Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (11 page)

R:
Things to love about The Screaming Jungle:

Last week, Robin Phillips got to play Altos as the villain of the episode. But Altos now has his true identity back, so he’s accompanying the TARDIS crew on their quest – and he’s bouncing around a bit like a puppy eager for approval. There’s a lovely bit where he’s delighted they have found the next key, only to be slapped down by Ian, who is more concerned about the missing Barbara. The flash of hurt on Altos’ face is rather endearing.

What else? Oh, I love the bit where Susan tells Barbara she hates saying goodbye to her grandfather. There’s foreshadowing for you! If this Susan character ever leaves the series, they should get that Terry Nation chap to script that awkward farewell. Indeed, Carole Ann Ford is very good this week, in spite of the fact that she’s largely required to shout a lot and blub. She brings such intensity to her assertion that the sound inside her head was evil, it actually gives the episode some much-needed atmosphere for a while.

Otherwise, though, this is a bit of a squandered opportunity, isn’t it? Once again, at the heart of this there’s a decent idea; the notion that the jungle is overrunning them not because it’s evil, but because the course of time and nature has been accelerated, is rather creepy. The moment of this revelation, in fact, gives a momentary shiver of claustrophobia. But this time, it’s Terry Nation’s script rather than the direction which stifles the concept. All the interesting little quirks of the episode are pushed into the background in favour of the key-hunting quest – which in itself has no real urgency, and seems to require precious little ingenuity. (In his dying breath, Arbitan’s friend Darrius tries to help Ian and Barbara by giving them a sequence of letters and numbers; later, at the very last instant, they realize this is a chemical formula and locate the key by finding the correct jar-label. Wouldn’t it have required much less effort for Darrius to have said, “The key’s in the jar”? But then, he also tells them that he set booby traps knowing that any associate of Arbitan would have been safely forewarned about them – which, of course, Arbitan clearly didn’t bother to do. Maybe Arbitan actually
wants
the travellers dead? Maybe Darrius does too? Or maybe I’m trying for some of the character complexity and plot twists that we saw on the journey to Cathay. Yes, that seems more likely.)

The best thing about The Screaming Jungle, though – and the real reason to cherish it in spite of its faults – is that it puts the focus almost entirely upon William Russell and Jacqueline Hill. They’re centre stage at last, and although they deserve better material than this, they’ve earned a real rapport that was only hinted at the last time they had any sustained scenes together, in An Unearthly Child. They here give an urgency to a scene in which they need to whirl around a greenhouse whilst stage hands wave plant fronds at them, whilst still demonstrating not only an affection for the other but a shared humour. And all of this attention on Ian and Barbara is because William Hartnell is absent from this episode. (He’s a shrewd man, he knows when to take a holiday.)

T:
Most of this episode centres around the Terry Nation Ludicrous Random Jeopardy Generator. It’s all here: falling prison bars, moving statues, spikes descending from the ceiling and Barbara fortuitously shouting out to warn Ian about the Noisiest, Slowest-Ever Moving, Axe-Wielding Statue of Doom. And it
almost
gains a pre-Edge of Darkness grandeur with nature turning against the blight of humanity... except, of course, that it’s all a bunch of nonsense.

Still, while it’s easy to write this off as daft, by-the-numbers B-movie peril, stories such as this one grabbed the children watching, and made them
keep
watching Doctor Who as it progressed and got more sophisticated. But they needed that grabbing in the first place, and there’s enough going on here to keep them coming back for more. It’s easy for me to forget that when I first encountered these Hartnell stories (courtesy of the Target novelisations), the incident-packed sci-fi tales sparked my fevered imagination much more than the worthy-but-nowhere-near-as-heady historicals. All right, so my adult eyes and ears are far more receptive
now
to the subtle subtext and characterisation that the more intelligent scripts provide, but the kids of the 60s were kept behind the sofa more by killer plants than bearded Mongols.

Incidentally, have you noticed how the episode titles here are unlike the normal Hartnell style, in which name of the episode and writer are both superimposed over the recap? Here, they strangely foreshadow the style we’re all familiar with, whereby they appear over the final moments of the title sequence. I must keep watch to see if it happens again (as it has done for the last two instalments) – this sort of thing interests me, which is why I’ve never been considered cool.

The Snows of Terror (The Keys of Marinus episode four)

R:
William Hartnell doesn’t appear in this episode either. Which leaves us with a bit of an oddity! Here we have, to all intents and purposes, a self-contained adventure – five people on a quest looking for a key, fighting a villainous trapper and a few soldiers. There’s no reference to the TARDIS, there are no monsters, and only a couple of minutes from the end is there a single use of the word “Doctor”. It’s about as atypical a story as Doctor Who will ever have, lacking all the trappings and fixtures that one can associate with the series. And it’s a measure, still, of how the programme is finding its voice – and how much bolder it’s prepared to be with the format when it doesn’t realise what the limitations are yet.

The tone of it is also very peculiar. There’s a strange brutality to the episode that sets it apart from the rest of what we’ve seen on Doctor Who, let alone from the other instalments of The Keys of Marinus. Vasor the trapper is the ugliest villain we’ve yet encountered – he has no creed, no beliefs, not even the courage to lift a weapon against Ian, preferring instead to fill Ian’s bag full of raw meat so wild wolves will kill him. And – there’s no way of drawing a veil over this – Vasor clearly wants to rape Barbara. His lust for her is brilliantly conveyed from the moment that he strokes her chilled hands to help restore her circulation; it’s subtle enough that it’d pass over children’s heads, and adults will deny the import of what they’re seeing until it erupts into violence. It’s cleverly done, and bold, and seems somewhat inappropriate because it’s slap-bang in the middle of a rather childish boy’s-own adventure. What’s wonderful is that the contempt Ian shows for Vasor afterwards is greater than any disgust we’ve seen displayed towards anything else yet in the show – the Daleks included. It’s as if real-world cruelty and selfishness and evil have crept into the teatime family series inadvertently, and it leaves a bad smell under all the characters’ noses.

Peter Davison once recalled in an interview that his earliest memory of being frightened by Doctor Who concerned the ice soldiers in this episode. There’s something a little Monty Python and the Holy Grail about them in their visors and chainmail, especially when they do a double-take on the crevasse when Ian destroys the rope bridge. But when they’re introduced – frozen, impassive and apparently dead – there’s something genuinely eerie about them. It’s partly, I think, because again they’re so inappropriate; there’s been no attempt to dress up the fact that these are stock costumes, and to stumble across medieval Crusaders in the middle of an ice mountain on an alien planet is startling in spite of itself.

T:
Terry Nation here takes advantage of William Hartnell’s absence by writing a mini-adventure that would have been hindered by his presence. The Doctor wouldn’t have been much of a match for Vasor, or very handy at making an ice bridge, so even if he
had
been about the place, he’d probably just be incapacitated and left out of the way. Fortunately, William Russell has plenty of steely grit; Ian here is a grimly heroic lead, although his slightly swaggering dismissal of the doomed, panicking Vasor – who doesn’t stand a chance against the oncoming ice soldiers – is unpleasant, and miles away from the ambiguous morality we’re given from better writers. Even so, Russell just acts what he’s given, and we can’t blame him for that.

Otherwise, the acting is a bit of a mixed bag. Carole Ann Ford is very nice on the ice bridge – she’s brave, determined, and wholly convincing (possibly because she fell off it during the camera rehearsal). Francis de Wolff, though, is pure ham as Vasor – he charges round his cottage after Barbara looking like that Chaplin villain Eric Campbell, all bewhiskered and wild-eyed, arms raised and fingers arched into claws. I suppose he’s just doing what the guest actors before now have done. They’ve generally responded to the individual scripts they’ve been given because there is, as yet, no template or house style for how to act in Doctor Who. So the cavemen were all grunts, the Thals were rather postured and worthy, and the journeymen to Cathay were subtle and layered. Sadly for de Wolff, his response to the one-note villain presented to him in this week’s episode isn’t very dignified.

What chiefly comes across to me in watching this episode, though, is how we’ve gone from a terrifying jungle to terrifying snow. The series continues its running meme that the environment itself is as powerful an enemy as any – indeed, Vasor uses it as an effective method of trying to murder Ian rather than having to indulge in any fisticuffs himself. I really fear for Altos, though: there’s so little separating his crown jewels from the inclement weather, and I suspect his chances of furthering his line have been frozen off.

January 13th

Sentence of Death (The Keys of Marinus episode five)

R:
The first thing that really struck me was the telephone that Tarron – a police interrogator in the civilized city of Millennius – uses to call security. It’s just so
ordinary,
with its curly wire and its plain handset; my family used to have one like that when I was a kid. And I snorted with disdain for a moment that the designer couldn’t even be bothered to try and make it look a bit more space-age – but then it dawned on me that this is the closest we’ve got, and are going to get to a long time to come, to an adventure which looks in any way as if it’s set on contemporary Earth. The show’s format is so dependent on Ian and Barbara being lost in time and space, unable to get home, that the one thing Doctor Who really
can’t
do at this stage is something which looks and feels like a standard drama. And so, this is it! Rather cleverly, this episode makes the clichés of the courtroom play and the modern-day thriller look somehow weird and jarring – we’ve got so used to our heroes wandering petrified forests or confronting history, it looks somewhat bizarre to see them taking part in a story which, if you squint enough, could just about be set in sixties Britain or America. (By the end of the episode, it’s as if the designers have woken up, and people are now talking into telephones that resemble hair tongs. But it doesn’t matter – that link to the everyday has been made.)

And so, I begin to find myself, at last, rather falling in love with The Keys of Marinus. Because although it’s daft and cheap, and the individual episodes themselves feel a bit thin, there really is an attempt here to change the style every week – so that wherever those travel bracelets may take us, it’s genuinely unexpected. We’ve now gone from the mind games of The Velvet Web to the horror of The Screaming Jungle to that strange and ugly thing that was last week’s Snows of Terror. I’m not saying they’re especially
good
takes on the different genres, but they are at least distinctive, and with every episode Terry Nation seems deliberately to be pushing the series into entirely new areas. So here, we’ve got a detective story in what seems a roughly modern-day setting (and yes, again, it’s not a very
good
detective story), wherein the culprit makes that cardinal error time and again of jumping up and giving away his guilt. Nonetheless, it’s still good fun to see Doctor Who being quite so different. The idea of a society in which you’re guilty until proven innocent is the series’ first stab at anything truly satirical, as broadly sketched as it may be. However paper-thin the courtroom proceedings are, the death of the duplicitous guard Aydan is very well handled. There’s a sudden flash from a gun, there’s a corpse on the floor, and then a silence falls upon the cast, as if they too have been surprised by the change in tone, what with this lightweight action yarn suddenly evoking the televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

And hurrah: William Hartnell is back! Beautifully, he’s here put into a role in which he can shine – there’s no better Doctor you’d want to act as your lawyer, and Hartnell clearly has great fun being autocratic during the court scenes. (The best joke being, of course, that for all the Doctor’s efforts, he only convinces the judges all the more of Ian’s guilt!) He’s wonderful in the scene where he gets to play detective too, fairly shoving Barbara to the floor in his enthusiasm to act out the crime. For the first time in the series, there’s suddenly no question that the Doctor is the lead character – we’ve missed him, and the story makes great play of building up his return.

Prior to this, The Keys of Marinus has hardly been the best-acted of productions – but here, either through luck or the cast being able to better identify with a setting that seems less fantastical, we finally get some proper and solid performances. Donald Pickering and Fiona Walker are great as the conspiratorial baddies, and flesh out what are little more than sketches. And I also love Michael Allaby as Larn – the character is a bureaucrat who is part of a society that’s condemning Ian to death, but Allaby plays the role with a straightforward affability that seems very credible.