Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (33 page)

The only real downer of the episode is the killjoy moment when it bothers to remind us of the Daleks and all that Taranium core business. Not because it’s a bad thing in itself to remind the audience of the ongoing story – but because it all sounds just as silly as the rest of the proceedings! The seasonal runaround also plays a clever trick on the audience – we more easily accept Sara as a fully fledged member of the TARDIS crew, and we’ll be all the more shocked by her death in a few weeks’ time. It’s typical of Doctor Who that even when it promises innocent fun, a darker consequence is around the corner.

It’s of interest that the production team resisted the idea of sending up the Daleks alongside the TARDIS crew. Only six months ago, Nation was fully prepared to use them as comic relief – now, in a fully fledged humorous romp, he’s unwilling to sacrifice them for cheap laughs. It’s a telling shift in tone.

T:
I dunno, Rob... one of my chief rules with comedy is that the louder something is, the less funny it generally tends to end up. So it’s ironic that the whole section dealing with the silent film studio is bloody loud – Sheila Dunn screams and wails, Royston Tickner bawls and everyone in the background shouts. Obviously, we can’t actually see what they’re going on about, but the physical comedy here would need to be bloody hilarious for this to work, considering the lines themselves aren’t up to much. It’s really difficult to discern what’s going on at times, but it’s hard to imagine that this is the laugh-a-minute that the script is aiming for. It just sounds messy, with everybody thinking that the way to make it funny is to belt it out.

It’s not all a waste, though. It’s nice to have Norman Mitchell showing up – he’s one of those “I know the face but...” actors without whom Britain wouldn’t have won the war, and he makes for a very sweet and kindly copper in his dealings with Sara. Mitchell could have interpreted the lines he’s given as requiring overbearing comedy exasperation, but the much softer tone that he uses makes him all the more likeable. He even tells the departing Sara to “have a swinging time” – as if he’s trying to be down with the kids!

And it warms my heart that Robert Jewell – here appearing as a clown – finally appears in the flesh; he’s only been “seen” inside Daleks and Zarbi before now, and he’ll spend the rest of the 60s stories he works on as Daleks or the Macra. (Camfield made a habit of promoting extras and people inside monsters so they could have a shot at the limelight – in future he’ll cast John Levene, who starts out his Who tenure operating a Yeti, as Benton – and good on him for doing so.) Jewell also took some off-screen stills, so he’s the reason why we still have the odd image from this, the most elusive and visually unrepresented of Doctor Who episodes. I saw these pictures when missing episode rumours were the meat and drink of fanzines, and they were published with a frenzy along the lines of, “...and The Feast of Steven was never sold abroad, but these pictures were found in Australia, so it could actually exist after all, and if
this
episode could exist, then statistically
all
the other episodes could too!”, etc, etc. All of which is terribly amusing, considering the photos were actually taken in England on its only broadcast there, by a man who subsequently moved back to Australia, so they provide absolutely no indication about the potentiality of anything else turning up anywhere, anywhen. But why let the facts get in the way of some returning episode speculation?

This episode has been such a curious and odd interlude, I’d be fascinated to actually see it – not because I really think it’d be very good, but because there are certain things you just have to witness for yourself (such as the delivery of the line, “This is a madhouse – it’s all full of Arabs”), if only to convince yourself that they actually happened. The visuals would also help us to evaluate the in-joke with Reg Pritchard – do you honestly suppose that anyone watching this would have comprehended that he played Ben Daheer in The Crusade about eight months back? But whether or not the gag worked at the time, at least it gives we fanboys something to appreciate 40 years later.

February 19th

Volcano (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode eight)

R:
This is absolutely bonkers – the maddest, most atonal episode of Doctor Who there’s yet been. It makes The Feast of Steven look quite restrained in contrast. We start off with a wonderful bit of Dalek callousness, as Trantis finds himself helping with the Time Destructor experiment in a manner he may not have been bargained for. The dispassion with which both Chen and Celation contemplate their ally’s fate, and then the eagerness as they wait to see how horribly he’ll die, has a sick cruelty to it. The cruellest bit, of course, being at the very end – after Trantis survives the Destructor, the Daleks coolly blast him down without even allowing him a word.

And it’s contrasted with... what, exactly? A scene in which the TARDIS arrives during a cricket match, the whole sequence played through the reactions of two BBC commentators whose only concern is checking to see whether a test match has been similarly interrupted before, and how it’ll affect England’s chances. It’s a piece of whimsy so Douglas Adams in tone, it’s hardly surprising that Adams himself wrote the
exact
same scene in Life, the Universe and Everything nearly 20 years later. It’s very funny and perfectly performed, but it’s so at odds with what we’ve just seen that it leaves you flummoxed.

And so the episode goes on. We go from scenes of the Daleks threatening the alien delegates, and assuring everyone of their future annihilation, to sequences of delightful comedy. The best joke of all is that, just as the Daleks are planning to pursue the TARDIS, the Doctor finds another old enemy is out for revenge. Against all the odds, that jolly Peter Butterworth is back as the Monk! Imagine the shock for contemporary audiences – you’re expecting the threat of a Dalek, and instead out of a rock steps this bumbling comic figure. The dialogue between Hartnell and Butterworth is delightful as always, and the echoed laughter they both share as the Monk tells the Doctor he’s getting his revenge is very funny and, somehow, rather insane at the same time. And then we’re off to the London New Year celebrations, conducted for real only hours before. The bells of Big Ben cut back and forth between the countdown of the Dalek timeship as it prepares to hunt the Doctor down and destroy him.

This episode is so
very
strange and all over the place, it almost looks as if it’s been thrown together as it went along. Instead, I think it’s trying to tell the story on two different levels at the same time, and is glorying in how jarring it seems. It makes the Doctor look complacent, wasting time on jokes when he should be worried about his survival. And it makes the Daleks look as cold and as humourless and as threatening as they’ve ever been. Volcano is either dreadful, or quite quite brilliant. What do you think, Toby?

T:
With The Daleks’ Master Plan, it’s becoming more and more evident that the writers have little to no idea how they’re going to resolve the plot strands of the promising opening instalments, and so are trying to distract us with some very arbitrary murders or some romping comic experimentation. Yes, it’s true: this entire adventure is a microcosm of The X-Files.

The cricket scene, at least, is utterly adorable. As an aficionado of Test Match Special, I can verify they get the tone of this just right. It’s a funny idea that seems to be a hangover from last week, and the characters are lovely – Trevor is all jolly and eccentric, and Scott is a slightly dull and bemused Aussie prone to repeating what’s just been said. Doctor Who does this sort of comedy scene so well.

But, setting aside the pleasant surprise of the Meddling Monk showing up, it’s all downhill from there. Having already killed Zephon, the Daleks now pick Trantis to be part of a lethal experiment – then slaughter him anyway when the test fails. “I wonder why they chose him,” hisses Celation blithely, as if using one of your allies as an experimental guinea pig is somehow normal behaviour (if it were, surely no one would ally themselves with you). The way that the delegates are so easily dispensed with is making them seem increasingly redundant... by story’s end, it’s a miracle that the Daleks haven’t killed them all. I’m also wondering what this means for the planet(s) Trantis represents? After all, if Gordon Brown went off to ally himself with France in a war against China and Nicolas Sarkozy suddenly killed him, you might expect there to be some repercussions.

All of my attempts at wry commentary, though, are being sabotaged because so much of this episode is little more than techno-nonsense. Let me try to summarise events: the Meddling Monk locks the Doctor’s TARDIS with a thing. The Doctor does a thing with his ring and the sun, which causes a thing to happen, and undoes the Monk’s thing. That’s about as much sense as can be derived from about ten minutes of screen time – these people may as well have been talking in Swahili. We don’t even find out what happened until everyone is back in the TARDIS – and when we finally do get an explanation, it’s a nonsensical one. Even Steven seems to realise this, forcing the Doctor to say, defensively, “I don’t want to discuss it anymore!”, which is the grumpy and less amusing equivalent of “I’ll tell you later.” We then round things off with a sequence that takes place on New Year’s Day (to coincide with when this story was broadcast), but it’s little more than an excuse for some stock footage of fireworks and an odd reference to Mafeking.

Meanwhile, the contrived cliffhanger entails the Daleks suddenly chanting about how their time machine will bring them victory, even after it’s been around for half an episode. It’s an ersatz moment of significance/jeopardy and just underlines how bunged together this whole episode feels. The Feast of Steven got away with some of its shortcomings because it was a bit silly, but this week doesn’t, because it’s a bit stupid. And there’s a big difference between the two.

Golden Death (The Daleks’ Master Plan episode nine)

R:
Look, Walter Randall’s turned up again – this time playing an Egyptian! It’s like the BBC keep him in a cupboard and dust him off for historical adventures.

There’s a nice, basic idea at work here – that a rather low-key comedy menace like the Monk can accidentally become the agent of a much greater threat. The best scenes of the episode are Peter Butterworth’s – whether he’s playing for laughs (like putting on sunglasses to face the Egyptian sunshine), offering a Dalek monastic greeting or being forced to play the unwitting ally of Chen and the Daleks, you can tell he’d be much more comfortable giving up all idea of revenge and chumming up with the Doctor. Butterworth and Hartnell play off well together in their one scene, with the Doctor laughing in genuine amusement as he advances on his irritating adversary with his walking stick.

But for the rest of the episode... oh, I don’t know. It is all very dull, really. The Doctor spends the majority of the instalment fixing the TARDIS lock, and Steven and Sara get captured and escape from a bunch of Egyptians. The locals are the most shabbily characterised historical figures in the Hartnell era; even the crew of the Mary Celeste were given a bit more life than this poor lot.

It does feel such a pity that The Daleks’ Master Plan is now on such a treadmill. With the scope afforded by 12 episodes, there really ought to have been room for something more epic than this. But the story has abandoned any attempt at that, and instead seems more content to tell self-contained little stories. It’s ironic that there just doesn’t seem
time
to develop anything. All the most interesting characters, like Karlton, were forgotten a month ago – and by now, Mavic Chen only gives sporadic hints at being a credible politician rather than a camp cardboard cut-out. The writers seem prepared to try any trick to keep the story plodding on – the cliffhanger here tries to suggest a mummy horror movie – and in the process fail to realise that the story will sustain itself far better if it reined itself in and concentrated on what it has already established. As you watch the Doctor’s exploits in ancient Egypt, you’re left with the nagging sense that some time next week, he’ll take off in the TARDIS and land somewhere else altogether; there’s no build-up, no hint of resolution, no development. The Daleks’ Master Plan can go anywhere, do anything – it’s a microcosm of the series itself in a way – but it resists doing anything interesting with any of its new settings, or any new characters it introduces. The 12-episode length by now feels completely arbitrary; this story will end when its slot comes to an end, and for no other reason. We must be grateful, I suppose, that Huw Wheldon’s mother didn’t want it to be any longer.

Pah. Sorry. It seems that it’s my turn to be grumpy. But I was
really
enjoying this story.

T:
No need to apologise; something very strange has happened here. The Daleks’ Master Plan started out brilliantly – Earth in the far future was awash with traitors and dangerous undercurrents, and the most trusted man in the Solar System was selling humanity out to the Daleks, who had also assembled an eclectic and exciting looking war force of disparate alien races. Only a few fearless Earth Agents and the TARDIS crew were aware of the conspiracy to hold the universe to ransom with a Time Destructor; bravery and cunning were the only weapons they had to expose the traitors and thwart the Dalek alliance. It was all very comic strip, sure, but in a good way. But now, we’ve left all of that behind, and Dennis Spooner – here trying to take the baton from Terry Nation, and finish the last half of the story, somehow – decided give us what no-one has ever asked for before or since: that’s right, another few episodes of The Chase. There’s no Celation, Malpha, Sentreal, Beaus or the much-missed Karlton... instead, it’s some rather dull Egyptians and another contrived cliffhanger.