Love and Liberty

Doctor Who fans were given a spectacular early Christmas present yesterday, when a surprise screening at the BFI revealed that there were two more episodes in existence than everyone had thought there were. For all of us born after the ’60s, this is the first time we can see these performances from William Hartnell in Galaxy 4 and Patrick Troughton in The Underwater Menace – an exciting prospect, even if neither story is universally loved. But in anticipation of these tales of Dalek wannabes and Flash Gordon-style hammery, I have reviews I prepared earlier based on the soundtracks of each. When I see the new old episodes on release next year, how wrong will I be?

The BBC website already has tantalising clips of Galaxy 4 Episode 3: Air Lock and The Underwater Menace Episode 2 to watch, with articles on how they were found both there and on the Radio Times site. If you know nothing about these two stories, be warned that each clip contains spoilers for its story’s key plot point – one implicitly, one directly – and so, unusually, do my reviews below. If you want to wait and see things for yourself, then, stop before the main headings. I will say that both stories, though very different in tone and setting, have monsters with two unusual things in common – and that both were designed to be four-part, ‘typical’ Doctor Who stories of the time and, incredible as it may sound, had comparatively significant cash spent on them to make them look good; it’s widely thought that this may have been more successful in one case than the other. And yet while Galaxy 4 is the one with a particularly well-respected director, of the two clips it’s the one from The Underwater Menace that’s compelling. That even makes up for this, the earliest surviving episode with Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, not being one in which he has his most famous hat – though he does get an outrageous replacement – nor a topless Ben. The clip from Galaxy 4, on the other hand, is visually interesting more in its design than its direction, so perhaps Julia Smith will win out over Derek Martinus after all. Now I’m wondering if the Chumblies are oscillating or merely wobbling (only seeing more of them will tell). Both clips, though, already display a little of what their stories are famous for: painful earnestness saved by Bill Hartnell in one, and an over-the-top mad scientist dragged to Earth by Pat Troughton in the other.

Missing – Presumed in the Skip

Half a dozen years ago, watching the whole of Doctor Who when there was considerably less of it – at both ends, it now happily transpires – I wrote reviews of all of William Hartnell’s stories as the Doctor and the first few of Patrick Troughton’s for an online discussion, and this seems an appropriate day to reprint these two for the first time where more than about half a dozen people can read them below, even if it’s inviting ridicule should things not look as they sounded. But how can I have reviewed these already without ever having seen them, you might ask, being born half a dozen years after their only airing in Britain? Well, I’ve written before about the BBC’s barbarous purges in which they destroyed many of their TV shows from the ’60s, creating what are now disingenuously referred to as “lost” or “missing” episodes. These two are the first surviving episodes to turn up for nearly eight years, since The Daleks’ Master Plan Episode 2: Day of Armageddon back in 2004. Until yesterday there were (or weren’t) 108 of them; now there are only 106 to go, and at least one of them would probably scrape into most fans’ top 100 to be found! Fortunately, for every single story, people recorded the soundtrack at the time, so you can now get the full adventures on CD with linking narration to make them clearer, while there are also many off-screen ‘telesnaps’ which mean we can get a fair idea of what the whole thing looked like for free, assembled into photonovels on the BBC website – and, unofficially, the two have been combined into Reconstructions, which you can get hold of for free as long as you don’t tell the BBC about it.

Of the six seasons broadcast in the ’60s that starred William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, the middle ones were the worst hit; while most stories survive intact from each of Seasons One, Two and Six, there are only four complete adventures from Seasons Three and Five put together and, as I wrote earlier this year when publishing a review of Doctor Who – The Smugglers, not one story still exists in full from Season Four. These two finds don’t complete any stories, but they do offer an ‘orphaned’ episode for Season Three’s Galaxy 4, of which only a clip had previously been known to exist, and add another ‘orphaned’ episode to the already existing one from Season Four’s The Underwater Menace. Both are sure to be released on DVD next year, probably with soundtracks for the “missing” episodes (and, if we’re very lucky, perhaps partial Reconstructions or even, just maybe, animation for the now half-complete The Underwater Menace). Already today, you can buy the other material on the DVD collection Doctor Who – Lost In Time, which includes that extended clip from Galaxy 4 (peculiarly, presented in the middle of a documentary rather than as a menu item on its own) and the infamous Episode 3 of The Underwater Menace, or you can get the soundtracks for the whole stories both as separate releases and in newly remastered box sets, respectively Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 1 (1964-1965) and Doctor Who – The Lost TV Episodes Collection No 3 (1966-1967). In which each is probably the weakest story…

For DVD reviews, this is usually the point at which I mention that back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine Issue 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and how high they and I scored the stories I’m coming to. And they didn’t think much of these, but, hey, they’re the only episodes with arguably my two favourite Doctors that I have never seen, so my enthusiasm’s racing. Even if the DWM vote put Galaxy 4 down into 172nd place and The Underwater Menace even lower at 194; I might put each of them as much as ten places higher, but no more than that. At the moment, I’m much more ill than usual, and Richard had to wake me with the glad tidings yesterday afternoon; when I crawled from bed to watch the clips some time later, though, even my sounding like a Dalek couldn’t hide my excitement. I promptly rang one of my oldest friends with the news, who was audibly thrilled when I told him two episodes had been found. And then said, “Can’t we ask them to put them back where they found them?” when he found out which two. Yet still, the DVD releases can’t come soon enough! And remember, before you read on – spoilers…

Doctor Who – Galaxy 4

“I told them soldiers were no good for space work. All they can do is kill. But they wouldn’t listen. If you are to conquer space, they said, you will need soldiers. So here I am confronted with danger. I’m the only one able to think!”

Season Three of Doctor Who is a strange one even by the standards of the series as a whole. Like the first two seasons, it’s highly innovative and experimental, but with a new production team (the first ‘new’ production team) it has a very different feel. Companions chop and change far more abruptly and the dangers the Doctor faces continue to get ‘bigger’, with this the first of many exploding planets, all making it an unsettling year – but the ideas get bigger, too, with a lot of ‘big concepts’. The downside is that the endearing characterisation and dialogue-driven drama of the first couple of years doesn’t always fit in with the new brooms. And Galaxy 4 is definitely a sign of things to come…

Mini-Skirts Are In Fashion; Complexity Is Out

There are two ‘big ideas’ that everyone knows about Galaxy 4, from the skimpiest story summaries: the Rills are ugly but good, while the Drahvins are wicked but ‘beautiful’ (in a very ’60s way – the book’s cover of highly posed ‘beautiful space women’ against a blazingly pink sky is easily the campest thing ever painted by Andrew Skilleter); and, linked to that, the Drahvins are the nearest broadcast Doctor Who has ever got to the horrendous old sci-fi cliché of ‘the planet of women’. The trouble is, there’s very little else to know about the story, especially as there’s very little made of the ‘evil women’ side of the plot. Naturally, it’s a relief that Steven doesn’t snog them into being good (as is the norm in such stories in other series), and that they’re mostly just dim and for a good reason, rather than behaving as screaming girlies who happen to have large Freudian weapons (admittedly, Maaga bullies her soldiers and makes them cry, but at least she’s a strong character), but in the gaping hole left by the omission of sexist blather is… Not much.

It’s nice that for once Doctor Who is doing a story where ‘ugly’ doesn’t mean ‘evil’; right from The Daleks, the series has a strong current against fascism which is slightly undermined by, for example, the ‘good race’ being blond and ‘perfect’ while we know the others are evil because they’re mutated horrors with funny voices. Unfortunately, while the Rills seem quite an interesting piece of design from the two photos we have of them, all we ever hear is how ugly they are, as if we could miss the moral. Surely the Rills themselves wouldn’t think of themselves as ugly (one of the novels even suggests that Rill social advancement is based on their ugliness, which seems to miss the point)? It doesn’t help that the Rill has the plummiest voice yet heard in the show, which appeals to my own prejudices by suggesting Shakespearean ham, or possibly Lord Melchett. The Doctor has a great moment when he calls this giant alien monstrosity “Young man”, though – we could do with more of that. Their “warning” ammonia bomb is perhaps supposed to recall World War I gas warfare, but (coupled with the Rill’s stern, schoolmasterly tones in telling naughty Maaga to stay indoors) I can’t help but think of it as a stinkbomb. There’s also a teeny bit of a plot hole, where – before we find out the Rills are generous and friendly – they decide to blow up the TARDIS, for no good reason, especially as they’ve deliberately not attacked the spaceship of the Drahvins, who they know are hostile. It’s difficult to imagine any other reason for them to do this than faux-villainous plot convenience in advance of the ‘twist’.

Hands Off My Chumblies

On the bright side, the particularly good Loose Cannon Recon both greatly improves the long clip that’s left of the story by putting it in context and proves that one of the reasons it’s so sad so much of Season Three was tossed into skips and burnt by the BBC is that it seems to have some lovely visuals. Ironically, the first two seasons’ dialogue generally makes them more suited to audio releases, while it looks like there are ‘lost’ higher production standards in the third, where every planetscape appears an improvement on The Chase. The Recon shows some superb design for the time, with great scenery and a very solid ship, as well as re-enacted scenes for the Chumblies, the cuddly little robots that the BBC once again hoped they could cash in on as much as the Daleks (plus someone ‘playing’ Bill Hartnell as, er, a hand waving a knobbly stick). They look quite jolly as they telescope up and down, so again it’s a shame that most of what we have of them is their irritating sound effect on the CD. Ah well [the rediscovered episode means I shall have to take back my observation that if I never hear another Chumblie “oooo-up-ooooom”, it’ll be quite soon enough].

In the end, this is a story with its eye on the big picture; the first planet destroyed in the series, much talk of galaxies, alien races and some rather nice scenery all there to illustrate a big ‘message’. You can’t fault its sci-fi ambition, but it’s as if they spent so much time making it seem ‘big’ that they forgot to fill in any of the details. The galaxy-spanning view makes little sense seen up close, when we realise that the name of the story merely refers to where Maaga comes from and tells us next to nothing, or that her mission to “conquer space!” (and before Sarah Brightman) seems a tad improbable in a backward ship with just a handful of more backward clones to staff it. Added to that, the sheer obviousness of the ‘point’ undermines itself; the story has its heart in the right place, but it goes on and on with little happening, and Season Two’s characters have given way to cardboard that spouts moral messages. It’s never actively bad, but it’s much, much too slight for its length. Photos of Drahvins and Chumblies may look camp and rather exciting, but as we’re drearily reminded, don’t judge by appearances – a simple moral for an even more simple story.

In mitigation, with its proto-Jagaroth spaceship and froody alien vegetation, and of course its (sigh) threatening dolly-birds and cute robots, this was clearly made to be seen, so perhaps the plot was secondary and it was deliberately designed as a ratings-grabber to look at? So will seeing it at last save or damn Galaxy 4? I can’t wait to find out. As then-companion Peter Purves has always said how much he hated this story, his commentary will surely be entertaining, too.

Looking back at it now, there is at least one way in which Galaxy 4 – ’50s B-Movie as it is, with its beehived alien Baaaad Girls – feels slightly ahead of its time. By mostly ignoring the gender reversal dynamics and focusing on Maaga, it’s an early example of TV’s Magnificent Bitch, even though she’s played by Stephanie Bidmead rather than Stephanie Beacham (now there’s a thought: Steven Moffat’s already had a Drahvin spaceship making a cameo last year in a story about a more grandiose but more improbable exploding Universe, undoubtedly because he likes women in micro-skirts, so if he ever does a full-on Drahvin story, how’s she for casting…?). For the most part, this makes it camply amusing at the expense of what little credibility it has – even the first episode title, Four Hundred Dawns, suggests she fuels her ship with her wooden compatriots (‘Throw another Dawn in the furnace! …I’m almost out of disposable Drahvins’, as Richard has it) – and it’s difficult not to imagine it turning up the Planet of Women dial to something like the Two Ronnies’ The Worm That Turned, not least because if it had been made in 1980 they wouldn’t have dared call the villain Maaga. Not only is her name often pronounced so it’s just a shade short of The Good Life’s anti-hero, but it’s uncannily similar to that of another blonde Leader, too.

And yet the scene I’m most keen to see from Air Lock – other than the surely unmissable spectacle of Rills reeling about – is one that’s always gripped me on audio, where Maaga gives a virtual soliloquy, barring the occasional dumb comment from one of her dumb subordinates. She starts off merely grumbling about them, and indeed gives her most infamous line, but it carries on to something much better, a proper bit of villainous spite, delivered in a gripping undertone:

“It may be that we shall kill neither the Rills nor these Earth creatures. Not with our own hands, that is. It may be better for us to escape in the Rills’ spaceship and leave them here. And then... When we are out in space… We can look back. We will see a vast, white, exploding planet... And know that they have died with it!”
“But we will not see them die.”
“You will not. But I, at least, have enough intelligence to imagine it.”

Her having an imagination is quite the best thing in it, which you could even take as a postmodern commentary that the special effects are never going to live up to your mental picture… And at the end, of course, we get to imagine in exactly the same way about her last moments – which might make it an even more postmodern commentary on the bloodthirstiness of the viewers, who watch all these things for their entertainment.

Or she might just be being beastly.

Doctor Who – The Underwater Menace

“You’re not clumsy, Doctor. You did it on purpose.”

The TARDIS lands at the entrance to what’s left of Atlantis and does Flash Gordon.

Of all the stories with missing episodes so far, this is the one where people seem most likely to want the surviving episode lost, too, as it might be better-regarded if only the short ‘censor’s clips’ had survived to suggest a grim and dangerous story about horrible operations, rather than the load of old codswallop we get to see in the surviving Episode 3 in all its ludicrous glory. Even fans who’ve never seen it tend to know that the final line of that involves the mad scientist exclaiming,

“Nothing in the world can stop me now!”

I’ve read several reviews excusing the story by saying this is the worst episode of the four, but that’s nonsense – both soundtrack and Recon make clear that Episode 1, for example, moves very slowly, the TARDIS crew act like idiots and it’s not even funny. Despite all that, it’s still possible to defend it, simply because the surviving episode is often fun. Is it good? Nah. Is it a pleasure to watch? Go on, go on…

Good News For Troughton, Bad News For His Friends

Though at times he’s just as extravagant as in his first two stories, everyone wanting ‘the new Doctor’ toned down a bit is in for a stroke of luck. Opposite Joseph Furst’s Professor Zaroff, he seems relatively underplayed, and not only is he funnier than Furst, at least with the hero we’re laughing with rather than at him. He’s both sharp and funny, particularly when puncturing Zaroff’s plans: “Oh, have I dropped a brick?” or calling his bluff on the explosion being unstoppable and not requiring his finger on the button with “Miss your big moment? I think not.” He’s already getting other people to play on his strangeness, most entertainingly when the lovely Ben bluffs his way past a guard using the old ‘I’ve got a prisoner’ trick: “He’s just not normal, is he?” He tries to bring down Zaroff by suggesting the Fish People strike (a major contrast with Pertwee in The Monster of Peladon), but when it comes down to it, he’s back to what’s clearly already his usual way of foiling an evil plan: blow everything up, as he did on the Vulcan Colony the landing before last. With this strange mix of the gentle and the utterly destructive – ‘Better safe than sorry!’ he seems to think, to make sure the plan’s thoroughly knocked down – you have to feel relieved that Scotland survived in the previous story, or that he didn’t at least blow up the cells and scupper Trask’s boat. By contrast, he also tries to save Zaroff from his horrible end. Meanwhile, with the most ludicrous array of hats seen so far in the series, we see the Doctor delighting in a huge priest’s hat, wearing a fish mask on a stick, and dressed as a gypsy in groovy shades for a very funny ‘action’ scene in the market. You can see why he’s Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor. It’s also the last story he wears his arresting stovepipe hat that appeared in all his early publicity shots, and a little sad that the only surviving episode from one of the ‘stovepipe stories’ is devoid of it, with the telesnaps suggesting that the last person to wear it is Polly…

Although they get to do lots of dressing-up – rubber guards’ uniforms for Ben and Jamie, a shell suit for Polly – it’s not a particularly good story for the Doctor’s three companions. They start well, in a fun little TARDIS scene where everyone thinks about where they’d like to land (it’s difficult to know for sure without the proper episode, but this may feature the rare device of hearing someone’s voice ‘inside their head’ – used in The Moonbase, The Mind Robber and The War Games, but for only one story outside of Troughton), but once they go outside and everyone suddenly wants to explore, now Bill Hartnell’s gone, they rapidly run out of useful things to do after a one-off attempt to use foreign languages. Given that Ben and Jamie have basically the same ‘running around not saying very much’ part, already suggesting too many similar companions, it’s startling how much one-off characters Jacko and Sean are ‘extra companions’, doing companiony things like rabble-rousing the Fish People into striking. Did Geoffrey Orme just not like Ben and Jamie, even in their little rubber outfits? Ben may notice the threat, as he teases new boy Jamie like a younger brother. That’s nothing compared to the distressing fall for Polly, though, as she goes from being a fantastically capable companion to utterly useless here. She’s taken in by Zaroff’s ridiculous bluff to jump the priest Ramo (asking for Ramo to come over so he can “feel the aura of your goodness”), then while they fight she could easily pitch in, but shamefully just squats in the corner looking scared (at least she tries to hit him with a rock later on). Still, the two sexy blondes Ben and Polly look good together, and Joe Orton clearly fancied Jamie in the guard’s outfit, as he wanted to cast Fraser Hines as Mr Sloane on the strength of it!

The Hats of Doom

Despite many attempts by Terry Nation, this is the closest Doctor Who ever gets to the original Flash Gordon film serial, and not always in a good way; the Fish People, the mixture of stereotyped religion and mad science, the hokey dialogue and design work (it’s difficult to believe the executioner with the mask and shell on his chest isn’t from Flash Gordon). Add in elements of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and a horrible physical transformation that’s even less convincing than that in Vengeance on Varos, and you’ve got a story that’s mostly not deliberately funny, but invites being sent up mercilessly by several of the actors and in Nigel Robinson’s novelisation. It’s the reverse of some Hartnell stories written as comedy and ‘straightened out’ in the studio, from a man who also wrote a very forgettable episode of The Avengers. It’s enlivened by Professor Zaroff and his occasional demented exclamations but, as he’s given the brilliant and detailed motivation of being ‘mad’, I can’t help thinking he should be more over the top. He’s not exactly Brian Blessed in full-on shouty mode – more just sniggering. It’s not a good story for Atlantean religion, either, with it all a big con (shock) and the fat priest Lolem apparently played by Christopher Biggins’ funny uncle in a huge hat made of curly bits of newspaper. His bitchy “May the wrath of Amdo engulf you!” to Zaroff is fun, though. At least it’s an exciting story for milliners. And shouldn’t the Atlanteans be able to spot the TARDIS crew aren’t local because they don't have silly eyebrows like everyone else?

The cliffhanger to Episode 1 doesn’t seem too bad, surprising you by not being about sharks after all but instead with Polly about to be operated on and a Fish Person peering in, but stick a load together in the ‘Dance of the Fish People’ and they’re jaw-droppingly silly. It’s probably the longest non-speaking sequence in the show up to that point, complete with strings and a terrible electric piano. The only time they look good is in a marvellously colourful DWM Time Team illustration of Zaroff and Nemo the octopus, though the Troughton’s not too good (with a huge nose that looks like a villain from TV Comic). Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman also has a particularly spectacular go at the story, which you may enjoy. The gormless King Thous gets one dignified line as the water surges into Atlantis at the climax, “The everlasting nightmare is here at last,” but the budget doesn’t really allow enough playing with water either, despite an effective image of the goddess Amdo ‘weeping’ as the idol gives way (I’m not sure about leaving nasty Mengele-figure Damon as the new visionary, though).

After all that you might be surprised that this ill-judged attempt to replace history with fantasy in the series was directed by the co-creator of EastEnders, so she probably didn’t put it high up her CV. Another echo of the future is that the whole Atlantis thing and the ‘villain from outside with the crazy destructive plot’ who ‘the ruler is chatted up by and realises is actually a bad thing and “the Doctor was right” too late’ ideas are blatantly ripped off for The Time Monster, which frankly makes you worry about Barry Letts… There is, at least, a great final cliffhanger into The Moonbase as the TARDIS goes out of control: “Do something!” “I seem to have done something!” but overall I’m left with two conclusions. It’s undoubtedly the lowest Doctor Who has aimed so far into the series… But though I don’t usually believe in the ‘so bad it’s good’ theory, this is at least ‘so bad it’s highly entertaining’!

The scene I’m probably keenest to see from the newly returned episode – given that it’s sadly not one with the stovepipe hat, nor a soaking wet Ben, nor with the probable inner-voiceovers – is probably the full version of the clip on the BBC website, which is delightful. This was only Patrick Troughton’s third story as the new Doctor, with the part only ever having been played by William Hartnell, and as I said above it does him a great favour by casting a villain next to whom he tones it down a bit, before finding his ‘mission statement’ in The Moonbase and then nailing his Doctor perfectly in the sublime The Macra Terror. And it’s fascinating to watch him in that minute that’s been made available, orbiting Zaroff in the background, watching, before he comes into close-up, all the while probing in a deceptively mild manner, hands held close to his chest in quite a Hartnellish mannerism, provoking the mad scientist into his second-most memorable outburst:

“Bang! Bang, bang!”

So, if you happen to have any old friends and relatives with dusty film cans in their attics, why not check to see if they have any more episodes themselves? Oh, and those two unusual things the monsters from each oldly new episode have in common: neither breathes our air; and, unlike the human-looking villains in each story, neither are really monsters at all. You can also read a brief review of the episodes at the British Film Institute yesterday from a lucky blighter who was there.

In the meantime, Andrew Hickey has just reviewed another – far from missing – piece of Dr Who from 1965, while if your appetite’s been whetted for Christmas Doctor Who, there’s a cartoony Reconstruction of the deeply silly 1965 Christmas episode The Feast of Steven online (worth watching for its marvellous closing line), or – from the other end of Doctor Who – the Prequel to this Christmas’ The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe.

Labels: BBC, Christmas, Doctor Who, Fandom, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Reviews, William Hartnell

BBC3’s endless but cheery rotation of Doctor Who hits a particular highlight with Utopia tonight at 7 – the episode that closes with, for me, the most thrilling 16 minutes of 21st Century Who so far (while last night’s featured BAFTA-winning Carey Mulligan). The two tiny clips from much older Who in tonight’s episode, though, made me wonder how I might devise a repeat schedule for the rest of the Doctors. Which would you pick? The lot, or a run of just one or two? Surely it’s not too much to ask for in the run-up to the new series…

The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who

Well, this would be the obvious one – a story from every Doctor so far, rather than just the last four and a bit seasons. And, yes, as yet you might think we only have a minute’s forthcoming season’s trailer boggling into 3D for Matt Smith, but remember how they showed a story for Peter Davison in 1981’s warm-up repeat season The Five Faces of Doctor Who? So it can be done.

The trouble is, there are so many stories to choose from – even if you kept it down to those running about an hour and a half so they could all fit in the same sort of slot – that I can easily think of, ooh, at least two for poor old Pat whose episodes were largely tossed away by the BBC (imagine if they still did such things today), three for Colin, four or five for Billy, Jon, Peter and Sylv, and fifteen for Tom that I’d want to show. So you get your thinking caps on for a set of eleven, and I’ll get mine. In the meantime, there are other options…

Update: rather belatedly, I did devise my own set for The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who. Almost at The Eleventh Hour, you might say (groan).

Tomtastic!

Who was the most famous, longest-lasting, most iconic of all the Twentieth Century Doctors? Who does everyone still recognise? Who isn’t quite my favourite, but has my favourite set of stories? If I were a BBC channel controller – look, even BBC Parliament, it needs the ratings somehow, but these would probably be BBC2 or BBC4, wouldn’t they – I’d be sorely tempted just to start with Robot, and show the whole of Tom Baker’s Doctor. In order.

It’s not just my personal bias – from a practical point of view, every episode of Tom’s still exists, in its original format, in colour, while the first three Doctors all have bits missing or knackered (thanks, BBC). And I do love Tom’s first season. And Genesis of the Daleks seems like it’s hardly been repeated at all after Chris and David’s daily outings…

But, if I really were a BBC channel controller, I know which repeats would be my secret desire, and they wouldn’t exactly be repeats at all. And I’d probably have to be a channel controller to order them, because unlike ordinary repeats, they’d take quite an allocation of budget.

Doctor Who and the Daleks

Imagine, if you will, the determination, the commitment, and most of all the money to show a good long run of Doctor Who repeats. Surely, you want two things to get attention and pull in your viewers: Daleks, and a unique selling point.

You may be aware that the BBC carelessly tossed many of the 1960s Doctor Who stories into skips and burnt them. Fortunately, people were audio-recording them from the first, so all the soundtracks survive, and are available on BBC CDs. Now, some of them are terrific, but the pictures would be better, wouldn’t they (and some of those narrations are very intrusive)?

So here’s what I’d do. I’d commission animation to replace the missing stories, starting with the twenty-six episodes of Daleks that need doing (twenty-two missing ones, and four that still exist without the episodes on either side of them and wouldn’t match the new versions. You can release them as extras on the DVDs, just as they are now on the Lost In Time box set). The BBC did the same for the two missing parts of Patrick Troughton’s The Invasion on DVD, and it became one of their biggest sellers – but the cost of animation still means only a channel can really afford to stump up the cash.

My perfect Doctor Who repeat season, then, would set out its stall with the newly re-animated The Power of the Daleks, The Evil of the Daleks, Mission To the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan. Each is a terrific story, not a single dud amongst them, each starring a terrific Doctor, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell – or in one case, starring no Doctor at all, which is why I’d start with the one that introduces a new Doctor rather than confusingly omitting him – and each would look fantastic with all the Daleks you can eat and fabulous new designs and special effects.

How about trailing them heavily immediately after each BBC3 repeat, saying, ‘turn over now to BBC2 / BBC4 for more exciting Doctor Who you’ve not seen before’? Show two episodes back-to-back every night, and you can have a regular two-hour multi-channel Doctor Who slot.

And, when those have been an enormous success, you can commission another set, Doctor Who and the Monsters – I for one would love to see The Macra Terror – and keep on until all 108 ‘missing’ episodes had been renewed, along with new versions of the ‘orphaned’ episodes that would stick out too much in a story mostly made up of animation.

Then, once the whole series is complete again… It’s simple.

Just start your repeat season starring William Hartnell as the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, and show the whole lot. Just in time for the Twelfth Doctor.


And, yes, I know this is a strange flibbertigibbet sort of post to break my block of the last few weeks, but anything to get me back on the treadmill, eh? I’m sure I can get into even more outrageous wish-fulfilment once I start writing about the General Election.

Labels: BBC, Daleks, Doctor Who, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

Our household’s all agog for tonight’s Doctor Who – probably the most important regeneration for twenty-nine years. Thank you, David Tennant, and good luck, Matt Smith!

And I always said the Time Lords were gits.

As a special New Doctor treat, I’d like to share with you this superb piece of animation by “Tardis Timegirl”, mixing Stanley Kubrick and Patrick Troughton to create something very special indeed: inspired, gorgeous to look at and, in parts, rather witty.



In other turn-of-the-year news, birthday elephant Millennium – happy birthday, young Master Dome! – has assembled the best of his and other bloggers (and has much to say about The End of Time so far), the other lovely Andrew (known in our household as Benedict Napoleon) is preparing for Sergeant Pepper and still more PEP! , and the lovely Helen brings news of a Guardian columnist’s prediction for a Labour-Tory coalition (it’s not going to happen, but short of a Liberal Democrat government, it’d be the best thing possible for us in the long term. Horrific while it lasted, though).

The most striking post of the New Year, however, belongs to the Blogger Formerly Known As the Lovely Stephen Glenn. He’s very musical, but not quite himself.

Fortunately, I am completely immune.




19.55: Yes, of course I cried. Then grinned, hugely.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Pictures, Recons, William Hartnell

Fairy-tale monsters abound: under the bed in The Girl in the Fireplace; devilish on The Impossible Planet; Love and Monsters’ all-consuming fan; Tooth and Claw’s scary werewolf (and Queen Victoria); inspiring many wonderful toys. Children’s magazine show Totally Doctor Who launches, then spin-off drama Torchwood makes it four Who-related series, peaking with They Keep Killing Suzie. The Invasion’s lost episodes are reanimated for DVD; Bernice has a Summer of Love; gods battle on The Ship of a Billion Years… And who will win? Daleks or Cybermen?

Army of Ghosts / Doomsday

“I’m – the Doctor…”
“Oh, I should say! Hooray!”

Edge-of-the-seat viewing as Torchwood rises under a fabulous villain, then falls to the Cybermen – thrilling music, tense build-up, electrifying cliffhanger and an action-packed climax to an epic season finale. Then the haunting last three scenes… Oh, and five million Cybermen against four Daleks? Easy. “Exterminate!”


Two forty-five-minute episodes, making one story, out on four DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Fear Her; in a box set of the whole 2006 season, complete with extras (including cut-down versions of Doctor Who Confidential); each on their own, once, as tabloid freebies; and in Summer 2009, paired respectively with Fear Her and The Runaway Bride, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files.

Labels: Big Finish, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Fandom, Music, Patrick Troughton, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Recons, Reviews, Torchwood, Toys, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

As Patrick Troughton’s performance as the Doctor becomes compelling, his stories really hit their stride. He faces his own double, a would-be world dictator in the twisty-turny The Enemy of the World, as well as a host of monsters: giant crabs that mess with your mind in The Macra Terror; the eponymous The Abominable Snowmen and The Ice Warriors; the Cybermen at their most chilling in The Tomb of the Cybermen; and even, could it be, the final end of the Daleks…?

The Evil of the Daleks

“Somewhere in the Dalek race, there are three Daleks with the Human Factor. Gradually, they will come to question. They will persuade other Daleks to question. You will have a rebellion on your planet!”

Doctor Who’s Faust, a gripping morality tale of insidious Daleks and the Doctor exploring human and Dalek nature – defined as ‘to ask questions’ and ‘to obey and to kill’ – it’s the series’ most powerfully Liberal message and intertwines past, present and an alien world to perfection.


And, yes, I’m afraid it’s one more that doesn’t fully exist, though I’m hoping the big, CGI-Dalek-packed Recon that’s due soon will be thrilling. If there’s one ‘missing’ (burnt) story that I’d love to be rediscovered… Anyway, thankfully you can at least buy the one fully surviving episode in the Lost In Time DVD set, and the whole soundtrack is terrific on CD (there’s a book you might find second-hand, too). It was adapted as a stage play two years ago, and though you can’t see that, you can read Richard’s review courtesy of Millennium.

Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Liberalism, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Reviews, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Grand historical tragedy in The Massacre, far-future space opera with Earth’s survivors, Wild West comedy and song in The Gunfighters, panic on the streets of London in The War Machines, even a serviceable Dalek movie on the big screen… Most strikingly for the series’ future, The Tenth Planet creates two of Doctor Who’s biggest ideas, spare-parts techno-zombies the Cybermen and the astonishing concept of regeneration, with Patrick Troughton as the Doctor facing The Power of the Daleks. But the year opened to building tension in a huge Dalek epic…

The Daleks’ Master Plan

“One Dalek… Is capable of exterminating all!”

The Daleks reach the zenith of their power and cunning in a plan for Universal conquest spanning many planets and times and spinning between thrilling, sinister and downright surreal. Shockingly, several of the Doctor’s friends die – the harrowing climax beats even modern finales for emotional punch.


Unfortunately, if you want to see the whole of this story… You can’t. Three-quarters of it was burned by the BBC and no longer exists, though you can buy the whole soundtrack on CD, and see the restored surviving TV episodes in the Lost In Time DVD set (and you might find second-hand copies of the twin books). However, though you should of course buy those, if there’s one Recon you should send off for, this is it. The huge Reconstruction of this story is a labour of love, with CGI Daleks and a breathtakingly recreated finale. It was adapted as a stage play last year, and though you can’t see that, you can read Millennium’s review.

Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, Patrick Troughton, Recons, Reviews, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

The series stretches out into new territory, creating the archetypal Who story of mixing history and science fiction in The Time Meddler, experimenting with comedy scripts like The Romans, trying a story with no ‘humans’ except the regular cast in The Web Planet and even a one-off grim Dalek adventure with none of our heroes at all but a James Bond-like lead instead, Mission to the Unknown. The first Annual appears. And a huge Dalek nightmare begins, though more on that story later, after…

The Crusade

“You defy me with the Pope?”
“No! You defy the world with your politics!”

The Doctor lands in a remarkably even-handed 12th Century ‘BBC adventure serial’, caught between two dangerous leaders – intelligent, calm Saladin and impulsive, petulant Richard – and their butchering warlords. An extraordinary script brings out the best from outstanding actors with perhaps the finest ‘serious’ dialogue in Doctor Who.


Unfortunately, if you want to see the whole of this story… You can’t. Half of it was binned by the BBC and no longer exists, though you can buy the whole soundtrack on CD, while the Lost In Time DVD set has both the audio-only parts and the restored surviving TV episodes. This is a good one to send off for the Recon, naturally, with a superb interview with Julian Glover as well as reconstructed visuals. Then there’s David Whitaker’s rather dashing novel Doctor Who and the Crusaders, now available as a talking book read on CD by William Russell, and well worth getting.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Julian Glover, Recons, Reviews, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

When I think of villains, I think of Kevin Stoney. By all accounts, he was a lovely man, but among the dozens of characters he played – in TV series as diverse as I, Claudius, The Avengers, All Creatures Great and Small and Bergerac – I treasure two charismatic would-be dictators in Doctor Who. He was even voted the Daily Mail’s 1965 “Villain of the year” (presumably handing over to Roy Jenkins for the rest of the ’60s). He was a marvellous actor, and after two decades of false reports of his death, sadly the news that broke on Monday is true.



Doctor Who fans will always remember him as Mavic Chen in The Daleks’ Master Plan, the first human villain striking enough to steal a scene from a Dalek, then as Tobias Vaughn in The Invasion, a business tycoon of such Bond-villain cool that he very much made the Cybermen just secondary villains in their own story. In one of the first Who stories I ever saw, Revenge of the Cybermen, he returns to play an avuncular bearded alien – though unfortunately that’s not a story from which anyone emerges with much credit. You may also have seen him as the perpetually upbeat astrologer Thrasyllus in I, Claudius (I must get round to watching him play the same man in The Caesars), Tiberius’ sidekick in exile who has to laugh off the threat of being thrown down a mountain. He was just about the only thing worth watching in two of the weakest episodes of Blake’s 7, first as a scheming councillor and then as a blind archivist who knows too much. And you can see him as a doomed Treasury inspector and then a bitter old bird expert in The Avengers, a dodgy Colonel in The Prisoner, the Prime Minister in the final Quatermass and in dozens of roles in TV series from The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s to Inspector Morse in the 1990s.

Mavic Chen (The Daleks’ Master Plan)

The Daleks’ Master Plan was the series’ early epic, a mixture of war story, political thriller, horror story and space opera, and perhaps because the Daleks are best when they have someone to play against, they’re accompanied throughout by Kevin Stoney’s Mavic Chen. Though the Daleks plot to take over Earth’s galaxy with the help of several ambitious leaders, it’s Mavic Chen, traitorous Guardian of the Solar System, who’s the real star. Named and made up to evoke a mix of as many human ethnicities as possible to accentuate his betrayal of the whole human race, he has something of the commanding camp of the Emperor Ming about him – but across twelve episodes, he has the time to develop as a character and in performance, with his overweening self-confidence (to the point of megalomania) making him increasingly blind to the Daleks’ real view of him and the fate he has coming. Competing for attention with another villain who has real charisma, the Daleks are at their height; for me, they were never better than pitched against the original Doctor, and in this story they get to be the devious galaxy-spanning conquerors of the TV21 comic strips. It’s enormous fun to see Mavic Chen winding them up to fury; because they need him – temporarily – he gets away with talking back to them and even swatting a Dalek’s eye-stalk with a long-fingernailed hand well past the point that they’d exterminate anyone else. And he still doesn’t see the danger when he’s told that

“One Dalek… is capable of exterminating all!”

While they allow him to live, his theatrics are immensely entertaining, and he’s great teasing and outwitting other of the Daleks’ allies in the second episode, Mr Stoney making great use of bars to peer through, lit by flames. Unfortunately, only three episodes still survive from the story, but the whole thing’s available on BBC CD, complete with narration to make it easier to follow. Once you have the CD, you might also consider picking up the Reconstruction, as the part-stills, part-computer-animated version of this story is by far the best Recon I’ve seen. You get a charming interview with Mr Stoney on the Recons for both The Daleks’ Master Plan and for The Invasion, too. But perhaps the most accessible way to view the story – well, a quarter of it, anyway – is to pick up the Doctor Who DVD set Lost In Time, which collects together eighteen ‘orphaned’ episodes, and where the survivors of The Daleks’ Master Plan are among the undoubted highlights (along with The Crusade and The Evil of the Daleks).

Tobias Vaughn (The Invasion)

When I was just four, I saw a Doctor Who villain that petrified me so much I’ve loved him ever since. Gabriel Woolf’s Sutekh the Destroyer (from Pyramids of Mars) was a performance of such quietly terrifying evil that the same actor was brought in to supply the voice of the Beast in The Impossible Planet two years ago. I still enjoy a great villain today, and Doctor Who has seen a great many – but only one’s ever captivated me as much as Sutekh did, and I didn’t see that until I was 21 and The Invasion was released on video (though, for all sorts of reasons, you’re much better off now with the DVD). My other favourite is, of course, Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughn. Kevin Stoney’s second appearance in Doctor Who is frequently said to be a retread of his first: an extra-long story; elements of a spy thriller; an invasion of Earth by one of the most famous two Doctor Who monsters; a human using his power and prestige first to betray Earth to the monsters, then planning to double-cross them (and, naturally, being double-crossed first). Despite all that, the 1968 story has a very different feel to the 1965-66 epic – the Daleks leapt from planet to planet to attack a far-future Earth, while the Cybermen are in effect invading a Bond movie on a BBC budget, with Tobias Vaughn very much a Bond villain in a sharp suit rather than a grand piece of Flash Gordon camp. On the other hand, if you’ve seen 2006’s Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel, you’ll recognise an awful lot of that double-length story lifted from The Invasion…

Tobias Vaughn is the head of International Electromatics, a global business empire that dominates the electronics market through its unique ‘micromonolithic circuit’ (yes, you may very well think this is where Intel started). And, unwilling to settle for mere market domination, he plots to take over the world. One of the reasons Vaughn is so striking is that he’s just like how we imagine heads of major corporations to be – after all, the James Bond films are documentaries, aren’t they? And this story has much of the style of the ’60s, with Vaughn’s dark suit and lovely high-collared shirt making him one of the best-dressed men in Doctor Who, but set just a little bit in the future, with videophones and private armies. And that look, the script and Kevin Stoney’s performance come together into the ideal villain for the story: he’s authoritative, he’s witty, he’s in control… At least until the Doctor gets in the way. In The Invasion, the Cybermen are at their most inhuman – faceless, mostly voiceless, wholly emotionless, and so Vaughn makes the perfect contrast. His journey from urbane sophistication through anger to broken depression isn’t just a demonstration of the kind of emotions that his allies can’t have, but a tour de force by a brilliant actor.

When we first encounter Vaughn, he’s not just calm but amused; when some of the Doctor’s friends wreck his irritating computer answering service – as many of us wish to on a daily basis – he thinks it’s very funny, and only his thuggish head of security wants to maltreat them. His urbanity persists while he’s still utterly in control, with orders and threats of “encouragement” for someone he wants to talk given as smiling asides that make them all the more effective. But his self-image as someone who’s both laid-back and in control is threatened when his ambition is threatened – he flares into temper for a moment when the Cybermen won’t share information, and again lets out a sudden whiplash of anger when his head of security warns him not to disobey the Cybermen:

“I don’t take orders, Packer, I give them!”

Increasingly, the story becomes about Vaughn’s state of denial when he stops having it easy. There’s a priceless scene when the hapless Packer finds the Doctor and friend inexplicably missing from a lift, while Vaughn – face like thunder – has clearly spotted the open panel in the ceiling and is losing his patience with an underling too stupid to notice. He manages an icy impression of his previous calm when Packer promises to find them:

“Call me when you do, Packer. I’ll be in my office. And don’t fail this time, there’s a good fellow.”

When Packer inevitably misses their exit by fire escape, Vaughn’s already strained quiet façade breaks into screaming fury. He’s one of those villains who purrs

“Much as I detest violence…”

then clearly distracts himself from things going pear-shaped by bullying sadism. Desperate to find a weapon he can use against the Cybermen, clearly terrified he’s left it too late, he has one wired up to an emotion-inducing machine that drives it mad with artificial fear, but the scene cuts two ways. It’s disturbing, because we’ve never seen a villain so powerful he can make a monster suffer before, but Vaughn’s evident hunger to make a Cybermen feel fear is a reminder that their natural state is that he’s afraid of them, not the other way round. He torments an inoffensive little scientist into shooting him in a superbly played scene, just so he can show off that he has a partly-cybernetic body that’s impervious to bullets – but again, underlying that is his desperation not to be fully converted by the Cybermen, because he doesn’t want to lose his individual human mind. Perhaps it was a real gamble, assuming he’d be shot in the chest rather than the head, but his whole invasion plan has been a gamble, and the more he realises the odds are against him the more he refuses to cut his losses, insisting

“Nothing has been overlooked.”

and

“I must go on, I must…”

One of the most memorable aspects of Kevin Stoney’s acting here is the way he keeps his left eye lazily half-closed throughout most of the story, while Vaughn is in control, then – when everything finally, undeniably falls apart around him – suddenly switches to having his eyes race around as if looking for a way out while he virtually has a nervous breakdown, then sinks into despair. He only drags himself out of it, after a last burst of fiery energy as he tries to justify himself and his need for power, with a desire to revenge himself on the Cybermen who destroyed his dreams. It’s a compelling turnaround, and you can’t help noticing that he never goes back to that lazy half-closed lid – because on being forced to admit his real situation, he’s finally opened his eyes.

You can watch this extraordinary character study on a beautifully cleaned-up DVD, and I thoroughly recommend it (with lots of bangs and flashes as well as acting, if you like that sort of thing). Though this is another story for which the BBC carelessly destroyed some episodes, this one’s the reverse of The Daleks’ Master Plan – three-quarters of it are present, rather than missing, and, even better, it’s the only one so far where you can see the ‘missing’ episodes on DVD. The BBC stumped up the cash a couple of years ago to have two full episodes recreated through animation and paired to the soundtrack, so it now starts with a rather marvellous film noir cartoon that completes the story. It’s the best way to remember a magnificent actor bringing a character to life. I remember reading the novelisation of The Invasion in the mid-’80s, and being so thrilled by the story that I acted out scenes from it in Drama class at school. I didn’t play the Doctor; I played Vaughn. Quite often, my imagination would conjure up something more impressive from the book than what Doctor Who had actually produced on screen, and I’d find myself a little disappointed on eventually seeing the video. When, years later, I was able to watch Kevin Stoney’s Tobias Vaughn, I saw everything I’d imagined and much more besides. He was simply brilliant. Ten years ago, I was inspired to draw a set of ‘Doctor and Villain’ portraits, and – as I draw very much more slowly even than I write – I only managed to complete the one. The first I chose, though, was of course a picture featuring Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughn (with Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor). You can see it above.

My condolences to Mr Stoney’s friends and family, and he’ll be missed by many people who, like me, never met him but had their imaginations captured by his work.

Labels: Blake’s 7, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Obituary, Patrick Troughton, Pictures, Quatermass, Recons, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Brigadier, William Hartnell

After delving into just why it’s more difficult than you’d think to see much of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor in action (and don’t forget to watch his The Web of Fear on BBC4 on Sunday night), it’s time to look more closely – or as closely as a Reconstruction allows – at a story from 1967, and marvel at just how very 1967 it all is. So exactly why is it that giant crab-monsters running an Orwellian holiday camp should result in one of the most uncompromisingly Liberal messages ever heard in a Doctor Who story? And is it any good?

“This is an emergency. Control must be believed and obeyed! No one on the Colony believes in Macra! There is no such thing as Macra! Macra do not exist! There are no Macra!”

The Doctor and His Friends…

There’s something that feels simply ‘right’ for me about the Doctor, unable to steer his TARDIS, arriving somewhere random with his friends – in this case, a planet somewhere, in the future sometime, with a human settlement run like a gigantic holiday camp with a curious intolerance of those who claim to witness giant crab-like creatures crawling about at night – exploring, investigating, sorting out its great big alien problem, then slipping away before anyone can ask awkward questions. Their avoidance of awkward questions may be ironic in The Macra Terror, but it still fits the blueprint that I suspect was drummed into me from the earliest books I read of the Doctor’s travels in time and space, telling of the Second Doctor as played by Patrick Troughton. The first book I ever read was a Pat Doctor Who story, and ever since then I’ve had a fondness for him. He even developed into my favourite Doctor, from something like the mid-’80s to just a few years ago. When he’s at his best, he has a gentle power that quite beats any other Doctor’s performance for me; he was only overtaken by William Hartnell when, three or four years ago, Richard and I watched the whole of their stories in order. Billy’s unwavering dedication to the part won me over, while I found to my surprise that when Pat was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad he was hammy. Watching his stories, you can see that for the first few he’s a little unsure of himself, taking over an established role and almost completely changing the character, so he does a lot of goofing and only occasionally lets his gravitas show through. He then hits his stride with a series of extraordinary performances that neatly balance comedy and seriousness, but towards the end it becomes very obvious which scripts he doesn’t think much of, and several stories see him fling his arms in the air, cry “Oh, my word!” and ham it up because he doesn’t think the lines worth playing for real. When he thought it mattered, Pat was absolute magic. But Billy never had a moment when he didn’t think it mattered.

Fortunately, The Macra Terror is one of the earliest in that consistent run of stories where Pat has found his feet as the Doctor but not yet got tired of the role. It’s the first where his anti-authority style really pays off, one of just two or three stories with such vividly anti-establishment messages that they really establish his Doctor’s fine balance between encouraging you to ‘free your mind’ and uncompromising ‘destroy all monsters’. The First Doctor would often have stand-up shouting matches with those in authority, but his age and bearing meant that he could often be taken as a figure of authority himself, all the better to undermine them. The Second Doctor is small, shabby and much more retiring, and is more likely to be thought a tramp than a toff. Here, he gets a script perfectly tailored to his character, instantly siding with the underdog, more likely to give events a gentle nudge than openly take charge (at least until the crisis point), and rebelling against neatness and conformity, whether physical or mental. Patrick Troughton was such a physical actor, with such an expressive face, that it’s a terrible shame so few of his stories ‘survive’. It’s great to see his reactions captured once in a while in the Recon, such as the huge, mischievous grin as he puts one over on the official in charge of the Colony’s gas supply. He has a marvellous voice, too, often using a nervous, apologetic tone that encourages his opponents to underestimate his dangerous intelligence, and a rarer deep, gentle, compelling timbre that means he’s being very serious; it makes him sound very gentle, as if this inveterate bluffer is finally taking you into his confidence, but it’s also the tone he uses to talk about life and death.

The distinctive way the Doctor approaches the turning points in this story is uniquely Pat’s. His attitude when one of his companions falls under the control of the Colony seems much more tolerant if also more guarded than that any of the other Doctors would be, but when he makes up his mind about the Macra he becomes morally absolute. He seems kindly, yet ruthless. Right from the start, his determination to hang on to his rumpled appearance when all his companions are kitted out in neat Colony tunics indicates that he sees the danger in a system that wants you forcibly ‘tidied up’ even if ‘tidying’ something changes its nature and ruins it, realising the mental conformity the Colony will demand as part of that: thrust into a machine that straightens his hair and polishes his clothes, he’s congratulated on how spruce he looks, but jumps into a massaging machine to scruff himself up again after witheringly observing,

“Who wants to see their face in a pair of suede shoes?”

Though there are points where the Doctor can’t help himself and protests at things he sees as wrong, he repeatedly retreats to the background, observing and deducing before he acts and often making use of his companions to ask questions and draw attention away from him. There’s an outstanding pair of scenes in which, having worked out that everything in the Colony comes back to the gas which they throw everything into mining – no-one knows what it does, it’s poisonous to humans, and yet it’s prized above all else – he insinuates himself into the gas supply centre and first works out how it all works, then puts that knowledge into action. He gets so wrapped up in scrawling calculations across the walls that, having deduced the key formula from the readings coming in and given himself ten out of ten, he doesn’t spot the Colony’s chief administrator, its Pilot, coming in behind him until he’s accused of stealing the secret:

“…you’re not asking me to believe that in a few moments you have been able to work out a formula which it has taken our combined computers years to perfect?”
“It does seem rather a tall order,” observes the Doctor, chuckling delightedly.
“Well, you must have seen the document. That’s the exact computation.”
“Really?” he laughs again, very pleased with himself. “Well, in that case…”

At which point he awards himself eleven out of ten, before being made to scrub the wall clear. The formula is, of course, still in his head, and once the Pilot’s gone on his way, the Doctor is able to bamboozle the jobsworth in charge of the gas station with a stream of mathematical nonsense while pretending to help, all the time worming the last bits of information out of him and reversing the settings as he does. With the supervisor – unsubtly named ‘Officia’ – completely unable to deal with a dissident who is devious rather than loudly resisting, all he can do is protest that the Doctor doesn’t know what he’s doing. He does, of course, boasting as he finishes his work that “I can stand an operation on its head quicker than anyone,” and that he’s “revolutionised the entire gas flow of the Colony.” The ‘revolution’ motif slipped in isn’t the only double meaning in the script, and it’s only after the Doctor finally shows his cards with this sabotage that Officia finally realises he’s dangerous. By this time, of course, the underrated Doctor has been allowed to pick up enough information that he can run rings round the regime.

The Doctor’s also particularly well-complemented by his companions here. I said the first book I ever read was a Second Doctor story, and it featured the same crew. Highlander Jamie (Frazer Hines, later in Emmerdale for many years) is still relatively new, but already well-defined, and there’s great chemistry between sailor Ben and socialite Polly. They’d been around for a year or so, and they’re both blond and beautiful in a way that previous companions hadn’t been – ‘something for the dads’, and for those of us unlikely to be dads. It’s one of my favourite line-ups, though an unlucky one: most of their episodes are ‘missing’, and few of their stories manage to give good parts to all of them. This is probably the best story for the team, though Polly draws a bit of a short straw compared to the young men, with a lot of the story revolving around rivalry between Ben and Jamie after Ben ‘switches sides’. Early on, we see each of the Doctor’s young friends drawn to and repelled by different aspects of the Colony, so it’s not obvious which one might ‘turn’; yes, Ben is delighted to relax topless (damn those video-burning barbarians at the Beeb!) while Jamie fidgets nervously, but it’s Jamie who enjoys the all-pervasive music of the jingles and Ben who distrusts the message in them linking happiness to work. Polly, given rather a fab short haircut by her ‘treatment’, is told how beautiful she is and that she’s “sure to be elected our next beauty president”; you’re distracted by the updated version of ‘beauty queen’, of course, but the disturbing assumption beneath it is that there’s no question they’ll stay. There’s an outstanding sequence for all three companions in the second episode, when the Colony’s Big Brother-like voice of ‘Control’ declares that, after having been welcomed in and neatened up, our heroes are “to be given the advantage of high powered adaption at once” so they’ll “think like members of the Colony.” It’s deeply disturbing to see Ben, Jamie and Polly asleep while a mellifluous, insidious voice coos brainwashing propaganda over them, persuading them to relax, believe the Colony knows what is best, and obey without question. As far as you can tell from the telesnaps, we don’t see the Doctor’s room or witness him doing anything as human as sleeping, but perhaps he’s already heard and overcome the voice, alerting him to what’s happening to the others; he creeps into Polly’s room – a bit dodgy, you might think – to check the walls, and finds a wire like an artificial nerve hidden there, which he fuses with a groovy little explosion (visible on the new Recon). She wakes, and he tells her she’s had some very bad advice, suggesting a classically Liberal homily instead:

“Now Polly, I want you to forget everything that you’ve been dreaming.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well it’s just possible that you’ve been given a series of orders while you’ve been asleep. You know – ‘do this’, ‘do that’, ‘do the other thing’… My advice to you is: don’t do anything of the sort. Don’t just be obedient. Always make up your own mind.”

It’s a little too late when he and Polly dash in on Ben and Jamie, though. Jamie has already woken, disturbed by the voice, but when he rouses Ben, his friend just wants to get back to sleep because “We’ve got a hard day’s work ahead of us tomorrow.” Jamie’s taken aback at Ben, usually cockily resistant to authority, and when the Doctor arrives to fuse their nerve filaments, Ben wakes again and starts heckling him, telling him to stop before he does any damage. The Doctor prefers some damage to loss of will power, but Ben no longer understands: “It’s against the law!”

The Doctor realises what’s happened, but doesn’t react as explosively as his other selves would. While Jamie erupts at Ben, the Doctor becomes rather cold and calculating, drawing back to observe while Ben calls the guards to order him away (“I take orders from no one but the Doctor,” shouts Jamie, ironically). For most of the rest of the story, Ben is transformed from his usual easygoing self to a stiff Colony apparatchik with high collar and steely manner, but the Doctor never directly ‘deprogrammes’ him, instead choosing his moments to nudge him in the direction of fighting the control off himself, guarded, mildly chastising, and encouraging his doubts in a similar way to how Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor would operate. Michael Craze steals the show as Ben, normally so straightforward and suddenly tortured, with spasms of sounding like the Daily Mail (it’s unsettling for him to suddenly join the herd and yell for the ‘outsider’ Doctor to be ‘corrected’, pretty much ‘string ’em up’), and his becoming a ‘normal’, law-abiding member of the Colony gives the story real oomph, with his throwing off the baleful influence of Control appropriately essential to the climax.

The biggest test for Ben is in reconciling his feelings for Polly with his new loyalty to the Colony. Anneke Wills’ Polly is a bit of a spare part for much of the story (and none of the many other women appearing here have major roles, making it one of the few ’60s Who stories that really does tend to follow the general ’60s style and reduce them to ‘dolly birds’, even if it is a sign of the Colony’s vacuity), often ending up just someone for the Doctor to talk to and hand bits of equipment to and at one point even nervously wanting to stay put instead of showing her usual assertiveness, but there are real sparks when she literally leads Ben into temptation. She makes a break for forbidden ground, daring Ben to report her, and he can’t help following, torn between obeying orders and protecting her. Naturally, she runs straight into a giant crab, rather awkwardly a creature that the Colony insists does not exist. There can rarely have been a more visibly enacted ideological crisis as when Ben batters at a creature he has to believe isn’t there, and though he rescues her – both looking extremely fetching in the short clips, her struggling in short bob and tunic and him in very skimpy shorts, then both hugging and screaming in a terribly endearing way as if on a ghost train ride – when he makes his report, he struggles to remember what happened, eventually asserting despite his bruises and scratches that “there are no such things as Macra!” before openly questioning what to do in a very ’60s, trippy way:

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I… Got these voices in my head – sometimes I just think I’m just having a bad dream…”

With Ben and Polly the ‘companions in danger’ towards the end of Episode 2, the following week it’s Jamie’s turn, escaping the Danger Gang in the mines (after complaining in a very sexist but protective way about Polly being forced down there) only to run into more Macra. And he’s in a t-shirt, gloves and apparently a silver apron while doing it, which isn’t his best look. Fortunately, when the Doctor’s sabotage allows Jamie to escape, he gets a splendid little scene where he runs into a group of cheerleaders practicing their “We all know Control is right, and we must obey!” inspirational chants. Taken for a dancer, he makes his exit with a terrific gag:

“Why do you call it the Highland Fling?”
“Because we finish the dance by flinging ourselves out the door!”

Free Will and Utopia

Regular readers will know I’m deeply suspicious of utopias and ‘perfect societies’ that claim to know best for everyone, because everyone’s idea of ‘best’ is different. To maintain its own ideal of ‘perfection’, a utopia always has to crush free thought, creativity and difference, all of which would spoil the pre-planned pattern. As Margaret Atwood said in last year’s documentary The Martians and Us – Trouble in Paradise:

“In a dystopia, you don’t have choice and free will, because conditions are imposed upon you. And in a utopia, you don’t need choice and free will, because what would you need them for? Everything’s perfect.”

Doctor Who, unsurprisingly, has a similar scepticism towards utopianism; the two may not be unrelated, as readers of either the ‘Liberal’ version in Liberator 293 or the ‘Doctor Who’ version of my article How Doctor Who Made Me a Liberal will know. Although I only became familiar with the detail of The Macra Terror and its ideological soulmate The Evil of the Daleks once I was already an active Liberal Democrat, I immediately recognised and cheered on the stance they take. These stories make perhaps the most explicit statements of the anti-establishment ethos that the series’ original producer Verity Lambert saw as the core of its appeal to children, as well as to adults still thinking for themselves. He repeatedly speaks for freedom from ignorance and conformity, the Colony’s two founding principles, as when he confronts the Pilot over plans to take Medok to the hospital for more “correction”:

“He’ll be given another course of treatment. And when he returns to the Colony, Medok will be a changed man. He will co-operate and he will obey orders. He’ll be just like the rest of us.”
“Why do you want everyone to be the same?”

For me, the Doctor’s caring individualism seems inescapably Liberal – a curious traveller in time and space, by definition unbound by rules and by instinct dismissive of authority, to a petty bureaucrat in the story between The Macra Terror and The Evil of the Daleks “the most subversive and anarchic figure of his entire career, a shabbily dressed little man known as the Doctor,” (from The Faceless Ones, though I don’t entirely recommend its exceptionally daft B-Movie villains who the Doctor deals with by talking to them sternly and making them stand in the corner). It’s because he’s an individual and not an enforcer that he always feels Liberal even in less freewheeling stories, someone who looks after the little people against bullies and isn’t upholding the law, the military or any ‘one size fits all’ utopian solution. Here, he announces “Bad laws are made to be broken” and changes the world to get rid of them. It’s politically inspirational, and one of the Doctor’s best-known lines championing freedom; often quoted to suggest the Doctor’s an anarchist, I wouldn’t go quite that far, or at least not on that evidence. Though there’s no doubt of a libertarian direction, wouldn’t the corollary be that ‘Good laws are made to be obeyed’?

Though most of the monsters Pat faces in his next two years as the Doctor are still symbols of conformity, mind control and dehumanisation, the rhetoric is rarely so nakedly Liberal as it is at this point, when the Doctor urges people to think for themselves and question authority every two minutes. Afterwards that side of things becomes more implicit, as if they decided that, having set out their stall, ‘we’ve done the free will, now let’s just kill the monsters’. A few years ago, SFX Magazine published an unflattering set of pen-portraits of the Doctors, of which the Second Doctor’s was the only one that really hit the mark:

“You have a childlike approach to life, and don’t worry about dressing smart, making a good impression or coming first. You seem really relaxed and vague and trustworthy. But if anybody even slightly irritates you, you build a machine and you destroy them.”

Enjoy the Doctor opposing not just soulless, identity-sapping monsters but the soulless identity-sapping in an everyday wash-and-brush-up when it appears here, then. The early clue that the ‘welcoming’ Colony want the Doctor to be neat and tidy and he resists on principle reminds me of another of my great heroes, Conrad Russell. He was told on taking the Liberal Democrat whip in the Lords that he should still rebel against the party whip on at least one point of principle before long, or he wasn’t a proper Liberal. Not only was Conrad told this by the Lib Dem peers’ deputy leader, but he later took rebelling to such a happy extreme he was nearly expelled, while also becoming the party’s intellectual guru. Though the Doctor is never party political, he has a similar urge to tell authority where to put itself. Shopped by Ben for fusing the brainwashing circuits in his companions’ rooms, he’s taken before the Pilot, who like a stern, concerned headmaster can’t begin to understand why this individual should be so unruly.

“You have destroyed three nerve circuits, Doctor. You have burned them out. What have you to say?”
“Rather neat, don’t you think? And so simple. I did it with this.”
(He holds up a little pin or piece of wire)
“You admit it?”
“I’m proud of it.”

Although he prefers to act stealthily in the background to get away with more before he’s caught, this Doctor abruptly stops dissembling and takes pride in his interference when eventually confronted; he does it again in almost exactly the same words when finally put on trial by his own people for mixing it. And in a sudden switch of mood, when the Doctor notices a mind-control circuit in the Pilot’s office as well, he immediately stops standing up to him and turns sympathetic, fusing the Pilot’s circuit, too (though it takes him a long time for him to say thank you). It’s at this point that the Doctor’s attention focuses on what’s behind the Big Brother-style picture of an assured, confident leader in Control, and what it conceals is the not wholly unexpected main twist in the story… As it gradually becomes plain that the gas to which everything in the Colony is geared to produce is purely to support the crab-like Macra who can’t live in our air, it’s plainer still that more toxic to the Macra than oxygen is ‘asking questions’. In the end, it’s assault by constant questions that drives the voice of Control into such hysteria that even the calm, conservative Pilot at last questions his orders. Of course, before things reach that crisis, turning up in what appears to be a happy utopia and making a bee-line for the only (surviving) dissident isn’t calculated to endear him to the Colony, so he encounters the problem that people don’t necessarily want to be free if they think they’re having a good time. He’s still right that happiness isn’t enough if you can’t choose it for yourself, but it won a particularly barbed spoof ‘Moral’ for this story in Doctor Who Magazine:

“Don’t wander uninvited into someone else’s party and turn on the lights.
It won’t make you popular.”

I Feel Like I’ve Been Here Before…

With Control a very deliberate echo of 1984’s Big Brother and ‘giant insects’ (as the crab-like Macra are repeatedly described) in a story of a system itself gone mad echoing Kafka, there are obvious literary homages in the story. Then stir in a touch of Quatermass II, with workers conned by conformity and normality into making deadly gas for aliens to breathe, and the likes of The Ipcress File for the psychedelic interrogation / ‘correction’. And Butlin’s, obviously. Perhaps more crucial to the story’s development are influences from other Doctor Who and from politics of the real world, though in each case The Macra Terror finds as many later echoes as existing ideas that it picks up. Author Ian Stuart Black had previously written two other Doctor Who stories for William Hartnell, and though this is the most interesting and most lively of the three, it draws themes and other elements from the other two. The Savages is a particularly forgotten story even for Doctor Who’s largely forgotten third year, a long-destroyed prototype ‘typical’ Doctor Who plot without even a monster to remember it by. There’s not a lot to it; there’s a ‘who are the real Savages?’ moral – like The Macra Terror, a utopian society is revealed as based on exploitation with the scary people outside / scary ‘nutter’ proved more in the right, and the Doctor is first welcomed then persecuted for asking awkward questions – but though I might nod at its message, the only two ‘twists’ are both done by half-way through and the rest is running about with very little plot. The Macra Terror adds not just monsters but rather more layers and a lot of wit, as well as something of Ian Stuart Black’s second story, The War Machines. The clunkiest computer technology you’ll ever see can’t disguise that this was remarkably ahead of its time for 1966; with a giant computer (they all were) inventing the Internet thirty years early – TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! – this is the one that should have been called ‘The Web of Fear’. Well, all right, the melodramatic threat to free will doesn’t quite anticipate the Internet’s explosion of different opinions, but it got ‘everything happening by signals over the ’phone’ right. Its modern-day, army-versus-monsters feel means it anticipates much early ’70s Who as well, but as far as similarities with The Macra Terror go, here we have huge, hulking monsters, Terry Nation-style mind control (The Macra Terror’s delusional utopia resembles the earlier, cheesier The Keys of Marinus even more strongly) and one of the Doctor’s companions distressed as another comes under the influence. That time it was Polly who was brainwashed but still unable to give Ben away, rather than the other way round, but they’re terrific together in both. That story even opened with the Doctor having a mysterious sensation of evil to warn him to keep an eye out, in its own way as contrived as the ‘Look! A giant claw will appear next week!’ teaser for the Macra.

Later Doctor Who stories have more than a few similarities to The Macra Terror, too, as do The Prisoner and The Year of the Sex Olympics, both of which came soon after. Day of the Daleks, for example, has a work-heavy dystopian future where humans obey a few monsters in real control, and where the Doctor persuades the chief administrator to turn against the monsters only for them to replace him with his sadistic police chief. And I’ve written about the varied attacks on utopias in, for example, The Green Death and The Keeper of Traken. You could say it’s been almost remade – Sylvester McCoy’s story The Happiness Patrol similarly has a Colony with enforced happiness, though the aliens under the floor are another layer of victims rather than the exploiters. The Doctor uses the crooked, smiling logic of that colony against it too, giving himself up so he can’t be arrested in both stories (and both of them even have an edible monster); the association of these two stories in my head was so strong that I was actually quite taken aback when I saw a Recon of The Macra Terror for the first time. I’d always imagined it would be like the 1988 story, shot entirely within the studio, so it was a marvellous shock to see 1967 one starting off with location filming. Then, if you’ve been watching the new series… Well, just look at the Empress of the Racnoss, for one: a great big ‘practical monster’, actually there in the studio and a bit spidery in the script, but with the slight drawback of not being able to move about much.

As to the political sources of the story… Though I’m in little doubt of the Liberal messages peppering The Macra Terror, not everyone agrees. Before I’d ever heard the whole thing, I remember being told it was a Marxist fable, with the workers in a state of false consciousness, being exploited by a system set up entirely for the benefit of a separate class of parasites. Well, the shape of that may fit and there’s certainly a point in the ‘false consciousness’, but I’ve never read a Marxist who argues that individual freedom and asking questions are the most important things in life. Besides, when I did at last hear The Macra Terror, its main satirical target – other than holiday camps – struck me as quite the opposite. With dissidents being taken to hospital for ‘correction’ or sent to mine mineral salts from which gas can be produced, it wasn’t a very big jump to recognise the Soviet definition of opponents as psychiatric patients or the notion of exiling others to the Siberian salt mines. When we hear that “Medok is one of our last patients in the colony,” the real life examples make us wonder whether the brainwashing is getting more effective, or if the other patients have just been ‘disappeared’, rather than thinking ‘Oh, good, they’re cured’. Add the whiff of Berlin Wall in the curfew and the Chief of Police’s ambiguous warning that “Anyone who wanders round the Colony at night may be killed,” and the story doesn’t come across as entirely taken with Marxist states. I suspect the author was in fact having a laugh, but whatever his politics, there’s a passionately anti-totalitarian, pro-free will critique that might come from Liberals or anarchists against any political system that decides it’s in the business of telling its citizens it knows best.

Forty years later and well after the collapse of Soviet communism, it’s striking how easily the story’s barbs hit home on modern politics for any system that stifles criticism and compels conformity. Marvel at just how much Macra propaganda is used by New Labour:

“Our ancestors believed in the virtues of ‘healthy happiness’, and we have tried to keep their ideals alive. Sometimes, alas, it is necessary to use force.”

No, it’s not Tony Blair talking about hard-working families and control orders, but I’m sure I’ve heard him say “We cannot have criticisms from these strangers,” and repeated assertions that “There are no such thing as Macra” are every bit as convincing as “There are such things as WMD in Iraq”. The ever-present loudspeakers and viewing machines to keep an eye on everyone in the Colony smack not just of telescreens, but CCTV. The attitude towards Medok, who’s says he’s seen something disturbing and, unable to be exhorted to be happy with platitudes, has refused ‘treatment’ despite being told by the Pilot that “It’s for your own good,” is redolent of the government’s desire to lock up people who might be mentally ill because, you know, they might some day do something, and besides, they scare people – or, as Chief of Police Dr John Ola puts it,

“The Colony will be petrified when they know he’s out there in the night.”

The Doctor marks himself as potentially dangerous by showing concern for Medok, then (rather than just letting him be locked away for his anti-social behaviour) trying to talk to him in order to ask questions, with the Pilot giving away the whole way in which the Colony is ruled:

“What were you doing with Medok? You know he’s a dangerous man.”
“I’m not so sure, Pilot.”
“You have already been told!”

Similarly, when the Doctor and his friends expose the reality of Control, the reaction is to blame them for challenging the Colony’s accepted beliefs rather than deal with the evidence. The Pilot reflexively orders them condemned to the pits, where no-one but other dissidents can hear them, and Control feeds his prejudices by announcing that “We will not tolerate the evil of such strangers”; yes, whatever the actual evidence, everything is blamed on the immigrants and people of questionable mental health. Good job that couldn’t happen here…

Monsters in Control?

There’s an impressive guest cast, in addition of course to the rather striking if not completely convincing appearance of the Macra themselves. Each of the four actors who best typify the different aspects of the Colony also appear in The Avengers, adding to the 1967-ness of it all and the feeling that the Colony is something normal, recognisable, but slightly off-kilter. Graham Armitage, playing the camp ‘Clothes Show’ organiser Barney, symbol of all that is apparently frothy and frivolous, had a good day on the 11th of March, 1967: not only did he get a significant guest spot in that evening’s first episode of this Doctor Who story, but another in The Avengers’ stylish The Correct Way to Kill the same night. At the other extreme of the conformists, Gertan Klauber’s Chief of Police Ola may be familiar to you from the odd Carry On film and as any number of ‘heavies’. Here, he signals something wrong from the start – for such a happy Colony, they have a lot of guards – and this sneering, sadistic bully is someone who clearly doesn’t care who’s in charge as long as he still gets to strut. He’s provides several of the key Kafka-esque moments, when Medok’s and even at last the Pilot’s proof that Macra exist doesn’t tick the right boxes for him, as he’s not interested in the truth, just the law, which orders that people who say there are Macra are by definition seeing things and should be locked up.

The Pilot and Medok are the most complex and interesting characters. The Pilot is played by the brilliant Peter Jeffrey, always hugely reliable though not really let off the leash here until almost the end. He’s initially a rather sniffy and distant bureaucrat, dictating memos and not liking to be interrupted, but contact with the Doctor gradually loosens his inflexibility. It’s difficult to tell how much of his headmasterly conviction that he’s doing everything for everyone’s own good and that “Control always acts for the best” is worn away by arguments and evidence, and how much simply by the Doctor short-circuiting the device controlling his own mind, but either way it’s interesting to see his unquestioning faith gradually falter. At one stage he’s able to ignore and completely forget evidence while still believing himself to be solicitous; when he claims “We’ve nothing to hide,” he believes it, but by the end of the story he no longer does. That’s why Polly comes up with the idea of showing him the creatures in Control towards the end, and the Doctor realises that the effect’s had enough time to wear off him that he might now be able to take in the truth, enabling the Doctor to use a top-down authoritarian system against itself. With the Doctor having already destabilised the system by proving himself able to come and go almost as he pleases, Ola assaults the Pilot’s authority, which may encourage the Pilot to assert himself as much as the Doctor’s arguments do… And the only way in which he can stand up to Ola, who is obeying Control, is by listening to the Doctor. So, in part, the Pilot is forced into rebellion by his desire to maintain his own authority. He still dithers as he’s swept along by the force of the Doctor’s argument, and by simply keeping up with the Doctor as Pat resolutely heads towards Control:

“But Doctor, this is forbidden territory.”
“Yes, and you’ll soon see why.”
“Stop! Stop! You’re breaking the law!”
“Bad laws were made to be broken.”

Ironically, given that dissidents are accused by the Pilot of being insane for saying they’ve seen Macra, the sight of them really existing is such a shock to his worldview that it almost tips him over the edge. Because they look horrible, he gibbers that “it is they who must be destroyed,” and his despairing cry is almost indistinguishable from Medok’s earlier warning that he condemned:

“Ola, the Colony is in the hands of grotesque insects!”

“All right! Have fun while you can, before they crawl all over you!”

Medok is the only one of the locals we meet who’s dead against the Macra from the start, with a mood ranging from grim to hysterical in contrast to the general cheer, and it doesn’t do the poor chap a lot of good. The opening image of the story is a close-up on his eyes, to a threatening electronic heartbeat, before the shot and music change to the enforced jollity of the cheerleaders. The initial impression is that he’s a scary lunatic, violent and dangerous, that he’s the threat rather than the only one who can warn about it: that close-up of him watching at first makes him seem like a voyeur perhaps stalking the dancers, but soon it becomes clear that, instead, he’s seen things that no-one else will see because he’s the only one whose eyes are open. Terence Lodge gives an edgy performance, needled by the calm, regimented order that “It will be fun for all” into losing control and shouting about the crawling things as he’s restrained (well, more like extravagant!). Even he, though, needs the Doctor to break free entirely from his pattern of conformity; he keeps refusing to talk to the Doctor, mistrusting him because “You don’t belong here” until the Doctor makes him realise that neither does he, not any more. There’s a truncated but disturbing scene (even in still frames) in the correction hospital as they attempt to brainwash him. Strapped to a bed with voices telling him he’s seen nothing and “will work hard and happily” and lights flashing on and off, it’s very much of a piece with the disorientating psychedelic dramas of the time, and reflects both his roles in The Avengers: would you believe he’d played not only a lunatic who’s been broken by interrogation, but also ‘the Wringer’, a hip interrogator using the same sort of disorientating psychedelia to break Steed?

The most memorable guest performances in the story are not, however, the actors who we see interacting with everybody else but the sinisterly confident voices that pervade the Colony, led by the giant screen bearing the face of Control (reminiscent, as I’ve noted, of Big Brother) from which all the instructions for the Colony come. The rich, insidious tones of the brainwashing voice are also disturbing, but in some ways even more so are the more innocent and ever-present tools of repression, the jingles all with the general message of “Happy to work, happy to play…” Even the fun is tightly controlled, as Control’s instructions “to welcome joyfully the visitors” makes clear, instructing that they be made “happy and contented” but “Now, back to work, everyone,” in a brisk, monarchical pronouncement that permits no question. If the musical style and the face of Control recall the post-War years and everything stops for Control’s proclamations, though, the constant presence of the jingles is much more modern: with conversations cutting across them all the time, it doesn’t matter if you can’t hear some of them, as there’ll be another along shortly and the overall effect is almost subliminal. The constant announcements are a source of humour, too. There are the reactions they draw from the Doctor and his friends, for example when, in a ‘Good night children, everywhere’ tone of voice:

“It is now dark. No one will go outside into the Colony. A dangerous man is in hiding. Our patrols have orders to shoot on sight. Happy sleep time, everybody.”
“Same to you!”

The announcements themselves can similarly invite an amused reaction from the listener at home, perhaps accidentally when “Stand by for action” booms through the massed loudspeakers, partly in their absurd devotion to activity and partly through ‘inappropriate’ juxtapositions:

“The Pilot is to be arrested! This is a happy Colony! All must obey!”

This effect can also be chilling, as when the normally calm Control’s hysterical screams that “Macra do not exist!” give the lie to the words and display that, of course, they do. Though we never actually see a Macra speak – retaining some of their alien mystery, and not appearing a bit silly – it is evident that the Macra are in Control throughout. The revelation comes half-way through the story, as the once strong, handsome face of Control is revealed as now a terrified old man, menaced by a giant claw, providing a memorable cliffhanger, confirming the Doctor’s suspicions, and sparking a frenzy of shouted denials from the controlled humans and from Control itself. With Control of course using mind control to direct the Colony, the script has great fun with double meanings around the word, from Polly screaming “Macra! They’re in Control!” at the revelation to asking “they weren’t always in Control, were they?” and then Ben finally throwing off his conditioning as the voice breaks into panicked shouts for them all to be arrested: “That doesn’t sound like a man in Control.” And, of course, it isn’t: it’s eventually seen to no viewer’s surprise that what’s there, amid the groovy ’60s spiral patterns, is a hulking, pale Macra…

In true Doctor Who tradition, I’ve held back on the monster itself, but rather just given you occasional glimpses. In part, that’s because when revealed, they’re not the story’s most impressive aspect, despite three cliffhangers relying on them. The worst way to see the Macra is in the one detailed, outdoor publicity shot, where it looks like a sculpture someone’s abandoned; far better to watch the dark clips that survive, where at least you get a feel for how they lurked in the shadows and slithered about the ground – or not, as they don’t appear to be the most mobile of props. Still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in giant monster-movie-style creatures, and their big, glowing eyes are quite effective in moments when you can forget that they’re lamps, though admittedly people caught in their claws seem to have a struggle to stay there. The organ music accompanying their appearances also gets a bit much, especially in the extended final sequence of Episode 3, where Jamie’s trapped with a sleepy Macra (was it written that way before or after they knew how immobile it would be?) and the Doctor’s trying to work out how to divert the gas that will revive it. Especially without the full pictures, this sequence feels rather stretched out, as if they want to emphasise that the Doctor’s doing something clever and want to get their money’s worth out of the huge Macra. It’s the size of a car; it cost as much as a car; it moves as much as a snail.

Though the threat of something horrible being behind Control is more effective than seeing the ‘something horrible’ itself and the story is as a result more ‘creepy’ than ‘scary’, it still works by being more about the ‘idea’ of Macra than having a pitched battle with the things. The author apparently started with the notion of what happens when you get different life forms with irreconcilable life cycles, but that’s not really how the story works. There’s no explanation for the Macra save that they’re there, in Control, and dependent on the gas. They’re crab-like, but variously described as like insects or bacteria, and we don’t know if they’re invaders, the original inhabitants of the planet usurped by humans and driven underground, or creatures that were always underground and parasitically using human technology to colonise the surface (we don’t even find out how their control started – do their boggly eyes have hypnotic powers?). None of that matters, as the Macra aren’t there as characters, or even as the usual sort of monsters: they’re there for the impact they have on the Colony, in jolly music, regimentation, repression, terror and madness. With their human opponents locked up as mental cases, the Doctor turns the metaphor inside out by comparing the Macra to a disease (handy for killing them all, you might add) of the brain, an infection to be surgically removed – albeit with a big bang – in the same way they prescribe for dissidents. The Doctor treats them as if they are the Colony’s psychosis made manifest, and in that way they remain effective. Though they’re not able to do much except insinuation – ironic, as they’re probably the physically largest monsters in the series to that point – that’s the whole point of the story, as they’re aided by the Colony not wanting their ideas or comfortable way of life challenged. The Macra are an idea; they’re the personification of the Colony’s problems, which is why there really are no such things as Macra.

So, Does It All End in an Explosion?

It only remains to look at the climax. Well, the story stumbles slightly as it builds up to the finale, with Control ordering that the entire Colony is to gather together while our heroes are locked in with the gas pipes; it turns out that this is just a rather over-the-top way for the Colony not to witness the Doctor and his friends being gassed and to handily get the guards out of the way so Ben, still on the loose as a theoretically loyal subject of Control, can decide which side he’s on and blow up the Macra with no-one to stop him. That seems a little contrived, even with Control in a panic – it had never worried about witnesses before, and for a few minutes gathering every controlled human together seems like the Macra may have decided they’re more trouble than they’re worth and to kill the lot. That threat never materialises, which gives a moment of anti-climax before Ben satisfyingly resolves his inner dilemma to get the story back on track, with Control implicitly at last admitting the existence of Macra in their final despairing cry that the pressure will be unbearable – “for human beings as well!”

While many stories fade away in an unconvincing outbreak of spontaneous goodness and light among former oppressors, The Macra Terror remains insidious to the last. The climactic explosion cuts to more of that bloody music, with the cheerleaders leading another big celebration. You may well wonder if anything has actually changed, with this rather suggestive of a Nazi rally to celebrate the fall of Berlin. Perhaps they’re just adjusting to life by pretending none of it happened, but if so, what lesson have they learned? The Pilot announces a festival with a ‘Strangers’ Trophy’ to be held in the Doctor and his friends’ honour every year, which again has an initial ‘awwhh, that’s nice’ moment before you realise that they still want to assimilate our heroes into their society. The point is driven home by Ben, strolling up to the Doctor – with giant crabs disposed of, this time he’s the one who’s fallen for the Colony’s charms, lazing about with a drum majorette’s hat on (another Inspiral Carpets link?) – to warn him that:

“I just heard it on the grapevine. They’re going to draft us as members of the Colony, and make you the next Pilot.”
“Oh, they can’t do that to me! Let’s get out of here.”

So, they dance their way to the Colony exit and leave without a word. This Doctor does tend to slip off without saying goodbye, but it’s difficult not to conclude that he’s doing it here in order to escape rather than to avoid a scene. The Colony may now have self-determination at last, but they’re still not as nice a bunch as they look: evidently, they still assume they know what’s best for everyone and should compel them to obey that model. While the Doctor may have sorted out their biggest problem, there is still the problem of ‘ordinary’ society: colonists with a taste for freedom still have work to do. In the end, the Macra ‘Terror’ is less about how terrifying the Macra themselves are and more about the terror of having to decide your life for yourself, when it’s easier to go with the (gas) flow.

Far from being just another story of bug-eyed monsters, even though their eyes do indeed stick out on big stalks, The Macra Terror is a disturbingly satirical tale pulled off in style by a great cast. Funny, jolly, serious, intelligent and firing at authoritarian political targets of all kinds, it takes what even by 1967 was a very traditional Doctor Who outline and brings it to life in an original and entertaining way. It even beats The Prisoner to the punch by several months and in a considerably more coherent way, as well as resolving the contradictions in the character of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor: ‘free your mind’ and ‘destroy all monsters’ are part of the same message if you take the monsters less as exciting scary objects for the kids, but as metaphors of control for the adults (if Doctor Who does that these days, it’s called ‘borrowing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’). There are few ‘missing’ stories I’d be keener to have restored to the BBC Archive, wishing I could see everything right from that sinister opening close-up of Medok’s eyes. In the meantime, get hold of the BBC CD and a Reconstruction, and enjoy.

Or, if you’re still not convinced that Doctor Who is the greatest fantasy series to come out of the ’60s, late tonight on BBC2 there’s Star Trek’s own immensely subtle dystopian story from 1967: The Apple, with a giant papier-maché snake (did you see what they did there?), David Soul in a ludicrous wig and ‘What is this Earth thing called love?’

Labels: Books, Conrad Russell, Doctor Who, In-Depth Doctor Who, Liberalism, Patrick Troughton, Peter Jeffrey, Recons, Reviews, The Macra Terror, Utopia