Doctor Who From The Beginning: 5 – The Keys Of Marinus
The Keys Of Marinus
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: John Gorrie
DVD availability: single-disc DVD Buy from Amazon
This one’s taken a *long* time to get around to writing about, hasn’t it? Partly that’s because my DVD player broke, but also it’s because of the nature of this story. While it might have worked well as a serial, particularly for the eight-year-old demographic at which it’s clearly aimed, watching it all in one go (which is how I’ve been doing these) is like trying to eat ten dry cream crackers. When you start you think “this will be easy!”, but after a few minutes you’re thinking “Why on earth did I think this was even possible? I want to die!”
The Keys Of Marinus is the first bad Doctor Who story. Why on earth this was saved when Marco Polo wasn’t is something we shall never know. The performances – at least those of the main cast – are as good as ever and the production design is *astonishing*, but there’s a gigantic hole in the middle of the script.
All the previous stories have been *about* something, or several somethings – An Unearthly Child was about future shock and the generation gap, The Daleks was about fascism, Edge Of Destruction was meant to show us more about the characters and bring their relationship forward, and Marco Polo was, by children’s TV standards, a pretty decent stab at showing how life was lived in another continent and another century.
But The Keys Of Marinus isn’t about anything at all except filling up six twenty-five minute TV slots between the Telegoons and Juke Box Jury. It’s the first example of someone trying to write ‘a Doctor Who story’ – it’s the first of many, many attempts to recapture the Daleks’ success, but even though it’s written by Terry Nation it comprehensively misses everything that made them a success. While the Daleks were hideous inhuman tank-robot-monster-aliens with zap guns, Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, is a bloke in a wetsuit.
It also has a rather… confused… morality. An ancient scientist kidnaps the TARDIS crew and holds them to ransom until they retrieve the pieces of his giant mind-control machine that, until someone found a way round it, was controlling the minds of every person on the planet. He’s the goodie.
But that doesn’t matter, because this isn’t really a story at all. It’s a ‘quest’, where Our Heroes have to find all the pieces of the MacGuffin, splitting up into groups and adventuring in several different ‘exciting’ locations, against various ‘scary’ foes of the psychic-brain-in-jar variety, before finally getting together to defeat the big baddie. In other words it’s the sort of plotting that had previously been a staple of Republic serials and bad superhero team-up comics, but is these days better known as video-game plotting.
In other words, this is the first example of Doctor Who being written by a lazy hack. And just how much of a lazy hack Nation is being here can be seen by the place names – Marinus (a watery planet) and Morphoton (where you’re dreaming while you’re there) must have taken whole *seconds* to think up. We also have those Terry Nation staples “plants.. that are more like animals!” (unless you’ve watched a lot of Nation’s work you’ve no idea how tedious ‘scary’ jungles can get), casual sexism (both Barbara and Susan want nothing more in the universe than a nice dress, while the Doctor wants a well-equipped lab), and a heroic character with a name like Terry Nation who saves the day. (In this case the character is called Tarran, but in future we have magical substances callled Tarranium, heroes called Tarrant and, most blatantly of all, a sexy super-spy called Sara Kingdom).
Terry Nation could, when he wanted, be a very good writer. Unfortunately, he only wanted to three times in his many years on Doctor Who – the first two Dalek stories and Genesis Of The Daleks (and it’s very debatable how much of that story he actually wrote). The rest of the time he was the absolute definition of a hack.
While reviewing the previous stories, I’ve found myself straining against my self-imposed 1000-word limit – they all have many points of interest, good lines, well-composed shots or *something*. In this case you have a bunch of good actors and an excellent set designer doing their best with terrible material, and there are only so many synonyms for ‘not very good’ you can come up with.
Doctor Who has always been a children’s programme, but the stories before this one all pretty consistently refused to use that as an excuse to be bad TV. But this is just unbelievably lazy writing, and the story is only redeemed at all because the cast haven’t yet realised that it’s OK to give a sub-par performance when handed a sub-par script. But even there, one of the chief joys of early Who is watching William Hartnell’s extraordinary performance, and he’s off on holiday for two weeks here, when the team split up.
This wouldn’t seem so bad in another context – to be honest, the script isn’t *MUCH* worse than the standard of, say, series three, much of the Troughton era, mid-period Pertwee or whatever. Whenever the programme makers get lazy and think ‘will this do?’, The Keys Of Marinus seems to be the standard to which they sink. But here it’s placed during an otherwise impeccable run of classic stories. This is the only unarguably *bad* story in the show’s first year (one can argue about The Sensorites, and we will in a couple of weeks, no doubt), and while it’s easy to see what they were trying to do, it’s amazing that this story didn’t kill off the ‘rubber-suited monster’ genre of Doctor Who for good.
Luckily, next up came one of the best stories the show’s ever produced…
Doctor Who From The Beginning: Marco Polo
Marco Polo
Writer: John Lucarotti
Director: Waris Hussein (ep. 4 by John Crockett)
DVD Availability: a half-hour ‘reconstruction’ edit is available on The Beginnings box set Buy From Amazon
Other availability: Narrated soundtrack on CD. Buy From Amazon
First, I’d like to apologise for the delay in doing this one. I’ve been physically exhausted for about a month now, and have no idea why. It’s made it very hard to concentrate on writing anything of any length. I’ll do some more Batman posts over the weekend and deal with the next Who story on Monday.
Marco Polo is notable for several ‘firsts’. On the plus side, it’s the first historical (if you don’t count the adventure with the cavemen) – a genre that ended early in Patrick Troughton’s run, but that was vitally important in Hartnell’s time, where the Doctor would turn up in a famous historical setting and have an adventure with no SF/fantasy/horror elements at all. These stories were often among the best the show ever produced, and it’s a sad indictment of… something, whether modern audiences, modern TV executives or the lack of ambition of the people making the programme, that while in 1964 audiences could be expected to sit through seven straight weeks of travelogue through medieval China, the modern audience – which we get told all the time is ‘more sophisticated’ – is expected not to be able to stick forty-five minutes of early 20th century France without a giant invisible chicken-monster.
On the minus side, however, it’s also the first story where the BBC deliberately set fire to every surviving copy, thus ensuring that it can never be watched again. A hundred and six episodes of Doctor Who were destroyed in the 1970s to save space, including all seven episodes of this story – one of only three Doctor Who stories where not a single frame of footage remains. Doctor Who fans sometimes act as if this act of cultural barbarism only affected Who, but in fact it got off relatively lightly (thanks in large part to obsessive fan Ian Levine rescuing several stories from the flames). If you want to see Alan Bennett’s On The Margin, or John Fortune and Eleanor Bron’s Where Was Spring, or the Beatles on Top Of The Pops, or the BBC’s coverage of the moon landings! you can’t – except for a few seconds of the Beatles doing Ticket To Ride which are preserved on a Hartnell Doctor Who story.
However, we do have soundtracks to all the missing Doctor Who episodes, thanks to fans who taped the audio off their TV sets, and we have still photographs of many episodes too, and a group of fans called Loose Cannon Productions have used these to ‘reconstruct’ many of the stories (they only distribute these reconstructions on VHS, to avoid legal action from the BBC, but I’m sure you can find them in other formats easily if, like me, you have no TV). In the case of Marco Polo, as well as doing this, one of their members also did a half-hour reconstruction of the highlights of this, used on the The Beginning box set.
And the results are quite extraordinary in this case. Many of the surviving photos of this are in colour, and the team colourised the rest, so it’s actually the only colour Hartnell story, allowing us to experience the astonishingly beautiful production design for ourselves, and putting the lie to all those jokes about ‘wobbly sets’ – this was not a cheap show.
The plot itself is Boys’ Own Adventure stuff – a TARDIS component breaks down, and Marco Polo takes the broken TARDIS to present it to Kublai Khan, obligating our heroes to travel with him and his caravan, and to thwart the machinations of the evil warlord Tegana (who is basically the Hooded Claw, all moustache-twirling villainy except when he’s around Polo, at which point he’s all sweetness and light, and who keeps coming up with unfeasibly complex death traps), while learning a little about medieval China and science (one episode is basically designed to explain the concept of condensation). Luckily, however, the script isn’t, with Susan and Ping-Cho (a 16 year old girl on her way to get married) driving much of the plot and having a relationship that would, today, be called ‘slashy’.
(Speaking of ‘slashy’, fan legend says that the monkey perched on the shoulder of villainous, eyepatched character Kuiju was wildly incontinent and spent the entire time urinating on him. This is one more reason to regret the loss of the videotapes).
It’s also amazing how little this story falls into the racist cliches about China so prevalent at the time. Possibly having an Asian director (Waris Hussein, on his second and last story for the show) made them take the edge off, as the show certainly never shied away from these elements in the future.
Watched all in one go, in a reconstruction, this is frankly a bit hard going. But if you spread it out over several viewings, you’ll find the story has a lot to offer. In truth there’s very little to date it, other than some scenes of Susan trying to teach Ping-Cho 60s teen slang.
While as a Doctor Who fan I obviously wish that every episode still existed on videotape, I can’t in all conscience say that, say, Fury From The Deep being destroyed is a great tragedy. Much better shows than that were also consigned to the flames, with people kicking up much less fuss now. But Marco Polo *is* a great loss – at least as much so as any of the episodes of Not Only, But Also, and more so than many of the other lost shows.
While the reconstructions can be a little hard going, this one is a truly superb effort. But for those who don’t care about Doctor Who as much as I do, the half-hour version on the DVD is probably more than enough for you.
Doctor Who From The Beginning: The Edge Of Destruction
The Edge Of Destruction
Writer: David Whittaker
Directors: Richard Martin and Frank Cox
DVD Availability: As Disc 3 of The Beginnings Box Set (Buy from Amazon)
Other Availability – legally viewable on YouTube for those with Flash – episode 1, episode 2
A review I read of last night’s Doctor Who (which I’ve not yet seen) says it was “like something from an Indiana Jones film which [sic] shows [Moffat's] heightened aspirations for what the show is capable of.”
Fun as the Indiana Jones films are, I don’t think that emulating them is a hugely worthwhile aspiration. To see what Doctor Who is *really* capable of, we should go back to early 1964, to the cheapest story they ever did.
Set entirely within the TARDIS (except for the cliffhanger going into the next story, Marco Polo), featuring only the four regular characters, and with the most threatening thing in the story being someone running with scissors, The Edge Of Destruction is very clearly a cheap story made because the budget for the earlier episodes had overrun. The plot, such as it is, is ludicrously simplistic (a switch has got stuck on the TARDIS console, causing the TARDIS to try to telepathically warn the characters – the first sign we’ve had that she’s more than just a machine).
But this plot is used as the basis for one of the most astonishing pieces of drama ever broadcast as children’s TV (and whatever designation it’s given now, in 1964 Doctor Who was explicitly aimed at relatively young children). Back in the 1960s (and even as late as the 1980s), British TV came from a theatrical rather than filmic tradition, and this story is an absurdist drama that has far more in common with Becket or Brecht than with Indiana Jones or Aliens.
Of course, this isn’t to say it has that much in common with either – the characters here don’t go giving long speeches about the superiority of socialism to fascism, or attempting suicide through sheer boredom – but what is clear is that not only was Whittaker (the show’s script editor, and therefore the go-to man for quick filler cheapy scripts) aware of these movements within the theatre, but he was influenced by them too. In particular, while the characters aren’t aware of their fictional nature, they *are* aware that something is manipulating their behaviour, and in many cases that they’re acting like puppets rather than like themselves.
In this sense the TARDIS is acting as a surrogate author here, manipulating the characters in dramatic ways, so they attack each other to add conflict to the story even when they have no prior motive for doing so.
Edge Of Destruction is known as a character-centred piece, but in fact the only actual ‘character’ here is the Doctor. While the other characters behave in out-of-character ways, the Doctor’s paranoia (at one stage he drugs Ian and Barbara because he believes them to have sabotaged the ship) and egocentrism are entirely in character for him up to this point. The others are all active – but their actions are not in their control. The Doctor, for the most part, is passive – merely griping from the sidelines – but he’s the only one who appears to remain more-or-less in control of his own actions.
This is one reason why his apology at the end of the story is so significant – he remained responsible for his actions, and so he has to *take* responsibility for them, even though those actions (mostly just making false accusations) were far less dangerous than, for example, Susan trying to stab Barbara or Ian trying to strangle the Doctor.
Because, in some ways, this is the end of Doctor Who as it originally started. By this time, the production team knew the series was going to continue past the initially-commissioned thirteen episodes (this two-parter would have otherwise made up the last two episodes) and so used the enforced cheap two-parter to rewrite the Doctor’s character from his previous curmudgeonly, anti-heroic status to a more conventionally sympathetic version.
Incidentally, a bit of thought about this makes the story make a lot more sense than people who focus on the MacGuffin of the ‘fast return switch’ realise. It’s very easy to argue that the whole story is actually about the TARDIS trying to teach the Doctor how to cope with other people – as he says at the end, “As we learn about others, so we learn about ourselves”. The Doctor has ended up learning what his ‘true character’ is, by being the only person *allowed* to act as he wishes.
Unfortunately, this story also marks the last time the character of Susan is remotely interesting. You can’t have everything.
The story also sees the start of David Whittaker’s most obvious influence on the series; the incorporation of a proto-New Agey mysticism. While the show, like the title character, has for the most part stood up for Enlightenment values of small-l liberalism, scientific enquiry and rationalism (sometimes with a big dollop of Buddhism thrown in), Whittaker himself seemed to have about as much comprehension of science as a border collie does of the 1912 England cricket team, being happier with a kind of pop-Platonism.
Here this is shown in a rather sexist manner, as Barbara uses her female intuition to decode the obvious Freudian clues the ship is leaving all over the place (melting clocks straight out of Dali, that sort of thing) which the Doctor’s ‘logic’ can’t cope with. But even here, we have a fantastic monologue (wonderfully performed by Hartnell) where the Doctor describes the formation of solar systems which is one of the best examples of scientific sensawunda you’ll find in the show. Shame it’s completely wrong.
Despite its crass imitators (as a rule of thumb, the inside of the TARDIS should never be shown), Edge Of Destruction remains, along with the first episode and The Aztecs, the definite highlight of Doctor Who‘s first year.
Though the next story might rise to those heights. It’s hard to tell though, as it’s been burned.
Next – Marco Polo (or what’s left of it).
Doctor Who From The Beginning: The Daleks
The Daleks.
Writer: Terry Nation
Directors: Christopher Barry and Richard Martin
DVD Availability: As Disc 2 of The Beginnings Box Set
While An Unearthly Child was the start of Doctor Who, The Daleks is the story where what we now think of as Doctor Who actually started.
Well, sort of.
More than any other story from the first year of Doctor Who, it’s impossible to watch this story and get any sense of what it must have been like to watch at the time. Even the episodes that have been burned arguably stand up better, because we don’t have anything to compare them to – the Doctor never met Marco Polo again, and even the whole historical genre quickly disappeared, so when we watch that story we do it without any prejudices.
With The Daleks, on the other hand, we’ve seen the Doctor fight the Daleks dozens of times. Even for those of us who grew up in relatively Dalek-free eras of Doctor Who (and despite the way the Welsh series has managed to have them turn up every five milliseconds, only two of the proper Doctors actually met the Daleks on TV more than twice, and the last three only had one Dalek story each) have always known that The Doctor Fights The Daleks.
Not only that, we’ve seen *this story*. Not only did Terry Nation write almost identical scripts several times more (most blatantly in the Third Doctor story Frontier In Space Planet Of The Daleks), but this story was the first to be adapted to other media, appearing both as the novel Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks and the slightly more snappily titled film adaptation Doctor Who And The Daleks, which has been shown on Channel 4 every bank holiday since time immemorial.
So watching this now, it’s hard to watch it for what it was at the time – an exciting piece of children’s entertainment – rather than what it looks like now, which is someone doing a Dalek story and not getting it quite right. They don’t even say “exterminate!” for God’s sake!
Truth be told, even at the time this probably wouldn’t have held the attention of anyone much over the age of twelve. It was written in a rush by Terry Nation, a hack writer who felt the job was beneath him and was only doing it because he’d been sacked by Tony Hancock and needed the money. The story, such as it is, is essentially the wine of a couple of 50s Dan Dare strips decanted into the bottle of an old Flash Gordon serial. Susan has gone in four short weeks from being a spooky, mysterious figure to an hysteric who can’t walk two steps without screaming.
And watching it as a whole makes it seem worse than it should. This was designed for serial viewing, a week between each episode, not for watching in one two-hour-and-fifty-four-minute sitting. Watched all in one, it becomes incredibly obvious that nothing at all happens for much of episodes five and six, apart from a standard Terry Nation speech on how pacifism is evil.
DVD picture quality does the programme no favours, either, allowing us to see that most of the Daleks in the ‘crowd scenes’ are rather unconvincing cardboard cutouts.
And then there’s the message – judging people by their appearance is wrong, and ‘dislike for the unlike’ is terrible, say the blonde-haired blue-eyed muscular Adonises as they fight the squat ugly creatures inside their metal cases…
But despite all that, it still works, somehow.
Partly it’s the Doctor’s continuing moral evolution (his character definitely has what people nowadays call an ‘arc’ in these early stories) – breaking the fluid link and endangering the people who are travelling with him at the beginning, but being utterly outraged by the Daleks’ attitude towards murdering the Thals by the end. Partly it’s the music – almost musique concrete, sound effects blending in with the music so you’re not sure what is ambient sound of Skaro and what’s soundtrack music. The music for this story was by Tristram Cary, one of the great pioneers of electronic music and one of the few musicians at the time who could actually compete with Delia Derbyshire’s astonishing rendition of the title music.
But mostly what sticks with the viewer after watching this is the *look* of the thing. Raymond Cusick’s designs still astonish -and not just the Daleks, incredible though they still are as a design, but the whole Dalek city. The model work is particularly spectacular, and it’s also one of the few Doctor Who stories to have corridors that look like they’re designed for aliens rather than humans. (And indeed if you look, at one point Susan writes a letter to the Thals that’s clearly in an alien script, though where she’s had the chance to learn their writing isn’t made clear).
And there are odd images that still have a power – and strangely, not just those in Christopher Barry’s episodes (like the Dalek eyestalk coming towards Barbara at the end of episode one) , but even in the episodes directed by Richard Martin. Widely regarded as something of a hack, while Barry is regarded as one of the better directors to have worked on the show, Martin still gives us the odd evocative moment like the Kaled mutant (as they’re not yet called) claw coming out from under Susan’s cloak.
At these moments, for a second, one can get a flash of what it was like to watch this during the 1963 Christmas holiday. You can see why the Daleks became the big playground craze of the year, why there were toys, films and comics – why, in short, we have everything from the Welsh series to Faction Paradox novels to Big Finish audios to the new computer game that won’t work on GNU/Linux to birthday cards with voice chips with Nicholas Briggs’ voice in them. All this ultimately stems from a script thrown together in five minutes, that the executive in charge of the programme hated, and with a great monster design. On such things does the world turn.
Doctor Who From The Start: An Unearthly Child
One thing I’ve wanted to do with this blog for a while is sit down and watch every Doctor Who serial, in order, until I get bored with them or reach Survival (whichever comes first). I’m going to try to do one serial a week, and stick to a few simple rules:
1) If the story exists on DVD and I don’t own the DVD, I buy it
2) If the story is not on DVD, I torrent it, but buy it as soon as it’s released
3) If the story does not exist any more, I torrent a reconstruction and use that plus the text of the Target novelisation (also torrented because these are long out of print and my parents threw out my copies twenty years or so ago) to try to review it as best I can. I don’t feel under an obligation to buy the official BBC CDs of these stories – though I may, and have bought some in the past – as I think if they want paying for those episodes they shouldn’t have set fire to them. I do own the Lost In Time triple-DVD set though.
I’m also going to stick to a word limit of 1000 words in total for each of these posts.
In the case of An Unearthly Child, the first Doctor Who story, I’ve already written about it here – and if you want to know my thoughts on this story you should read that as well as this, but I’ll try to find more to say about it without duplicating that too much.
AN UNEARTHLY CHILD
Writer: Anthony Coburn
Director: Waris Hussein
DVD Availability: As Disc One of the The Beginnings box set
For something described as ‘quintessentially British’ every five minutes, Doctor Who had a very multicultural background. From an initial idea by Canadian Sydney Newman, the first story was written by an Australian, Anthony Coburn, and directed by a gay Indian, Waris Hussein, who also happened to be the youngest director working for the BBC. Verity Lambert, the producer, was British, but she was also both the youngest producer working for the BBC *and* the only female producer. Forget ‘the gay agenda’ – for 1963 that’s a shockingly mixed team.
And whether consciously or not, the sense of outsiderness that this must have engendered seems to have come out in the first episode of this serial, in which two teachers investigate an odd pupil, who turns out to be far odder than either of them could previously have expected.
The first episode is an absolute masterclass in how to make TV. We start out with THAT music – Delia Derbyshire’s realisation of Ron Grainer’s theme tune still sounds shocking today, it’s almost unimaginable how strange it must have sounded in 1963, when Cliff Richard was still considered something of a rebellious young rocker (Ian Chesterton was originally going to have been named Cliff, to show he was ‘with it’ and let the young relate to him). Then we have a story that starts out looking very, *very* like the opening of then-popular police show Dixon Of Dock Green, before turning into what looks like it could be a fairly harrowing drama about child abuse, before once again taking a complete change in direction and becoming science fiction in the last third.
And it *LOOKS* astonishing – the cameras here swoop and move in a style completely unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere in TV. At times it almost looks like Orson Welles was behind the camera. Hussein takes the disadvantages inherent in the medium at the time – the programme was recorded ‘as live’ with only one break in recording (for the cut when Barbara enters the TARDIS, though it looks to me like there was also an edit done in one of the earlier scenes in the classroom) – and turns them to his advantage. The close-ups on Susan in flashback while Ian and Barbara talk about her in the car are done that way so the actors don’t have to get from one set to another, but they also give the episode a unique look.
Sadly, that isn’t maintained in the three later stories in this serial – which really ought to be regarded as a separate story, albeit one with the same writer and director. Once the travellers reach the time of the cave people, we suddenly divert into something that is much closer to how one would imagine a children’s TV series with an educational remit from 1963 would appear – worthy, stagey, and dull when watched in one dose (it works *much* better when watched episodically, as was of course originally intended). And we already see the Doctor Who Formula starting to take shape – Susan, so mysterious and otherworldly in her first appearance, has her first scream at something unthreatening in episode three.
But even so there are interesting aspects. Firstly, the Doctor is still far from the hero – Ian Chesterton is clearly in the heroic role, while the Doctor is somewhere between mentor and villain. Never again (at least in the ‘classic’ series) would we see the Doctor even consider killing someone just for convenience’s sake.
And the story seems to be about *ideas* – in fact, bravely, the central conflict is between two *wrong* ideas. The old crone argues against fire on conservative grounds, but she’s arguing against someone engaged in a cargo-cult, rather than the more obvious choice of someone who can actually create fire.
There are some very, *very* interesting moments – for example, the shot of Kal looking at the TARDIS is very reminiscent (to my eyes) of Moon Watcher looking at the obelisk in 2001. And of course the inhabitants of the TARDIS bring the knowledge of fire to the tribe, in a similar way to the monolith giving the ape-people the knowledge of weapons. But this was many years earlier than 2001…
And there are some very well-written lines, too – “If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cry of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky” is a great phrase.
But on the whole, the impression given by An Unearthly Child is of a program that initially had huge amounts of promise, but quickly settled into mediocrity, and was just like every other kids’ programme. That impression would soon prove to be wrong…
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Doctor Who Unbound: Deadline (hyperpost 1)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
Doctor Who Unbound: Deadline
THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY (WHICH MAY NEVER HAPPEN, BUT THEN AGAIN MAY) ABOUT A MAN WHO CAME FROM THE SKY IN A BIG BLUE BOX AND DID ONLY GOOD.IT TELLS OF HIS TWILIGHT, WHEN THE GREAT BATTLES WERE OVER AND THE GREAT MIRACLES LONG SINCE PERFORMED, OF HIS HIS ENEMIES CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM AND OF THAT FINAL WAR IN THE BLIND WASTES BENEATH THE MEDUSA CASCADE; OF THE WOMEN HE LOVED AND OF THE CHOICES HE MADE FOR THEM; OF HOW HE BROKE HIS MOST SACRED OATH, AND HOW FINALLY ALL THE THINGS HE HAD WERE TAKEN FROM HIM SAVE FOR ONE.
IN THE BIG CITY, PEOPLE STILL SOMETIMES GLANCE UP HOPEFULLY FROM THE SIDEWALKS, HEARING A DISTANT WHEEZING, GROANING SOUND.. BUT NO: IT’S ONLY A SAW, ONLY A MACHINE. THE DOCTOR DIED TEN YEARS AGO. THIS IS AN IMAGINARY STORY…
AREN’T THEY ALL?
I didn’t write that, it’s from here. I was actually googling to find the precise wording of the opening paragraph of Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, so I could quote the first couple of sentences, but if you google “This is an imaginary story which may never happen” (without the quotes) that’s the first result involving the quote. One of those synchronicities…
There’s a long tradition in comics of ‘imaginary stories’, started by Superman editor Mort Weisinger in the 1960s (though someone will no doubt point me to an example from Pep Comics from 1939 or something), where stories that ‘didn’t really happen’ could happen – Superman could die, or marry Lois Lane, or split into red and blue versions of himself, or something else that could never happen in the ‘real’ comics, with no consequences – it was just an ‘imaginary story’, not a true story like all the other ones. This later became formalised in both the major comic companies as the series “What If?” in Marvel and “Elseworlds” in DC, where we could ask questions like “What would happen if Superman had landed in King Arthur’s time?”, “What would happen if Superman was adopted by Batman’s parents?” or “What would happen, right, if Batman had been a vampire? Wouldn’t that have been, like, just kickass?”
While these stories *could* have been an exciting and interesting thing to do – a way to tell stories about these well-known characters without having to dot the is and cross the ts and ensure they say nothing that contradicts anything in 70 years of already-mutually-contradictory stories, in fact they never were. In the DC Elseworlds stories, no matter what the premise, it almost always went the same way – everything would turn out exactly as it had ‘in continuity’, just with a different backdrop. Sir Kal would joust with the evil black knight Sir Luthor for the hand of Lady Lois, while his squire Jim Olsen looked on along with his aged mentor Sir Perry The White (I’ve not actually read the ‘what if Superman landed in Camelot?’ one, but I already know exactly how it would go). Meanwhile, in Marvel’s hands, the ‘What If…?’ question was always (for values of always that equal ‘quite often’) answered “the world would have ended”. What if Wolverine had had baked beans instead of tomatoes for his breakfast? – He would have broken wind and alerted the Skrulls to the X-Men’s presence and they’d have destroyed the world. What if Ben Grimm had bent over to tie his shoelaces? – A villain wouldn’t have tripped over them, and wouldn’t have been caught, and would have used his doomsday device…
In other words, what could be a way of freeing writers and artists from the creative straitjacket of continuity is instead turned into a way of reinforcing the primacy of ‘canon’. Things couldn’t be different, because no matter what change you make, no matter how major or minor, things still turn out exactly the same (DC) or the world would end (Marvel) so the only story that ‘matters’ is the mainline one. All is for the best in the best of all possible continuities. Hopelessly Panglossian indeed.
Big Finish also created their own range of ‘Imaginary Stories’ – the Doctor Who: Unbound range of audio stories – in the early 1990s, and for much the same reasons. Fans wanted to hear what it would be like if The Doctor was played by David Warner (the answer is exactly as you’d expect, which is a good thing), or “What if… the Doctor regenerated into a woman?!” or “What if the Valeyard had won?!!!!!”
These plays (which are all, incidentally, in the Big Finish For A Fiver promotion if you want to pick up some fun, cheap entertainment) were done at the time when BF were doing their best work, so they were pretty good, but that’s all they were – pretty good – with one exception, Rob Shearman’s Deadline, starring Sir Derek Jacobi (available here).
While the blurb for that story makes it seem like it’s an absolutely standard Doctor Who story, it’s anything but. In fact, it’s not a Doctor Who story at all, but a story *about* Doctor Who. Jacobi plays a retired writer, a once-prominent playwright who had descended to hack TV work (any resemblance of this character to prominent playwright turned Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman is, one hopes, purely coincidental given the life the character is living). Stuck in a nursing home, slowly losing his sanity, estranged from his family, he muses on where it all went wrong, deciding that the turning point probably came when a TV show for which he’d been commissioned to write, Doctor Who, was cancelled before it ever aired.
While there are many hilarious moments in the story , as one would expect from Shearman, “We have so much in common – we write, we have bladder control, and we’re lonely” being a prime line, the story is one of the darkest, most upsetting pieces of drama I’ve heard in a long time.
Every character is emotionally crippled and monstrous. Martin Bannister, the writer, destroyed three marriages in pursuit of writing which even when he was at his youthful best never had any humanity to it. Sydney, the journalist for the official Juliet Bravo Magazine (Juliet Bravo was a real British TV cop show from the early 80s, which had many of the same writers and directors as Doctor Who, especially from its third series when Robert Holmes’ protege/former Who and Blake’s Seven writer Chris Boucher was the script editor) is a parody of the sad anorak fan (one of the few missteps in the story – this character seems dislikeable because Shearman dislikes people like that, rather than through his own actions). Nurse Wright is a sad old spinster, desperate for a sexual relationship with her patient but turning violent when it looks like it might actually happen, and Martin’s son Philip has spent his entire life trying not to be anything like his father, but is exactly like him in the end, and so desperate to talk to him he fakes his own mother’s death just for an excuse to get back in touch.
Throughout this, we keep slipping into Martin’s fantasy world – the world of the Doctor, made up of Martin’s scripts for those first few episodes (all of which are *almost* exactly like the scripts for early or unmade Hartnell stories, but not quite as good), with Martin as the Doctor – where he can be a good person, and has a granddaughter whom he loves, and where he’s a hero and nothing ever goes wrong. Slowly his dreams start to leak into reality – that wardrobe seems bigger on the inside than on the outside, doesn’t it? And doesn’t that green stain look like alien footprints? – and he has to decide if, in fact, reality is all it’s cracked up to be – if it’s better to be the Doctor, or to be someone whose greatest achievement is that he wrote the fifteen least-popular episodes of Juliet Bravo.
Many of the themes in this story are very much of a part with Shearman’s earlier story The Holy Terror – the writer who harmed his son because of his obsession with his own work, and who retreats into a fantasy world, occurs in both, while the characters being haunted by ghosts of their past, and the thin borderline between reality and fiction, are recurring themes in all Shearman’s Doctor Who work.
Deadline is in an unfortunate position, in that Doctor Who fans are the only people who could really appreciate it, yet that conservative group are probably the least likely group to be able to understand what Shearman is doing. This is simultaneously a Radio 4 Play For Today about a dying writer’s relationship with his family and a genre ‘Elseworlds’ story. In fact, it’s an Elseworlds that manages to use this world as the world from which it departs, rather than the fictional universe it’s ostensibly connected to. Like those Elseworlds, it shows that if you change one thing – in this case, the broadcasting history of a forty-year-old children’s programme – almost nothing would have changed. But like the What If? stories, it shows that for at least one person, getting rid of Doctor Who would have been the equivalent of the end of the world.
In this play, Doctor Who is both the least and most important thing in the world, a pernicious, damaging influence and the one thread of happiness in the mind of a monstrous old man who hurt everyone he touched but himself more than anyone. It’s a bitter, twisted little play, full of spite and heartbreak, but also surprisingly touching. Well worth seeking out.
Tomorrow, Melmoth (yay, more stories about people on their deathbeds! Don’t worry, after that it’ll be superheroes).
Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With Some Cavemen, or Nothing At The End Of The Lane
For a great televisual institution, Doctor Who did not have the most auspicious of starts. The show was not created by a single auteur, wrung from the sweat of the brow of a tormented genius, but was instead created by a huge committee of people, who were looking for a children’s show to go on between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury. Rather than coming to someone in a flash of inspiration, the first episode was the product of months of discussion and meetings, and endless documents passed back and forth between executives.
In the end, the script for the first episode, credited to Anthony Coburn, was in reality in more-or-less equal parts the work of Coburn, BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman and staff writer CE “Bunny” Webber, with significant input from producer Verity Lambert and some ideas from director Waris Hussein.
This matter of credit is actually quite important – scripts for Doctor Who remained copyright to their writers, so while the character of the Doctor himself belongs to the BBC, the name TARDIS, created by Coburn, belongs to Coburn’s estate. Similiarly, writers Terry Nation and Kit Pedler retained ownership of the Daleks and the Cybermen. When one sees how the BBC has managed for decades to create the show despite this multiple copyright ownership, the arguments made by DC and Marvel comics about creator ownership become far weaker.
While Newman is often credited as the major creative force behind Doctor Who, Lambert and Hussein were both pivotal in creating the series’ early feel. As the youngest producer and director working for the BBC at the time, and the only female producer and only Asian director, it is perhaps unsurprising that what they produced would be somewhat different from the rather staid typical BBC children’s programme. What *is* surprising , though, is that at least the first episode is quite an astonishing piece of drama.
The first episode is an absolute masterclass in TV, managing to be quite unlike anything else broadcast before or since. Every element of it is near perfection (and in fact the pilot version, before Sydney Newman toned some elements down, is even better), but it manages to be genuinely unsettling and straddle several different genres without the viewer even really being aware that this is what is going on.
The plotline actually has some incredibly sinister overtones for the first three-quarters of the episode – two teachers become concerned about one of their pupils, who is incredibly bright, and who seems to know more in some areas of science and history than her teachers, but who behaves very oddly, almost autistically at times, and who seems frightened of saying anything at all about her home life. The teachers follow her ‘home’, which turns out to be a telephone box in a junkyard, barely big enough for one person to stand up in. The box is locked, and the key is in the possession of a sinister, possibly dangerous old man.
The viewer’s expectations have already been subverted a couple of times within the first fifteen minutes – first from being mildly scared *by* Susan, the girl, (the title of the first episode is An Unearthly Child, and she has more than a little of the Midwich Cuckoos about her) to being scared *for* her – she’s being locked up by this terrifying old man, and there is more than a hint of abuse. This is very strong stuff for a programme aimed at 8 – 12 year olds, and it also means that we’ve gone from one kind of story to a very different kind.
Then the rug is pulled out from under us again, when the teachers burst into the phone box to discover… it’s a gigantic spaceship. Even watching this now, forty-five years on, when Doctor Who is a National Treasure, it’s still a shocking moment. But at the time, when no-one knew what to expect, it must have been absolutely astonishing.
It’s impossible to overstress how well-constructed this first script is, because it’s actually playing two separate games of misdirection with us. The first, and most obvious, is the repeated misdirection about what kind of story we’re watching; but while it’s doing that, it’s also setting up the protagonists for an entirely different kind of story again – the ongoing serial that Doctor Who would become. Ian and Barbara are a science teacher and a history teacher, respectively, not just because they’re random subjects Susan can be seen to know about, but because science and history are the two subjects most likely to be necessary to explain things to viewers in a time-travel show.
On top of that, the first episode is a masterclass in a forgotten art – the art of television. Television, at least in Britain, used to be a very different artform than it is today. The way the filming was done (multiple cameras, all done in the studio rather than on location, filmed in close to real-time) encouraged an aesthetic that was closer to theatre than to film, and this persisted long after the technical limitations had been lifted, at least until the mid-1980s. A lot of the criticisms raised against the ‘classic’ series come from people who are seeing the show with eyes that are adjusted to modern TV, which sees the Hollywood blockbuster rather than the RSC as the model to follow, but the ‘wobbly sets’ (which never actually did wobble, but do look cheap to modern eyes) are no more a hindrance to suspension of disbelief than having a cardboard tree in the middle of the stage in a production of Waiting For Godot – it’s an artistic suggestion of reality, rather than an attempt at accurate reproduction of the real world, and should be seen in that light.
(Actually, I can think of one feature film that works in this way – Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. It’s probably no coincidence that Gilliam and most of his cast had come from TV rather than the cinema).
So we have smooth, rolling, swooping camera movements, rather than cuts between stationary shots, as the norm – some of Hussein’s choices for camera placement and movement almost remind one of Orson Welles (although he was possibly *too* imaginative at times – I suspect one reason the pilot was reshot is that the camera movement meant it was often slightly out of focus) – and we have William Hartnell’s extraordinary performance.
Hartnell often gets overlooked by Doctor Who fans, dismissed because he occasionally flubbed his lines (no more so that any other actor would, working on the schedules he was working on, with little rehearsal and no opportunity for retakes – these shows had half an hour or an hour recording time for twenty-five minutes of screen time), but he understood acting for TV in a way that very few people before or since had. Just as an example, watch his use of his hands – they’re constantly fluttering about near his face, or playing with his lapels. Hartnell understood that on TV – especially on the small screens of the time – body language in long shots just gets lost. On the other hand, a lot of TV is shot in close-up, so if you want to use body language in your performance at all, it’s best to have all the expression be as close to your face as possible. It’s an unusual technique, but it’s one that works incredibly well.
Hartnell’s Doctor is a much more sinister, mysterious figure here than he was even in the next few stories, with a genuine air of menace, but he’s also recognisable as the character who would appear on our screens for the next twenty-six years.
The other three episodes in the storyline – involving the TARDIS crew getting involved with a tribe of cave people trying to figure out the secret of fire – are much less interesting (though visually stunning – they’re just let down by the leaden plotting and dialogue. Watching them with the sound turned off is far more interesting), but even they have some genuinely creepy moments, like the Doctor considering cold-blooded murder at one point. The Doctor would be humanised by his time with Ian and Barbara, but he remained an alien, with alien morals and values.
And of course, it’s impossible to discuss the impact of this first Doctor Who story without mentioning the theme music, credited to Ron Grainer but in all important respects the work of Delia Derbyshire.Again, this music still sounds experimental and different *now* – the impact back then, before the invention of the synthesiser, of this electronic noise with its echos of Stockhausen and Varese, must have been phenomenal.
Even had Doctor Who not gone on to become the TV staple it did, this first storyline, and in particular the first episode, would still be an all-time classic of TV. In fact, in many ways, it was all downhill from here – I can’t think, off the top of my head, of another single episode of the show that stands up in the way this one does.
1963 was a revolutionary year in the world, but especially in Britain – the true start of ‘the sixties’, and famously the year sexual intercourse began, to quote a grumpy Yorkshireman – and An Unearthly Child is easily both as much a part of its era and as timeless as the Beatles’ first LP.
4 comments