that might be Dutch, German, or the result of a serious stroke. Either way, he could make a name for himself as the Low Countries’ leading Liza Minnelli impersonator. But Tryst is a busy man, on a mission to catalogue “effry speches in da galaxy”. That’s an awful lot of speches, so Tryst is clearly a man of no small ambition. He hopes to meet “a sponshur on Ashur” – something which one hopes will be easier done than said. He’s the inventor of the Continuous Event Transmuter, a machine which can hoover up and compress a chunk of a planet’s surface, and all “der floura und der fawna”, into a crystal, with this miniaturised microcosm then available for viewing on a screen. The Doctor calls it “an electric zoo”, but what Tryst has actually invented is surely the ideal medium for the broadcast of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. It would allow a jungle full of the likes of Gillian McKeith, Paul Burrell and Coronation Street’s Antony Cotton to be captured in a single crystal that could then be easily and conveniently stepped on. Most of the planets offered by the CET Machine – Vij, Zil, Lvan, Darp – sound like brands of oven cleaner you’d find in a pound shop, so it’s no surprise that Romana’s attention is drawn to Eden. When she dials up the projection the camera slowly tracks in, and shadows in the foliage resolve into the shape of a face peering right back at us. It’s a spine-tingling moment. A lovely Doctor Who scare.

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s investigation of the crash has him follow navigator Secker, who is not in a good way. We learn that he’s been using the drug Vraxion (also known by its street names of ‘Vrax’, ‘Moff’ and ‘Paddy Kingsland’s spunky backpack’, although I might have made some of those up). The Doctor knows Vrax to be dangerous and addictive: “I’ve seen whole communities, whole planets, destroyed by this.” It’s an astonishingly adult topic for Doctor Who to tackle at Saturday teatime – even the use of the word ‘communities’ is an interesting shading there – and one wonders if it would be countenanced today. The progressive effects of Vraxoin are played through the character of Rigg – a great, unsung performance by David Daker – whose drink is spiked with the stuff. The initial high seems similar to that of cannabis, in the sense that Rigg becomes a total bore. “Let’s talk about life,” he says with a giggle. Now, when someone sits down next to you at a party and suggests you might want to talk about life, it’s always best to find another seat; preferably another party. Even at this stage, Rigg should stand as a stark warning to the kids watching. “Don’t do drugs, guys, because they make you more interesting only to yourself.” Soon, the Captain is completely off his chump, and laughs as he watches his passengers murdered by rampaging monsters. “They’re only economy class!” he scoffs. “What’s all the fuss about?” It’s a black joke worthy of Robert Holmes. That’s a thought: how much darker and more satirical might the comedy in this story have been had the scripts passed through his hands? Soon after, Rigg’s comedown proves swift and brutal. “I must have something for this terrible feeling,” he wails at Romana. In a moment he’s screaming at her: “Let me have some or I’ll kill you!” And it’s clear he’s ready to do exactly that. He has her by the wrist, and raises his arm to strike. Rigg is shot before he can actually beat Romana to death, but the implication alone of what he’s about to do makes this a staggeringly brutal scene by Doctor Who standards.

Unfortunately, a couple of production missteps typical of the period take the edge off all this. Rigg is shot – killed, we must assume – by customs officer Fisk, whose official uniform makes him look like he’s on work placement from the Village People. And the monsters who excite Rigg’s mirth – the Mandrels – do, unfortunately, look ludicrous. But while the dressing of this storyline might seem absurd, we mustn’t lose track of what is happening here. To reiterate: a decent, honest man, who is secretly drugged by others, laughs at wholesale slaughter and then, desperate for another fix, tries to kill the Doctor’s companion. This innocent man is then shot in the back and goes unmourned. There has long been a view that the 17th year of Doctor Who is somehow less serious than others; that it is gaudy and whimsical. Well, phooey to that. Doctor Who doesn’t come darker than Nightmare of Eden.

However – yes – the Mandrels are silly. The problem is, they’re just too darn cute. If the Doctor Who title sequence were remodelled after that of The Muppet Show, a Mandrel – all fun-fur and googly eyes – would surely lead the stomp across the bottom row of that tiered colonnade, followed by the Garm and the Ergon. (Up above, the smallest arches would be filled by the Graske, a baby Fendahleen and a trio of friendly clams. The diamond logo would be winched down, and through the ‘O’ of ‘WHO’ the Bandril Ambassador would toot on a trumpet.) Normally it’s the feet that do for a Doctor Who monster, but while the Mandrels have the kind of legs that won’t be seen again until the closing number of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it’s their arms that really let them down. They’re too long, and flail hopelessly about. With all the will in the world, from the moment a Mandrel comes windmilling in at the end of Part One, it must surely be impossible for anyone over the age of four to suspend their disbelief.

Happily, monsters alone do not a Doctor Who story make, and Nightmare of Eden delivers a steady stream of other pleasures. The electronic effects used to depict the hazy overlap of the two ships are outstanding, especially when accompanied by a clever soundtrack of distant creaks and clangs. The cliffhanger out of Part Two, when the Doctor takes Romana by the hand and they leap into the Eden projection – “We’ll get torn apart!” – is impossibly thilling. It’s easy to imagine how this scene would be reshot today. The projection would be CGI and the camera would sweep left to right with the Doctor to the edge of it, to make it clear that he’s jumping into a two-dimensional screen. There’d be a blup! as the image of Eden ripples and swallows him up. Here, however, the effect is achieved merely by placing the two sets side-by-side, and the thrill is delivered thanks to how well the script has sold the reality of this to us; by the performances; and by the perfect timing of that final cut to the credits. It’s both sublimely simple and devilishly clever.

That cliffhanger also serves to knit together the various strands of this story – the unstable overlap of the ships, Tryst’s CET machine, the Mandrels and the drug smuggling – in a wonderfully stylish way. While inside the Eden projection, our heroes meet Stott. He’s the owner of the face that peeped out at Romana, and with his bouncy perm and cheekbones he looks more like the Denys Fisher Tom Baker doll than Tom Baker ever did. Stott, a drugs officer with Space Corps, explains that he was left for dead on Eden while investigating Tryst’s operation, but was then caught up in the CET crystal. “There were a few times I felt like blowing my brains out,” he says. It’s another dark and adult moment that pulls you up sharp.

It’s been said – many times – that Lewis Fiander’s enthusiastic performance as Tryst, and that Amsterdam pot-dealer accent he deploys, is to the detriment of Nightmare of Eden, as it signposts too clearly that he is the villain. That’s an easy claim to make with hindsight, but if you can imagine not knowing this fact, then you can appreciate that Fiander is, intelligently, trying to make his character seem too silly to be the prime suspect. The problem is actually with the script and the wider casting, which fail to deliver any other suspects. We ought to think that Della could be responsible, but Jennifer Lonsdale’s performance is so flat, and her dialogue so basic – “It’s just that Eden brings back such terrible memories for me. That was where we lost the other crew member” – that she’s never a serious contender. Equally drably-written and played are customs officers Fisk and Costa, who you can’t believe have lived a single day before the events of the story, or will live a single day after. So it’s not that Fiander is too ‘out there’ for this story, it’s that the rest of the cast – David Daker aside – lack the wit and the material to allow them to deliver at the same level.

In the home straight, we learn that Tryst, in league with Dymond, is using the CET machine to smuggle the Mandrels – which are made of pure Vraxoin – from Eden, and is all set to transfer the contents of the Eden crystal over to the Hecate by laser link. So was this their plan all along? Did they merely intend to pull the two ships alongside for the short time it takes for the drop? In which case, are we to believe that the collision – plus the instability of the Eden projection, and no others – is just a honking great coincidence? And if this whole operation is designed to smuggle the Vrax past the super-sensitive shipboard scanner on the Empress, then how was Secker keeping some in a filing cabinet, and where was Tryst hiding the batch he used to dope poor Rigg?

One wishes there had been a final go at the script, which would have, I’m sure, made the accident deliberate, and vital to Tryst and Dymond’s plan. They would have needed the instability to make the Eden crystal accessible again. Secker would have been in their employ, and then drugged – like Rigg – to make it all seem like an accident. One small sample of Vrax would have been hidden in the Hecate, and brought over by Dymond. And maybe Della, who could have served the drugged drinks, would have been our prime suspect for a few episodes; imagined in league with her boyfriend, spotted lurking in the projection.

Doctor Who stories stand or fall by their scripts, I believe. Everything else is trivia; fuel for cheap jokes at the top of a DVD review. Special effects may fail, shots be missed and lines be fluffed due to time and money running out in the studio, that can’t be helped. But there’s less excuse for not finding the hours, days and weeks to polish storylines until they shine, and dialogue until it sings. Nightmare of Eden is a tremendous piece of work, but flawed. And it’s not the comical monsters and a comedy accent that are the problem, but a plot that fails to resolve properly, characters that fail to come fully to life, and a script that follows up every deft line with a clumsy one.

Nightmare cruises an erratic – and a joyously idiosyncratic – course; but one that’s plotted just a few degrees south of true greatness.

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DVD Extras

An interview with Romana actress Lalla Ward on an edition of Ask Aspel from 1980 provides a glimpse of lost age of starchy children’s TV. Ward is quite appallingly snooty about the whole thing; rolling her eyes and tossing her hair in response to Michael Aspel’s perfectly reasonable questions. A clip from a BBC Shakespeare production is cued by Aspel: “Here’s a snippet of Hamlet, where you play – guess who – Ophelia.” The seven-year-old viewers of Ask Aspel must have been puffing on their pipes and huffing impatiently: “Well yes, Ophelia of course.” Ward’s illustrations for the book Astrology For Dogs (and Owners) receive a nice plug. This inspirational work is doubtless now favourite bedtime reading of her husband Richard Dawkins, who loves all that astrology stuff.

The bafflingly-titled The Doctor’s Strange Love brings together writers Joseph Lidster and Simon Guerrier, plus comedian – it says here – Josie Long, for a chat about the hits and misses of Nightmare of Eden. “It’s too explicitly anti-drugs,” says Lidster – right on, dude! – which makes one wonder what kind of equivocation he was expecting from a family drama shown at 6pm on a Saturday in 1979. Guerrier wears an expression of such open and childlike delight in the cutaways, you feel there surely must be a particularly wobbly jelly being jiggled just out of shot.

The finest extra here, by a parsec, is Nicholas Pegg’s ‘info text’ subtitles. It’s a flood of facts and fun. And here’s a word of friendly advice on the subject. If you’re in the habit of watching these production notes while listening to the cast commentary, then try to resist the urge. Many insights and jokes in the subtitles bounce from cues in the scripted dialogue, and you’ll be missing a whole level of sly wit if you separate one from the other. The big behind-the-scenes story of Nightmare of Eden is of how a seething production team and cast rose up against the perceived shortcomings of director Alan Bromly – shortcomings that are not particularly evident on screen, it must be said – which led to his dismissal during the final day of studio recording. Pegg teases this tale up front, but then holds back the juicy details until Parts Three and Four, delivering a narrative every bit as intriguing and entertaining as Nightmare of Eden itself.

For some primary-source bitching, turn to The Nightmare of TV Centre, where thoroughly disconsolate visual effects designer Colin Mapson dismisses his spaceship shots as “a disaster, to be quite honest”, and blames the producer for insisting they be shot on videotape rather than film. But it’s the tales of Tom Baker chafing against the authority of Alan Bromly that again prove most fun. Tom’s studio backchat, at first audible only to his fellow actors but then bellowed at the gallery, make him sound quite wonderfully brattish; but he was furious only because he cared so much. And it’s clear that he was not alone in his anger. Floor manager Val McCrimmon suggests that Bromly’s assistant, sat beside him making notes on the script, would deliberately try to stab him with her pen. Whether she actually drew blood is not recorded, but surely on-the-job feedback to one’s line manager doesn’t get more direct than that.

 

 

 

The Daemons

A review of the DVD for Doctor Who Magazine, from 2012. (Sadly, there was no room for my theory that Bok is the Master’s Tardis. A glow-eyed, peripatetic statue, like a mini Melkur. At the the end of this story, it sits there, cross-legged, in the churchyard, waiting for the Master to escape from prison.)

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There comes a point, in the final minutes of The Daemons, when the Doctor inches perilously close to losing our goodwill. He’s locked horns with the alien Azal – 20 feet tall in his stockinged hooves – regarding the creature’s interference in the development of our race. “Thanks to you, Man can now blow up the world,” our hero heckles. “And he probably will.” Probably? Well, thanks for the vote of faith, mate. Who’s spat in your coffee today?

The Doctor has a chip on his shoulder throughout The Daemons. “I’m obviously wasting my time trying to turn you into a scientist,” he huffs at Jo in their first scene. Later, he bitches her up for criticising the Brigadier, even though he’s just done it himself. So why, we might ask, is the Doctor so grumpy today? Well, with his car undergoing its latest comedy upgrade, it’s possible he’s had to take the bus to UNIT HQ this morning. British public transport can bring out the misanthrope in even the most gracious and high-minded of life forms, especially if there’s a 20-minute tailback due to roadworks at Devesham. Two years in, perhaps the chains of exile are starting to chafe, and he’s finding his beloved humanity not so much indomitable as insufferable – they’re fun to hang out with on holiday, but you wouldn’t want to actually live with them. And if our erstwhile citizen of the Universe really can feel the Earth spinning wondrously beneath his feet at a thousand miles an hour, he must be deeply resentful of the fact that, every seventh rotation, it delivers a Tuesday.

We can sympathise. We can forgive the Doctor’s bad mood. Anyway, we don’t want him to be cute and cuddly all the time, do we? The Doctor must be eccentric, of course; but not merely whimsical, and certainly not entirely adorable. The first thing he ever did to a human travelling companion was electrocute the poor bugger, so these catty remarks to Jo are practically a charm offensive. Even today, Matt Smith’s performance is at its most bewitching when the twinkle fades and he turns to ice. His eyes slip their focus, and you sense an old and troubled soul gazing out from behind. And so it is that, from first to last, our hero has shown a dark side. The Third Doctor’s selfishness and sententiousness make him difficult for many to warm to, but they’re the reasons to love him most. Without the brittleness, this era would be long strings of “moments of charm”, and all the syrup and saccharine would rot it away to nothing. Doctor Who’s unique flavour is as much salt as it is sweet.

If you remain unconvinced, and are looking for someone warm and loveable to snuggle up with in The Daemons, then there’s always the Master. Roger Delgado steals the show from the moment of his reveal, early in Episode One, and only Nicholas Courtney’s Brigadier – at his droll best – ever comes close to taking it back from him. The majesty of the idea has perhaps become dimmed with familiarity, so let’s linger for a moment to appreciate the brilliance of seeing the Master in dog collar and thick-rimmed spectacles, but as saturnine as ever, posing as the vicar of an English village. He’s hoping to encourage the aforementioned Azal – an interstellar busybody who’s been bricked up in a local long barrow for centuries – to share his immense power. Witchy Miss Hawthorne, who knows that something’s up, scoffs at the idea of “a rationalist, existentialist priest”. It’s as good a description of a Time Lord as we might find. She thinks that the Master should be worried about “the souls in his care”, but he dismisses the soul as “an outdated concept”. That’s ironic. Later in his life, the Master’s own incorporeal essence will find a home – at various times – in a pocket watch, a signet ring, Nyssa’s old dad, and a string of snot dribbling from the TARDIS keyhole. If anyone in this Universe proves the existence of the soul, it’s our remorselessly reincarnated Master.

As he glides about churchyard and vestry, one has to wonder how long the Master has been playing the role of the Reverend Mr Magister of Devil’s End. He’s recruited a coven of a baker’s dozen to chant at his secret black masses, and that could have taken some time. Our tale begins on the last day of April. Was he here for the winter? Did he have to bless the Christmas crib? Has he invited eager grooms to kiss their spring brides? Has he christened the newborns of the parish? Certainly, his congregation must wonder why their vicar makes them sing He Who Would Valiant Be at every single service, giving them a peculiar kind of glare each time they reach the end of the first couplet.

In Episode Three, the Master seeks to blackmail the whole village into joining his band of disciples. He’s learned all their secrets, you see. There’s Thorpe the grocer, “padding the bills of the local gentry”, and Charlie, defrauding the post office. But best of all is the way the Master skewers poor Mr Grenville. “Has your wife come back from her sister’s yet?” he smarms. “Will she ever come back, do you suppose?” What’s the Master implying? Has Mrs Grenville merely run away with the coal man, or has Mr Grenville poisoned her beef tea and buried her under the rockery? We’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter, because what’s most wonderful is how casually the Master can indulge in this petty gossip and innuendo. The Doctor, whatever his incarnation, is forever struggling to understand humans and their funny little ways. The Master has no such difficulty; which, if you think about it, makes the Doctor look foolish at best, and thoroughly closed-minded at worst. The most recent extrapolation of the Master, by a modern series understandably eager to find a new angle on old material, painted him as psychotic; his mental illness caused by a kind of trans-temporal tinnitus and a fear of being taken out at night by old men to be shown the Doctor Who title sequence. That’s all good fun, but I prefer my Master sane. He shouldn’t represent madness, blind destruction or boring old ‘evil’. He’s temptation; just as the Doctor is salvation. The Master views human weakness, greed and desire with the same cool cynicism as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that’s why the Master is at his best in The Daemons, offering the citizens of Devil’s End “whatever they want in this world… whenever they want it”. It’s his finest moment in this, the character’s foremost adventure.

To their well-recorded pleasure, The Daemons serves all its regulars well. Sergeant Benton gets a couple of good punch-ups and Captain Yates joins the mid-story runaround that’s a tradition of this era. It’s padding, of course, but of the highest standard – with car and motorbike stunts and an exploding helicopter – and it displays a wild ambition in terms of physical action rarely seen in Doctor Who since, even in the modern era. Across its five episodes, The Daemons makes the most of its extended time on location. A lovely sequence sees the Doctor beset by morris dancers, of all things. Again, we mustn’t let familiarity distract us from the great wit of it all – especially the moment when the Doctor, hastening to save the world, is roundly beaten with a pig’s bladder on a stick.

The Brigadier, meanwhile, is kept away from the action by a force field placed around the village by Azal. He’d have got in if he hadn’t rocked up late. Lethbridge-Stewart is off to a regimental bash at the start of the story, but when Yates tries to track him down, he’s told that his commanding officer “went on somewhere after dinner – no one knows quite where”. Ooh! It’s another tiny mystery to ponder, but an image of the Brig dancing on a podium at an all-night disco flashes unbidden to the mind of this viewer. The fact that the Brigadier spends the next episode playing catch-up allows Nicholas Courtney to be quite brilliantly deadpan when replying to a report from his captain. “I see, Yates… So the Doctor was frozen stiff at the barrow and was then revived by a freak heatwave, Benton was beaten up by invisible forces and the local white witch claims she’s seen the devil?” Allowing the earnest Brigadier to hang a hat on the absurdity of the whole business only makes it more beliveable.

In addition to the helicopter chase and the maypole scenes, The Daemons’ other great set piece is – well – the whole of Episode One. It’s among the very best opening instalments you’ll ever find, and builds a sense of the uncanny while at the same time being full of genuinely laugh-out-loud dialogue. It’s sublime from scene one; where, late one night, Old Jim and his collie battle home through a storm of nostalgic BBC sound effects. The collie runs away. Old Jim sees something terrifying out of shot, cries out…  and dies from a heart attack, or so the local GP assures us after the cut. “Slight protrusion of the eyeballs, rictus drawing back of the lips over the teeth. Common enough in heart failure,” he says. (Oh, it needn’t be that serious, doc. I display those symptoms myself when watching Arc of Infinity.) Miss Hawthorne, however, is certain the man died of fright, and that diabolic forces are abroad in Devil’s End. It’s a bewitching brew of cliché and melodrama, with the theme of the whole story laid out in this brief exchange. (Sadly, we never do find out what Jim saw that night. It could be the gargoyle Bok, but as he seems to animate for the first time at the end of Episode One, it’s unlikely. And while we’re on the subject, the fate of the dog also remains infuriatingly uncertain.)

Lavishly filmed and well characterised, the first half hour of The Daemons quivers with small pleasures. The quirks of the BBC team visiting Devil’s End for the opening of the barrow are written and played to perfection. A neat directorial gag sees the episode switch from film to videotape for the first time at the moment of presenter Alistair Fergus’s piece direct to camera, turning a familiar and often painful Doctor Who discontinuity into a strength. Actor David Simeon finds every nuance of Fergus’s pastiche dialogue – chewing on his narration like David Frost (“There is. Something strange. About Devil’s End”), or doing an Alan Whicker as he affects to reach for the right word (“Standing here, in this… unquiet… place”). Archaeologist Professor Horner has no time for him, and their mutual dislike is played to great comic effect. Acting as go-between is another endearing character: Harry, the camp BBC assistant. When snapped at by Fergus for asking if he’s okay, Harry huffs: “Well! I only asked. There’s no need to make a production number out of it.” He’s a familiar stereotype of course, but one wonders if the writers found specific inspiration close to home. The Daemons’ production assistant is Peter Grimwade. Taking a similar role on the previous story, Colony in Space, was one Jonathan Turner. A decade later, with the former a director of Doctor Who and the latter the producer (his name, by then, gunning double barrelled), their bitchy snits and spats would become the gossip of the Doctor Who world.

Sadly, the BBC crew heads for the hills after the barrow is cracked and Azal awakes. Following his invocation, the pace of rest of the story is entirely set by the bizarre habits of our Daemon. The Doctor tells us that Azal will manifest three times before we finally learn what he’s about – though quite why, or how the Doctor knows his schedule, is a total mystery. Azal can also change size at will. He first struts across the countryside as a towering Mr Tumnus, stamping on policemen, but then gets all shy and shrinks to a speck in the Master’s cellar for a long while. What’s he doing down there on the floor all that time? Smiting ants? Put together, these affectations mean that Azal can keep us waiting for a couple more hours, but still go ‘ta-dah!’ every so often. It’s almost as if he knows he’s in a multi-episode, cliffhanger-based melodrama.

For his final encore, Azal plays the proper bossy boots, booming judgments through ill-fitting teeth. “THIS PLANET SMELLS TO ME OF FAILURE!” he bellows, though that may be an unfortunate side effect of the fright he gave the Master at the end of Episode Three. Azal considers destroying the Earth, but then decides to give it over to the Master and kill the Doctor. Jo shouts: “Kill me, not him!”, and her noble self-sacrifice causes Azal to blow up – which must be really frustrating for him after all those centuries waiting for his big moment.

It’s far from a fresh observation to say that the climax of The Daemons is disappointing, and Azal’s reaction difficult to swallow. Even the script editor, Terrance Dicks, doesn’t believe in it. So how might it have been handled better? What’s the simplest fix? Well, how about if Azal instead ruled in favour of the Doctor and tried to kill the Master – but Jo still intervened. She would do it because she knows it’s what the Doctor would do, and because no one should die. Minutes before, the Master was poised to cut Jo’s throat, so this would be a properly bewildering act of self-sacrifice. As our representative of humanity, Jo would be proof of how far we have come as a race. Bamboozled Azal goes poof. Church goes bang. A bewildered and broken Master is dragged away by UNIT.

The final scene we leave untouched, of course. The Doctor and Jo Grant, the Brigadier, Yates and Benton, all smiling in the spring sunshine. Around the maypole, the Doctor dances. The Brig would rather have a pint. As we slowly pull back high and away, we leave them together, forever, in an moment of undeniable Doctor Who perfection; in a timeless and perfect bubble of joy.

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DVD Extras

A reel of Super-8 film, shot on location during production, flickers with the rainbow palette of 70s nostalgia. Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning waltz by. Roger Delgado and Nicholas Courtney grin from behind groovy shades. Bok the gargoyle slips off his wellies and into papier maché feet.  Young children roll on the grass of the village green. They’ll be parents themselves now. Grandparents.

Suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, they say. It’s technology that gives the Doctor Who Restoration Team its ineffable powers, but I see only magic. A clip from Tomorrow’s World in 1993 demonstrates the Team’s early sorcery, while the episodes on this DVD show how much further their wizardry has come.

The documentary Remembering Barry Letts pays just tribute to the polymath producer of the Pertwee years, and features interviews with Letts himself, admiring colleagues, and his sons, Dominic and Crispin. The programme rightly puts its subject’s Doctor Who work into the context of a long and high-achieving career, and while one wishes the budget had been available to provide more footage of Letts as an actor – and clips from other TV series on which he worked as producer – it proves an excellent and quietly moving tribute.

The Daemons was a famously jolly job for its cast and crew, and that mood is captured by both the commentary and production documentary here. If you think there’s nothing new to be learned about the making of this serial, then prepare to be surprised; not least by the story of the floor manager’s hat. However, the most rewarding extra here is the ‘Info Text’ commentary, provided by the master of the art, Martin Wiggins. Intelligent, witty and insanely meticulous, it brings the making of these episodes vividly to life. By day, Dr Wiggins is one of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars. By night, he’s researching and compiling these facts for us; including a list of all the newspapers used to make Bert the Landlord’s coat for the morris dance sequence – and I mean down to the specific days’ editions. Frankly, we should count ourselves lucky that Wiggins is on our side. Because if all this focus and brain power were instead used for evil, there’d be no stopping him. We would all be as dust beneath his feet. As is his will, so mote it be.

The Face of Evil

A review of the DVD for Doctor Who Magazine, from 2012

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The Face of Evil gets straight to the nitty-gritty, and flings us into its fictional world with an opening scene that’s archetypal Doctor Who. “There can be but one punishment for such a heresy…” says a man in judgment of a beautiful girl. “Banishment!” It’s clearly a big deal, because Dudley Simpson blasts straight in with drums and trumpets. Da-da-da-da-daaah! Da-dah! Oh – you think – this is what Doctor Who’s all about. This is why we’re here. It’s leggy Leela who’s facing the banishment punishment, for doubting the existence of the great god Xoanon; if not his ability to pep up a game of Scrabble. Leela’s tribe is in uproar. Insults fly between the accused and high priest Neeva, and their argument fleshes out the idiosyncrasies of this world. We’re in a primitive, wattle-and-daub hut, but – look! – sci-fi gubbins litter the place. There’s no time to ponder that little tease, because Leela’s old dad is dragged away to face “the test of the Horda” and, backstage, delivers the finest scream in the history of Doctor Who. It’s a shrieking symphony in three movements: an epic yodel of horror, part Tarzan, part copulating fox. “You have until sunrise,” says leader Andor to Leela, his voice rumbling with movie trailer portent. “If you are still within the boundary then, you must be thrown to the Horda.” And so it is that we’re served with everything we need for an adventure in fewer than two dozen lines of script. There’s something to be scared of, a mystery to intrigue us, a heroine to cheer for. You can’t imagine how it might be done better… And then Tom Baker arrives, and brings us down to Earth with a bump.

It appears that our star is not quite himself. An actor of limitless horsepower, by his standards he’s barely revving the engine. Perhaps Baker suspects that he’s no longer the centre of attention, given that, as of this week, there’s now a gorgeous girl right alongside him wearing little more than a smile and a suntan. Every eye in the room is on Leela. “I’m going to enjoy lighting that!” calls a voice from the gantry. Reports of these days of recording place the new girl at the focal point of a semicircle of randy studio staff. And this being the 1970s, you picture a room of Les Dawsons with headsets and clipboards, pebble glasses steamed up, all “phwoar!” and “knickers knackers knockers!” Certainly, we know that actress Louise Jameson was wolf-whistled. Today, this would likely provoke a lengthy disciplinary procedure – and a furious, fully-illustrated article in the Daily Mail – but Jameson tells us she felt encouraged by the heartfelt enthusiasm. However, I’ll bet Tom Baker had a face like thunder. He may have the big hat and the coloured scarf, the teeth and the curls, but he’s now playing against acres of womanly flesh held in check by a few square feet of chamois leather. He’s been asking if he can go it alone without a companion, but instead he’s been given the most eye-catching sidekick imaginable. Doctor Who’s centre of gravity has shifted beneath him. And is that The Face Of Evil’s production code he keeps muttering under his breath?

“Leela is here for the dads,” says the producer. But not just the dads, surely? “Doctor Who is made for intelligent 14-year-olds”, adds the script editor. They’ll know that 14 is a particularly sticky time in a boy’s development, and Leela will certainly hold her audience rigid in front of the television for half an hour every Saturday. The irony is that while Leela is the most brazen – some would say cynical – deployment of sex appeal in the series’ history, she is also the most fully thought-through and skilfully played companion the series has ever had. Jameson makes Leela part pedantic toddler and part hunting hound. It’s a crazy-sounding combination, but her hard work makes the character completely real when she should be totally absurd. However, although Leela is certainly lovable, it’s hard to completely give your heart to her. It’s telling how, in The Face of Evil, there’s no romantic subplot for Leela and dishy tribesman Tomas. He seems devoted to her – as well he might – but she doesn’t notice or care. The need to play against all that obvious sexuality means that Leela has to be completely ignorant of such matters. Even the Doctor has to be careful not to touch. And so, Leela will stay childlike and innocent – and at an emotional remove from us – throughout her travels in the TARDIS, until the day she bizarrely decides to start a new life in the city with a middle-ranking policeman.

The Face of Evil is admired for having a Big Idea at its core, and rightly so. It is, I think, the series’ second attempt at what I’m going to call a ‘broken spring’ adventure. Everything that happens in such a tale is merely the side effect of an unstable system that the Doctor slowly comes to understand, and then repair. It’s a story type that’s been part of the series from the beginning, and now named for the spring that jams the Fast Return switch in Doctor Who’s third story, and spins the TARDIS to the brink of destruction. However, it took until The Face of Evil for the Doctor to encounter his second broken spring mystery. Here, god Xoanon is merely a computer running a corrupted program. It was built to help humans, but thanks to a mistake – and a very special mistake in this case – it is instead doing them harm, without any clear ambition of its own. There are other homicidal computers in Doctor Who, of course – WOTAN, BOSS – but they are portrayed as sentient, and working to a self-serving purpose in the manner of any mad scientist. Xoanon’s breakdown, portrayed here as madness, is the result of a programming error, and the ultimate solution proves to be – as for so many IT problems – to switch it off and on again.

And so, The Face of Evil is one of a rare breed. The only similar stories in the original run of Doctor Who are Underworld – with another computer running degraded software – and Full Circle, where the ‘system’ to be understood by the Doctor is the cyclic evolution of a whole planet, and there’s no one to blame for that. It’s a different matter for modern Doctor Who, where the broken spring idea has featured far more frequently. The Empty Child was the first, and The Girl in the Fireplace, Gridlock and Silence in the Library also gave us machines struggling to fulfil their original program. The idea is there again in The Beast Below, Amy’s Choice and The Lodger, and we saw it five times in last year’s series alone. The Siren, the Flesh, the Handbots, a creepy hotel and the ‘night terrors’ all turned out to be functions or side effects of a misfiring mechanism. It takes someone of the Doctor’s smarts to spot the trap, break the cycle and free the victims. And with no malice aforethought, a happy side effect can be that, sometimes, everybody lives.

Put in this context, and given the calibre of stories that have ploughed the same furrow, it’s no small compliment to say that The Face of Evil is one of the very best of its type. That’s because it delivers a unique and satisfying twist, in that the Doctor is not merely the solution to the problem – he’s also the cause. It’s the Doctor’s fudged repair, in an expedition unseen, that bust Xoanon’s spring in the first place, and left it with a piece of his own personality jammed in its software. This leads to the story’s signature moment, at the end of Part Three, when the Doctor confronts Xoanon. In a beautifully-realised effect that still impresses today, the Doctor’s own distorted face, thrice over, screams back at him in confusion with the voice of a child. It’s one for the all-time clips reel.

Sadly, the story gently trundles downhill through its final episode. There’s a countdown to a nuclear-reactor overload, but it lacks the sense of urgency one normally finds with countdowns to nuclear-reactor overloads – and we’ve seen a few in our time, you and I. Not everybody lives, but Xoanon is cured; or at least that’s how it’s sold to us. We’ll come back to that.

The Face of Evil is, perhaps fittingly, a schizophrenic production, with a fidgety left hand seemingly determined to undo the good work done by the right. The jungle scenes, largely shot on film, are a triumph – moody and sinister – which is no small achievement given that the jungle in question is for the most part a delicate suspension of Hoover hose. These sequences are beautifully lit, but when you step into the huts of the Sevateem, and in front of video cameras, the floodlights sear your retinas. You can close your eyes and still see a glowing outline of Leslie Schofield.

Similarly, while the Sevateem themselves hold our interest, thanks to the sharp script and skilful casting, when we meet their rivals – the whey-faced, uptight Tesh – it’s difficult to stay focused. Sure, the Tesh have an initial impact. They’re playing-card Jacks come to life, like the Queen of Hearts’ harassed footmen. The problem is, unlike the Sevateem, we never feel that that the Tesh have a life outside of the demands of the plot – perhaps because so many are played by extras and stuntmen. And while the story generally keeps us moving along, it fills out its length with little distractions that loop back to where we were a few minutes earlier. The test of the Horda, when we see it, is straight from the medieval zone of The Crystal Maze. “This is a three-minute game, shot entirely on film, and your time starts the second I close the door.” You can imagine a gormless estate agent from Woking wielding the crossbow while his colleagues screech from the sidelines. “Shoot the rope, Darren! Gettin’ thinner as it gets faster, innit!” Later, Leela is hypnotised twice – which looks like carelessness. The second time, the Doctor cures her by sonic screwdrivering a random, unidentified prop. There’s a sneaking suspicion they’re making some of this up as they go along.

But what of Xoanon, and the people he serves? There’s a suggestion that he’s been breeding the Sevateem and the Tesh for specific attributes – one for brawn and one for brains, but it’s not really explained why. Frankly, on the given evidence, he seems to have instead produced one colony of heterosexual men and one colony of homosexual men. The immediate result of bringing them together can only be confusion and disappointment on both sides, like taking a stag party clubbing in Brighton. There’s going to be no end of embarrassment the next morning, and red cheeks all round. However, there is some hope for the future, because although it’s often been commented that when Leela leaves with the Doctor the planet loses its only woman, there is – as Yoda once said – another. A second lady of the Sevateem can be glimpsed in a film sequence. Well, I say lady. Her hair is tight back in bunches, and she stomps past the camera like she’s on her way to the 24-hour garage for a scratchcard and 10 Bensons. But she at least looks the pragmatic type, and might well be game for repopulating the planet. She might even go for a Tesh, if she can see past the velvet knickerbockers and pea-green espadrilles.

That’s if she even gets the chance. For there remains reason to believe that Xoanon still isn’t the full ticket even after the Doctor’s second repair. When commenting on the computer’s crackpot foray into eugenics, Leela says: “That’s horrible!” The Doctor agrees. “It is,” he says – before addressing Xoanon. “Isn’t it horrible?”

“But it’s over now,” smarms the machine, entirely dodging the question. Hmm… That’s a rather suspicious bit of evasion, if you ask me. And was that the sound of a spring going ‘ping’?

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DVD Extras

Into the Wild, the production documentary, is as smart and comprehensive as can be. Special congratulations to the team for finding Anthony Frieze, who provided the child’s voice for Xoanon. It’s the sort of thing the DVD range so is very good at. And if you’ve ever craved a close look at the ‘stone’ head of Tom Baker made for this story, then here’s your chance. The camera caresses the big face so thoroughly, so lovingly, you feel the director won’t be completely satisfied until he’s snogged it with tongues.

An instalment of Tomorrow’s Times looks at press coverage of the Baker years, and rightly lingers over a defining piece of Doctor Who-related journalism: Jean Rook’s hatchet-job interview with Robert Holmes for the Daily Express in 1977, titled: “Who do you think you are, scaring my innocent child?” Rook was one of the great, pompous witches of old Fleet Street, and it’s a treat that she ever bothered with Doctor Who. “I wonder if this inflated ex-children’s programme is over-stretching itself,” she wrote, “and worshipping its own uninhibited cult?” Oh, Ms Rook… Over-stretching itself is what Doctor Who does best. And if you think it was uninhibited then, you should see it now. And while I have you, dear Jean… Let me take this moment to point out that any sentence written by Robert Holmes has more worth, and will live longer, than every single word you ever wrote added together.

The most exciting DVD extra of all is a TV advertisement for the Denys Fisher range of Doctor Who dollies, where a young boy with four teeth that clearly don’t get along is the show runner for a brief – but no less full-blooded and game-changing – adventure. Our tiny Time Lord and a flicky-haired Leela, who looks like she should be held by the feet and used to rinse out wine glasses, are under attack from “a fearful Cyberman, the Giant Robot, and one of the deadly Daleks.” The Giant Robot, while not so giant as it claims, strikes a swishy, hip-swinging pose that clearly puts the wind up the Doctor. “Leela covers him!” gasps the voiceover. “And the Doctor escapes!” What? He leaves the poor girl to fend for herself and just skips off in the TARDIS on his own? It’s like a miniature metaphor for Tom Baker’s dreams.

As a lad, your reviewer begged, cajoled and pleaded for these toys, and they arrived gift-wrapped, one-by-one, over the course of various birthdays and Christmases. Except for poor Leela, that is.  Buying a Sindy or Barbie – albeit one armed with a knife – was a step too far for my parents. Because, although they didn’t know the proper words for it, they already suspected their youngest son was far less Sevateem than Tesh.

The Sensorites

A review of the DVD for Doctor Who magazine, from 2012

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If visualised on a graph, with THRILLS up the y-axis against TIME along the x, The Sensorites would plot a resolute diagonal from top left to bottom right. However, while the story offers steadily diminishing returns over the course of its six episodes – each, it feels, of around 87 minutes – there is at least time for one’s mind to wander to weightier matters. And so it is that today we will consider such thorny questions as: What is the future for mental health care in Britain? Can a fair society be built on fear? How do Sensorites reproduce? And who is Carol Richmond’s secret hair stylist?

But first: praise where praise is due. It’s June 1964, mere months into Doctor Who’s near half-century journey, and we’re seeing it do things for the first time. The TARDIS lands inside the show’s first spaceship – the first of so very many – and this scenario is so radical that the spaceship doesn’t even require a name. On the flight deck, the Doctor and his companions Ian, Barbara and Susan find two crew members slumped over the controls and declare them dead. (It’s the first instance of a leap-to-conclusions fatalism that becomes rather a theme of The Sensorites.) With a shiver, Susan declares an instinctive dread of the place. There’s a sinister rumble of kettledrum courtesy of composer Norman Kay. This has a subtly transporting effect, because Kay also provided the incidental music for Doctor Who’s astonishing first episode. And so, as Susan peers nervously into the gloom, Kay’s sparse, bleak score – flute, timpani and muted trumpet – brings echoes of that foggy junkyard, and the moment crackles with all the possibility and potential of Doctor Who.

But it doesn’t last. From here, that line on our graph begins its steady descent. The uncanny atmosphere is dissipated by the waking of the crew of the SS Spaceship, who prove immediately unbearable. In charge is the lettuce-limp Captain Maitland, who speaks like English is entirely new to him. In fact, he speaks like speech is entirely new to him. “My. Name. Is Maitland,” he tells us, in swoops and pauses. “This. Is Kerril Richmond. My co-astro-not.” He means Carol Richmond, his co-astronaut. Carol is very posh most of the time, and when asked by Barbara where the water is kept, she gives her best Celia Johnson: “It’s deyn thar.” These astronots, born in the 28th century, provide Doctor Who’s very first insight into what the future holds for the human race. In their time, the whole south of England is “Central City”, so it’s uninterrupted tarmac from Brighton to Birmingham. This news will undoubtedly depress anyone currently campaigning to save the Chilterns from High Speed 2.

Maitland’s ship is trapped in the orbit of a planet called the Sense-Sphere, and he and Carol have been held in suspended animation. They sense that the local inhabitants, the Sensorites, have popped up to feed them from time to time. This conjures a fleeting, bizarre image involving spoons, bibs and an awful lot of wet wipes. As Maitland talks, we’re shown mysterious hands stealing the TARDIS lock. This is happening no more than five yards away, so it tests one’s patience when nobody notices.

The ship shakes violently. It’s falling out of orbit towards the planet. What follows, as the Doctor fights to save the ship from crashing, seems so familiar as to be cliché – but again, this is his first time. “Stabilisers, Maitland!” he shouts. “We’re going to hit!” screams Susan. “Jet reverse port!” yells the Doctor. “Jet reverse starboard!” The planet races up to meet them, filling the viewscreen. “We’re heading straight for point of impact!” shouts Carol, rather self-evidently. It’s a shame that the Doctor merely twiddles some small knobs on the control panel, and doesn’t elbow Maitland – who’s an unmitigated liability – out of the pilot’s chair so he can grapple with the big control levers; physically heaving the ship out of its nosedive. But while the Doctor saves the day, the chance for an iconic hero moment is missed. It’s something the show will learn to do much better. Furthermore, the reason for this sudden panic remains unclear. It’s suggested that the Sensorites are trying to scare the bejesus out of the humans, leaving their minds more susceptible to control, but that doesn’t really fit with what we later learn about them. Swap two pages in the script and it might have served as a cunning distraction for the Sensorites’ lock-stealing antics.

A sense of the strange is recaptured for a few moments as Barbara and Susan explore the ship, where they are menaced by a third crew member, called John, who shuffles about like a zombie. (That said, even in his living death, John shows more wherewithal than Maitland and Carol put together.) We score our first proper look at a Sensorite with the first cliffhanger. It startles Ian as it peers through the flight deck window from space, seemingly trying to find a way in. It’s hardly Salem’s Lot, but it’s still a spooky moment. Sadly, the Doctor isn’t impressed. “Oh, just ignore it!” he huffs, with a dismissive flap of the hand, which rather ruins the mood.

When compared with other humanoid aliens of the Hartnell era – the Voord, the Aridians, the Monoids – the Sensorites must be considered a success. With their stiff and shiny skin, bulging cheekbones and coal-black, unreadable stare, they put one in mind of recent chat show appearances by Madonna. And though essentially bald, they do wildly creative things with the rest of their facial hair. Long strings of beard are plastered up to their eyes like inverted sideburns. It’s not so much a comb-over as a comb-under. However, for all their little absurdities, you do find yourself believing in these peculiar pixies – most of the time – and that must be the ultimate accolade for any Doctor Who monster.

The Sensorites’ standoffishness stems from the fact that humans have visited the Sense-Sphere before, and since that day the Sensorites have been dying “from a fearful affliction”. They have used their telepathic abilities to keep Maitland and crew safely in cold storage, but this power has unpicked the seams of John’s brain. The Sensorites say they can cure him, but Carol – who’s supposedly in love with John – is surprisingly defeatist, and seems ready to wash her hands of him. “He might as well be dead!” she wails. Perhaps Carol’s attitude offers an insight into the state of healthcare on 28th century Earth? Are loved ones abandoned at the first sign of mental inconstancy? Carol refuses to believe that John can be saved. “Oh, it’s no use. It’s too late.” We might feel some sympathy if the scene did not immediately cut to Barbara talking to a Sensorite. “You can do something for John?” she asks. “Oh yes,” says the Sensorite.

Some might consider it a tragedy that Barbara remains on the ship for two episodes as her friends descend to the planet. But as Maitland stays with her, it’s a good deal for the viewer. The Sense-Sphere proves a curious place, and we are given many happy hours in which to idly ponder its mysteries. Sensorite society is based on a hardcore communist model, with individuals assigned fixed roles in society during childhood that will define them for the rest of their lives. From each according to their ability, as Marx put it. There is reference to a “lower caste”, but the First Elder assures Ian that all Sensorites are happy with their lot. Ian riffs on Animal Farm to suggest, “maybe some are happier than others.” It proves a pertinent point, for there are clues to suggest the Sense-Sphere has a sinister history. We learn they have capital punishment, and discover, hidden in the palace of the Elders, a weapon called “the disintegrator”. This can tune in on an individual Sensorite and boil his brains out through his nose, without him even knowing he’s been targeted – although he may come to suspect something is amiss when his frontal lobe froths into his lap. It’s a terrifying weapon when you think about it, more chilling in its implications than even the Conscience machine of Marinus, or Google, and makes one wonder if this ordered society might have been founded upon the threat of unwarned and instant execution by the state.

The Sensorites was made in 1964, and it’s clear that Maoist China was the inspiration for the Sense-Sphere. The Sensorite Elders, whiskery and inscrutable, speak pure fortune-cookie homily. “No opinion can be worse, sometimes, than a very dogmatic one,” cautions the First Elder of a colleague. Later, the City Administrator voices his dread of the alien visitors: “Their pleasant smiles conceal sharp teeth.” (Although this may be more then just a figure of speech given how, in moments of anger, the First Doctor can come at you with his little Adipose fang.) It’s familiar science fiction shorthand to use a foreign culture as a touchstone for an alien race, but when a key plot point of The Sensorites turns out to be how, to humans, “they all look the same”, the whole thing starts to feel rather crass and insulting to our intelligence. We must be thankful that they weren’t given “me velly solly” accents.

In all our time on the Sense-Sphere, we only meet male Sensorites. However, mention of a “family group” might be taken to imply there are ladies stashed away somewhere. Perhaps they’re cowering indoors, feeling bashful; after all, a polycotton onesie can be such an unforgiving garment. Or maybe there’s only one gender on the Sense-Sphere, and when it comes to making baby Sensorites, the ‘boys’ get together and mingle some unseen pseudopodia. The tubby Administrator may be six months gone for all we know. It’s a troubling image. Either way, there’s certainly a feminine side to the Sensorites hidden away somewhere. Between episodes, Carol scores a sexy new hairdo, and someone must help with that. The state-designated stylist likely leapt on her with giddy enthusiasm, desperate for a new challenge after a life spent backcombing ear hair into eyebrows.

Meanwhile, the plot plods on. It takes the Doctor roughly two seconds to realise that the cause of the Sensorite plague is poison in the water supply. It takes the viewer less than half that time. The Sensorites’ long-term failure to solve this childish conundrum rather erodes one’s sympathy for them. If even the planet’s brightest brains hadn’t considered the possibility of poison, then this might just be natural selection taking the scenic route. Happily, the Doctor appoints himself a one-man CSI: Sense-Sphere, and in one of the story’s more vividly directed sequences, he identifies the toxin – deadly nightshade – through application of the classic montage technique. However, in the face of his not inconsiderable efforts, the Sensorites prove no less defeatist that Carol. After Ian is poisoned, the First Elder waves his hands and moans: “Your friend his dying! There is no hope!” When the Doctor later makes a solo trip into the tunnels of the local aqueduct to find the source of the poison, the Elder wails to Susan: “There is no hope! You cannot save your friend!”

All this panic and melodrama does nothing to disguise the fact that The Sensorites suffers from a chronic lack of jeopardy. When the Administrator intercepts the vital antidote on its way to Ian and smashes it, you go: “Ooh! Nasty!” But then, one minute later, we cut to a mostly recovered Ian, with Susan saying: “It’s lucky I could get some more.” Actor Peter Glaze does his best as the Administrator, the villain of the piece; tilting his head back to suggest haughtiness, and that the humans might just be stinking the place out. But overall he feels about as threatening as a petulant toddler. The best performance in the story comes from John Bailey in the final episode, playing the deranged Ben Gunn of an Earth astronaut hiding out in the aqueduct. With just a few lines he conveys a complete inner life to his character, and it all suddenly feels real for one glorious fleeting moment.

The star of the show, the man who makes it all worthwhile, is William Hartnell. Here, we see the First Doctor complete his journey from anti-hero to plain hero, and Hartnell’s total conviction keeps the whole thing alive. And Doctor Who is already cheerfully re-writing its own myth. “We’ve never had an argument,” he says to Susan, conveniently forgetting that this whole business may have started as a mild curiosity in a junkyard, but continued as a right old barney in a police box. Back then, when we first met the Doctor, he appeared to be hiding from the Universe. By the time of The Sensorites, he’s the gadabout troublemaker we know and love, and apparently always has been. Before Ian and Barbara, he met Beau Brummel and the telepathic plants of Esto, and lobbed a parson’s nose at Henry VIII.

As the Doctor faces down the Sensorites when they steal his lock, he has a line that sums him up perfectly. “I don’t make threats,” he says – friendly, but with an edge of steel. “But I do make promises. And I promise that I will cause you more trouble that you’ve bargained for.”

You can easily imagine Matt Smith saying that line. For a moment, past and present click together, and your hair stands on end. That flash of connection you can feel is – as the Doctor puts it – quite the great spirit of adventure.

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DVD Extras

Hurrah for the Restoration Team! The clean-up job on The Sensorites is sensational; a great achievement. If you’re in any doubt about that, then take a moment to check the version of these episodes available on YouTube. They’re splattered with muck and flicker like a zoetrope.

We are also spoiled, as ever, by excellent production notes and a wonderfully wide-ranging commentary track. Moderator Toby Hadoke has become a real hero of the DVD range – so well-prepared, so unassuming – you find yourself wishing he had joined the team years ago. Hadoke is also the on-screen presenter of the documentary Looking For Peter, in which he dons his best fan hat and sets out to discover the life story of The Sensorites’ forgotten writer, Peter R Newman. His wingman is researcher Richard Bignell, whose eyes shine at the thought of archives unexplored. At one point, they dash off on separate missions to either side of the camera, like Batman and Robin.

Looking For Peter is, to my mind, the finest Doctor Who DVD extra yet, so sharp is its focus, so skilled its execution, and so complete its fulfilment of its promise. It’s a brilliant job of work by producer and director Chris Chapman. And it has a very moving tale to tell. When Hadoke discovers that Newman didn’t commit suicide – as fan rumour has suggested – he says, with relief: “I’m looking to discover some fun stuff about Doctor Who, not uncover a man’s disaster.” However, there’s no little sadness to Newman’s own story – the story of a war hero whose ultimate enemy proved to be his own self doubt, and whose life would end in a sudden and bizarre tragedy. But there’s joy here too, as Doctor Who gives something back – providing some comfort to Newman’s family after so many years by showing that his name and his work lives on.

This review may have had some fun with The Sensorites; but here we are, discussing it in absurd depth. That’s still a compliment. And Newman would surely be tickled to know there’s an acoustic rock duo, based in Liverpool, called Sensorites [www.sensorites.com]. The Sensorites themselves wouldn’t approve of all that loud noise in dark rooms, but it’s Newman’s work that inspired the name. It just goes to show that we can never know where a Doctor Who story – even one made 48 years ago – might take us next.