Love and Liberty

Doctor Who has always been political. From the very start, the Doctor has fought fascism and stood up for freedom. But you wouldn’t know it from the periodic explosions from some fans or media headlines that the series has been ‘ruined’ by ‘suddenly’ turning Social Justice Warrior.

It’s not new. Fifty-four years ago tonight, the SJW Doctor upset a bunch of fans who just didn’t get it, condemned an unequal society, and gave the villain a piece of his mind.

“The sacrifice of even one soul is far too great! You must put an end to this inhuman practice.”

To Begin With…

Doctor Who – The Savages Episode 2 was first broadcast on June 4th, 1966. The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his companions Steven and Dodo have landed in what’s claimed to be an age of great peace and prosperity, but not everyone seems to be enjoying it. In the ‘civilised’, technologically advanced City, people profit from great vitality with no cost, contented as long as they ask no questions. In the wilderness outside, cave-dwellers age before their time. What could be the City’s terrible secret? …Yes, the twist came in Episode 1 of four. But there are two interesting things left (and one awkward one), and, surprisingly, Episode 2 is the exciting part.

The Savages is not an especially well-known story. It might be the most forgotten of Doctor Who’s largely forgotten third season – perhaps because it has no ‘monsters’ (at least, not to look it; keep The Dark Crystal in the back of your mind), perhaps because it was novelised very late in the range, perhaps because it was one of too many Doctor Who stories the BBC transmitted in the 1960s and then burnt (yes, I know). All of them survive as soundtracks recorded at home, usually with an assortment of photos to give a taste of what they may have looked like, but aside from a handful which have recently been animated to give them a new lease of life, they’re not as accessible as stories that move about a bit. And speaking personally, it was the Classic Who story I came to ‘see’ last and have probably watched least.

Particularly in these future times that don’t even pretend to great peace and prosperity, I try to find something cheering to Tweet each day. And not being one for uplifting mottos, the easiest prompt for me is to find the anniversary of a Doctor Who story or something else I enjoy and Tweet something interesting about it. Last week I had a look through some old notes from when I last watched The Savages in search of inspiration, and (slightly to my surprise) I found it. So this piece started off as a Twitter thread this time last week, which I’ve collated and polished and expanded here into something not quite an article, but which is now appallingly topical…

For many years, all I knew about The Savages was what I’d read in one-paragraph summaries in programme guides – and, a bit like Galaxy 4 at the top end of the same season, it’s a simple story with bold moral (but a complicated way of showing it) which when I eventually came to watch it, I found out there’s not a lot more to it than the one-paragraph pitch. But there is a bit more. The first thing about it is that it’s got several Doctor Who ‘firsts’ (even though most of them are more memorably done later).

A Few Doctor Who ‘Firsts’

This is the tail end of Doctor Who’s third season, a hefty way in for most series, but this Episode 2 is the first not to have a new title of its own. Up until now, modern viewers would recognise the way it’s been: from 1963 on, every episode had had its own title, no matter how long or short the story it’s part of. The Savages Episode 2 sets the pattern right up until the end of Classic Who: ‘Story Title + Episode X’.

Not an absolutely fascinating fact? Well, how about this: The Savages is the first Doctor Who story to have location filming at a quarry somewhere in England which, by the magic of television, becomes an alien world (and, by the magic of critics, becomes a cliché).

It’s the first Doctor Who script by Ian Stuart Black, a major TV writer who only contributes three Who stories, but all within a year. While his first here is a bit middling, his second is considerably more exciting (and influential in its own ways), while his third, The Macra Terror, is one of my all-time favourites (and one of those burnt stories now thrillingly recreated by animation).

And perhaps most significantly for the series’ continuing moral development, while it may not be a huge leap from what’s gone before, this is firmly the first story where the Doctor could leave but chooses instead to stay, save people and fight ‘human’ oppressors as he does Daleks. It’s also in its own way the show’s first vampire story (spoiler, but that’s already obvious in last week’s episode), though like most of Doctor Who’s many vampiric tales, it avoids using the V-word.

Where Fans Miss the Point

I feel bad for criticising “fans”. I love Doctor Who fans. I am one. I married one. And Doctor Who made such an impact on my life that one of my best-known articles remains How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal. But there are some fans who seem to have watched Doctor Who without ever thinking about it for a single second, and who shout hateful politics that are the utter antithesis of the Doctor’s. I wonder if this story made a deliberate point as far back as 1966 – perhaps not about Doctor Who, but about how people watch ‘message’ TV and even when it makes its message so blatant that critics roll their eyes, some viewers still just don’t get it.

When I first watched Babylon 5 (another deliberately, institutionally liberal science fiction series) back in the ’90s, one early episode was the butt of criticism. Infection had a bad reputation as preachy, unsubtle and generic. It has several morals of the week (one at the end almost direct to camera), but the central one was so very heavy-handed that I remembered it with eye-rolls of my own. As if we needed to be told racial supremacists are bad! Rewatching it in the last couple of years, I thought, ‘No! It was too subtle! Louder! With diagrams! Neon letters ten metres tall!’ Because we haven’t learned a bloody thing! And The Savages has a very obvious moral that it seems could do with diagrams and neon letters ten metres tall even after the Doctor explains it pretty much direct to camera.

In earlier drafts, this story started as a racial allegory, which changed to became more generally applicable… But the make-up on the City-dwellers is awkward (it’s not exactly black-face for ‘role reversal’, but it’s not quite not; their leader seems to have by far the heaviest make-up, so it might imply a ‘tanned’, super-healthy look, like Dracula’s ruddy glow after feeding). I grew up knowing this sort of information from those one-paragraph synopses which told me pretty much everything. Except they all made the same crass mistakes.

The City-dwellers are not named “the Elders”.

Yes, some of the City-dwellers are indeed titled that. The rest of them aren’t called anything in particular. But… A clue: if you didn’t know the name of the city where I live, but you knew Sadiq Khan’s title, the people who live here would still not be called ‘the Mayors’.

That’s not the crass bit.

This is a story of rough-looking cave-dwellers exploited by ‘civilised’ City people. It’s an allegory. You see, I explain patronisingly, the ones who appear ‘civilised’ are, if you think about it, in a shock twist…
You might think I’m hammering the point home way too heavily. But despite neither peoples being named, leaving it to the viewer / listener to find the answer for themselves who the title of the story fits, ‘Who are the real “Savages” here?’ (it was the Sixties)…
In neon letters ten metres tall, for the avoidance of doubt: the conclusion this serial is subtly guiding viewers towards is that brutally draining the life-essence from people conveniently defined as not really people is savagery. Trying to live despite long violence and exploitation crushing your culture is not.

The City people are the real “Savages” here.
[Take a breather, rub your nose after I was too on it]

Yet in a triumph for unthinking literalism, every fan and book synopsis – even the soundtrack CD narration – labels the cave-dwellers “the savages”.
Headdesk.

All of which made it a thing of utter joy when I looked at this adventure and realised that the story’s villains who fail to see the problem here are the first in-universe Doctor Who fans. The City people have followed the Doctor’s travels and think he’s brilliant! They’ve even given him their own fan-fic title: “The Traveller From Beyond Time”. But they’ve never wondered if, just maybe, the things he says might apply to them.

The City’s Elders are nice, comfortable, polite people who put their robes on the Doctor and expect our hero to praise their way of life. They think he’ll literally fit in. They’re appalled when, instead of protecting their feelings, the Doctor first asks awkward questions and then compares them to the Daleks. The Savages might be better-remembered had the Elders looked like the Skeksis, but then they’d be much less uncomfortable for the viewer. If it were made today, an affronted Jano would be asking, ‘But, Doctor, don’t you think #CityLivesMatter?’

I love William Hartnell’s blazing righteous anger. You can see why some don’t.
No utopia can tolerate people asking difficult questions.
It’s always far worse to hurt people’s feelings by calling them out than it is for them to actually hurt, exploit and murder others.
From a certain point of view.

“We do not understand you, Doctor… How can you condemn this great artistic and scientific civilisation because of a few wretched barbarians?”

“So your rewards are only for the people that agree with you?”

“No! No, of course not… But if you are going to oppose us—”

“Oppose you? Indeed I am going to oppose you – just in the same way that I opposed the Daleks or any other menace to common humanity.”

“I’m sorry you take this attitude, Doctor. It is most unscientific. You are standing in the way of human progress.”

“Human progress, sir! How dare you call your treatment of these people ‘progress’?”

“They are hardly people, Doctor. They are not like us.”

“I fail to see the difference.”

“Do you not realise that all progress is based on exploitation?”

“Exploitation, indeed! This, sir, is protracted murder!”

“We have achieved a very great deal merely by the sacrifice of a few savages.”

“The sacrifice of even one soul is far too great! You must put an end to this inhuman practice.”

Nobody likes being called a monster, but in this story, the Daleks look just like us, and when he makes them uncomfortable they immediately turn on their hero, the Doctor. So by the end, the only answer it to smash it all up.

Doctor Who: being ruined for some fans by the Doctor being an SJW since 1966.

Bigger On the Inside

After this terrific impassioned moment, the story has a certain amount of trouble filling its second half, but it has one more great idea: the City-dwellers have long been draining and living off the energy, creativity, intelligence and life-force of the wilderness people. City leader Jano orders the Doctor to the vampiric lab and consumes his essence. But the Doctor is especially vivid…

Jano failed to get the point of Doctor Who as a viewer and fan, but on absorbing the Doctor directly he finally starts to think ‘What would the Doctor do?’ Because the Doctor’s essence is bigger on the inside. Though we don’t get nearly enough Hartnell later, we do get brilliant flashes of Hartnell from Frederick Jaeger as the Doctor’s life and morals struggle with his own (in a reverse-Buffy, the victim possessing the vampire). And that makes you feel what Doctor Who is about.

Plus, the Doctor carries his “reacting vibrator”, which is always entertaining.


If you’re intrigued, later stories engaging with similar ideas range from The Tenth Planet just a few months later (which expands from a vampire society to a whole vampire planet, and with mummy-wrapped zombies to make it memorable) to 1977’s The Face of Evil (two peoples split in a more interesting way though this time not really either of their faults, with the opposite ending where, rather than the Doctor leaving a natural leader to help from outside, leaves with the natural leader because she doesn’t want to be the chosen one) and then to 2011’s The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People (where some people count as human while those they exploit don’t, and the process makes another Doctor who makes life uncomfortable).




This is the third of what might be a series of Fragments – not-quite-finished, not-quite-polished, from ideas I’ve written up over time and maybe I’ll share some of them anyway. If you’d like more, please let me know, and if you’d like to help, please ask me, ‘Have you at some point written something intriguing about Story / Series X, and could you find it, consider it and post it?’ You might suggest one that I can (TS;RM [Too Short; Read More]? Here). This one was partially inspired by Iain Coleman, who asked for comedy historical Hartnells, and while I’ve not exactly got there, one out of three’s a start.

Labels: Babylon 5, Doctor Who, Fragments, Liberalism, The Dark Crystal, The Savages, William Hartnell

Introducing Doctor Who – The Rescue…

A poor orphaned waif with a forbidding guardian, waiting to see if their ship will ever come in. The sinister figure that terrorises her while claiming to be her protector. This is Doctor Who at its most Dickensian – set on an alien world four hundred years in the future, first on TV fifty-two years ago today. Time for New Year stress and resolution in this 1965 tale that’s small but perfectly formed at the length of a 2017 episode. Maureen O’Brien debuts as the series’ first ‘new companion’, comforted by William Hartnell’s Doctor at his most delightful and menaced by Sydney Wilson’s dastardly Koquillion…

I’m anxious but excited. As chance would have it, a story from exactly fifty-two years ago marks the turning point in my Doctor Who 52. I initially started offering an exciting variety of Doctor Who stories in an idiosyncratic order to run through the year, one every week, inspired by the fifty-second anniversary in November 2015. When my health collapsed beyond even its usual state, that all juddered to a halt. I started again in November 2016, only to end up in hospital soon after. I’m still in a lot of pain, I’m still very unhappy about it, and my health has still yet to recover anywhere near pitiful Alex-normal. But not wanting to be beaten, I somehow buckled down and have now very nearly caught up to where my calendar tells me I should be (Ten Reasons and one Extra still waiting). So far, most of the blog posts I’ve published in this series have been ones that I originally wrote a year ago, which I’ve re-read, rewritten and republished as repeats Special Editions. On Christmas Day I published my first entirely new 52 article. Now, at New Year, I’ve come to the very last one I’d prepared earlier. I hope you enjoy The Rescue, and wish me luck at this new start: I’m getting no more help from my past incarnations. From now on I’ll be on my own.

The Rescue is available on DVD and through BBC Store. Read on here, or just press Play. If you’ve never seen it but my first few reasons to watch it entice you, then, really, press Play. And while usually I’d take the DVD over BBC Store like a shot (extras, picture quality, not seizing up and needing a restart every time you pause it…), one very good reason simply to press Play this time and one advantage BBC Store has by missing something is the DVD menu. Usually the menus on Doctor Who DVDs have a mix of tantalising moments from the story, like an ambient trailer; that’s how the main menu works here, but the Special Features sub-menu is just one continuous clip of the climax. There are some preposterous decisions elsewhere in the range, but this probably wins the ‘What were they thinking‽’ award for most random and complete spoiler. So when I say there are spoilers lower down my list this time, I mean it…

Ten Reasons To Watch The Rescue (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – It’s the ideal Doctor Who for New Year.

The Rescue is a bit of a new start, but not too much. It’s not too complicated, but has a refreshing twist. It’s small and manageable both in the scale of the action and in lasting just fifty minutes across two snack-sized episodes. And even our heroes get to sleep some of it off.

While The Rescue didn’t start a new season, it was first broadcast on January 2nd, 1965, and it’s perfectly pitched for new viewers to jump on board with the new companion. We see the TARDIS materialise – literally a beacon of light throughout – before we see within, always crucial in making us appreciate that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, and the small cast gives us much more time with all the characters. Most of all, we get to know newcomer Vicki, and we get to know the Doctor all over again. Written by original Doctor Who lead writer David Whitaker, this is quietly the series’ first relaunch. Of course, the honest New Year Doctor Who would be Resurrection of the Daleks (massive overindulgence followed by regret and resolutions that you’ll break immediately and double down instead) then The Twin Dilemma (the awful hangover)…

“We can travel anywhere and everywhere in that old box, as you call it. Regardless of space and time.”
“Then it is a time machine?”
“And if you like adventure, my dear, I can promise you an abundance of it.”

2 – Vicki is the first new companion.

…And the story goes as far as it can to make that easy on the viewers – or, rather, to make us go easy on her. When we first met the Doctor, it was through his granddaughter Susan, a mystery for her schoolteachers Ian and Barbara to follow. But Susan fell in love and out of the TARDIS in the previous story. How would the Doctor take to someone else? How would we get used to a new teenage face in the show? And what could bring her on board? She’s not another relative, and while the Doctor effectively kidnapped Ian and Barbara, that was bundled up with the role-reversal on teachers who know nothing, and not something a kinder, gentler Doctor could do to a teenage girl. The producers nearly brought on board a gutsy young freedom-fighter from the previous story, but instead chose to go quite the other way. They pull out all the stops to make us feel sorry for her and want her looked after.

Vicki seems, to begin with, much younger and less capable than Susan. Maureen O’Brien – here beginning an impressive career, though thanks to a forgotten early work of Andrew Davies’ I grew up thinking of her as an evil witch-nun – plays her with huge eyes, a waif-like form and outfit, and just enough pluck that she doesn’t make the audience wonder why on Dido she’d want an abundance of adventure after spending every scene cowering. Today Vicki is easy to read as abused or at least crushed by her multiple bereavements and oppressive semi-guardian – she’s young and full of hope that’s ever cowed, he’s dark and brooding and rains on every parade – and to see how after being adopted into a friendlier sort of family she’s going to gain the self-confidence of a cheeky teen anarchist (though inconsistent writing – or PTSD – will give her wild mood swings between the two as her stories continue).

But for now, Vicki sets a template that will often be repeated for new companions, and which I once sarcastically labelled ‘Daddy was a lord, but he’s dead now’. Her mother has died, so her father takes her away to make a new home on a colony world. But their ship crashes on the inhospitable planet Dido, so they don’t get to their new home. And then her father dies too. Not just him, but a massive explosion that takes out every other person she knows, except one. And he doesn’t like her. So there is literally no-one on this planet who loves and will look after her. She seems the most thoroughly orphaned person possible (until the show eventually takes this to extremes with Nyssa), and the Doctor and his friends spend most of the story getting to know and befriend her, so by the end of the story there can be no possible objection to her choosing – and she is very carefully given a choice and time to choose it – to leave on the TARDIS. Just to make sure we get the point that she is utterly and totally destined to be the new companion, she even introduces herself to Barbara twice. The second time spelling out her name, letter by letter.




3 – The Rescue reintroduces the Doctor too.

Even more effectively than it introduces Vicki, The Rescue gives us fresh angles on the Doctor. In a subtly reworked role that retains all of William Hartnell’s intelligence and authority but allows him to be kindlier and funnier, suddenly the Doctor twinkles. This is a great place to start for Mr Hartnell, showcasing just how versatile the Doctor could be and will be from now on – stern, affectionate, vulnerable, incisive, embarrassed, and often comic here, too. People often dismiss the youngest Doctor – the one looking like the oldest man – as a grumpy old thing, not least because when we first see him he’s terrific but not kind in running rings round his companions. He takes a while to warm or warm to, and longer to seem trustworthy. Yet I can’t think of another Doctor with more facets. This story doesn’t so much soften the Doctor’s character as give him a chance to shine in many different ways, not least as the only person who sees everything that’s going on in the story. I love Billy for his speeches and his passion, and there’s plenty of that here. At the climax of the story, he follows previous ‘courtroom’ triumphs with a stunning confrontation in a majestic Hall of Judgement. But by then he’s already charmed budding companion Vicki with his understanding, then been chuffed to bits overhearing how much she already likes and trusts him. He promises her he’ll be diplomatic… Which last about ten seconds before – though he’s the last Doctor of whom you’d expect it – he picks up a girder to use as a battering ram and determines on breaking a door down.

William Hartnell turned a powerful acting presence learned as the stern sergeants and ruthless crooks of his film career into the perversely authoritative anti-establishment Doctor… But he also had great comic timing, and his vulnerability in a character role inspired producer Verity Lambert to make him the Doctor. Both are on full display here. The show needs us to move on from Susan, but the Doctor can’t forget his granddaughter just yet; rarely do we see the Doctor so quietly hurt as when he starts to ask her to open the doors here, and falters, Barbara gently offering help instead. Before long he’s showing he’s sharp as ever to Ian, then wondering if he can get away with pretending he landed on Dido deliberately before remembering that he did it in his sleep, playfully undercutting the danger of his becoming a know-it-all. On the surface, The Rescue may be designed to repair the ensemble cast by introducing a replacement fourth member, but compare it with a year earlier and it’s not just the teenager who’s changed, nor even the Doctor’s character that’s evolved – it’s not an ensemble any more. He’s the Doctor. The ‘new companion’ makes it clear that the others are just that: his companions. If there was ever a doubt who was the star, there isn’t now.




4 – Alien Design.

This is a small, cheap story, but designer Raymond Cusick – who created the series’ first alien world – carefully chooses where to put detail that fills in a civilisation. Though his big alien beastie here isn’t a patch on his Daleks, the various stylised representations of it are fabulous. Massive carvings draw your attention from bare rock walls; pillars give shape and purpose to the Hall of Judgement, transforming it from a big empty space to the eerie, majestic heart of the story, aided by smoke and (reused but atmospheric) musique concrète. And the alien figure of Koquillion, all leering tarantula-faced bristles and tusks with the manner and mendacity of a wicked Dickensian stepfather, is decidedly creepy every time he comes to call and tell Vicki not to go far from the crashed ship, or he might not be able to protect her from his people…


5 – The Doctor’s sympathy versus Barbara’s exasperation.

One of the biggest changes in the Doctor since the series started a year before is that he’s now much more concerned for and tactile with his companions, no longer just with his departed granddaughter. In their first scene together here, the two teachers are worried; she’s noticed that the vibration of flight has ceased, meaning that for the first time, the Doctor’s slept through a landing. They rouse him and he comes to, embarrassed but charmingly tactile with his friends, pretty much giving each of them a hug, so when Barbara breaks his flow to try and tell him what’s happened, he jumps wonderfully to the wrong conclusion and clasps her hand to his breast in concern and delight. Then he’s more embarrassed when he realises what she actually meant…

“Oh, but Doctor, the trembling’s stopped.”
“Oh, my dear! I’m so glad you’re feeling better. Hmm!”
“No, not me – the Ship!”
“Oh, the— Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.”

6 – The Doctor’s knowledge versus Ian’s exasperation.

Ian and Barbara have developed since the of the series, too. This time, everyone’s favourite Coal Hill Schoolteachers go off exploring, while the Doctor dozes in the Ship. But when they’re menaced by Koquillion, Barbara’s toppled from a cliff and Ian caught in a rock fall, the Doctor springs out to help… Only to wind Ian up by knowing considerably more than he does, despite as far as Ian is concerned having only been outside for a moment while he was out risking his neck exploring.

“Oh, there was this – thing, this repulsive thing with a – hideous face.”
“With hands and feet like claws?”
“Yes, that’s it. How do you know?”
“Well, this is the planet Dido. I’ve been here before. I know them very well.”
“What?”
“They’re very friendly people.”
“Friendly?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! It wasn’t friendly to us.”
“…This thing. Was it armed?”
“No, no, it wasn’t. Wait a minute… It was carrying – some sort of – jewelled club. About so long.”
“With a big head? Resembling a spanner?”
“I don’t know why you bother to ask.”

The Doctor gives him a quick glance up and down and tells him no bones broken, but somehow Ian doesn’t seem to mean it on thanking him for “The most thoroughgoing medical I’ve ever had.”

Though the Doctor gets an exasperated moment of his own later, as the two of them clamber across a narrow rock face in the dark and then, as if that wasn’t enough to put up with, hear a roar from ahead of them. Ian sticks the torch right in the Doctor’s face.

“What was that?”
“Well, it’s not me, is it? Shine the torch down there!”

7 – Making you think about time travel (and tact) for yourself.

Charmed by the Doctor, Vicki has started to bond with Ian and Barbara, so they start to exchange confidences: Vicki about her loneliness, and the two teachers about their travels. Ian tells Vicki that their spaceship travels through time as well. Barbara tells her that they left in 1963, instantly regretting it.

“1963! But that means you’re about – five hundred and fifty years old!”
“Well, yes, I – I suppose I am. Yes, it’s a way of looking at it, but I’ll try not to look at it too often.”

The camera lingers first on Vicki calculating, then Barbara trying not to look monstrously offended – in the fragile moment of still feeling very in the wrong just after Vicki’s forgiven her – while Ian covers his mouth and chokes with laughter in the background. And all neatly reintroducing the series’ concepts, and letting the viewer go, ‘Hang on – no – that’s not right – let me work it out…’ while Babs is writhing in embarrassment and elbowing her long-term companion in the ribs, before Vicki drops another clanger on the contemporary audience, too:

“They didn’t have time machines in 1963. They didn’t know anything then.”

The same conversation gets one of my favourite moments in the book, similarly making us think:

“‘Oh, come on, you’re imagining things, Barbara Wright,’ Ian laughed. ‘You’re as bad as that awful little Tracey Pollock in 3B!’
‘Tracey Pollock . . .’ Barbara murmured. Coal Hill School suddenly seemed a million miles away. In fact it was a great deal further and long since buried beneath the Metropolitan Disposal Plant.”

8 – The double (or single) entendre.

Ian Chesterton at one point calls the villain “Cocky-lickin’”. I suspect it’s only that William Russell seems so sober and respectable and that Ian is written as the most reassuringly ‘straight’ of all the Doctor’s companions that he ever got away with it. It’s almost as bare-faced as one of the stories in the first ever Dr Who Annual, published the same year, being titled The Fishmen of Kandalinga. In later years The Rescue was also described by one infamous guidebook as being set on the planet “Dildo”, which I knew people were finding funny some time before I understood why. But it’s Ian Marter’s novelisation that’s mostly likely to make you gasp. It was the book he was writing just before his untimely death, and I can’t help but wonder if he inserted some passages as a gag, expecting his editor to take them out, and then the editor didn’t want to change any of his last book. Right on the first page, a character sniggers at the script’s time-reading of “sixty-nine” flying hours until they reach Dido, which was so blatant that I spotted it even as a surprisingly innocent teenager, while in Chapter 5 there’s so much manipulating of oily, lubed rings that when I re-read the novel later in life I immediately re-re-read it back again to be sure those were really the words.


9 – A very Doctor Who moral: don’t judge by appearances.

The Doctor and Ian struggle to avoid a howling Sand Beast at the cliffhanger (both episodes end with pretty much literal cliffhangers). We see a Sand Beast staring at Vicki with its big shining eyes on stalks as she innocently goes about finding shrubs to eat, then lumbering forward. And Barbara sees that too. So she seizes the crashed ship’s flare gun and runs out of the wreck to blast it in the head (which Ian Marter’s novelisation describes tastefully as a “smouldering toffee-like blob”, after cheating rather in the build-up). Its keening death wail is rather distressing for the viewer, but worse for Vicki: “Sandy” was herbivorous and her only comfort as a pet, and now this becardiganed murderer has killed him! Alien-looking doesn’t mean nasty, human-looking doesn’t mean nice, Barbara and Vicki between them have to learn both lessons, then poor Vicki is slowly brought to understand and forgive her by the Doctor listening to and trusting the orphan to make her own choices. You can see her realising how much better an alternative guardian he’d make…


10 – The two-faced guardian.

And finally, the big twist. The Rescue is sometimes described as a whodunnit, but of course the point is that it only becomes that once you know who’s done it. You don’t even think of it like that when you can see the monster Koquillion played, as always, by a man in a monster suit all the way through. The glowering Victorian authority figure, the only other survivor after the wicked alien natives killed all the crew at a feast of welcome – but somehow managed to kill all their own people in the explosion too – had murdered a crew member on the voyage and everything else was his attempt to rescue himself. Vicki was ill in her cabin and didn’t know, so he dressed in Didoi robes made from local animal skulls to menace her as Koquillion, personification and maligner of the beastly natives, setting her up as witness to Dido’s cruel, murderous and conveniently unable to answer back inhabitants for when a ship arrives from Earth to rescue them both. It’s an entertaining dual performance from Ray Barrett – double-credited behind a portmanteau pseudonym of Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson, two of Doctor Who’s co-creators – though outshone by William Hartnell. The Doctor’s been enchanting right through the story – but now he sits like a marble statue in the Hall of Judgment of a slaughtered people to wait for the killer. And while the murderer made me think of Dickens throughout, the Doctor’s intellect and the plot he unmasks reminds me of Conan Doyle’s The Norwood Builder.

There are few scenes in Doctor Who that make me sit up and pay attention so keenly as when the Doctor, not turning but eyes racing as Koquillion enters the Hall, calls for him to come in. The atmosphere’s already electric, and then – casually, conversationally, because both of them know, so there’s no need to announce it, and because that way the audience is all the more likely to go ‘What? What did he say?’ – the Doctor informs him by his real name that such robes are only for absolutely ceremonial occasions. And from then on everything about the scene is relentless.

The Doctor doesn’t shrink from the ‘alien’, but he backs away as something far more sinister – an evil man – closes in on him. A betrayer, a cruel tormenter, a genocidal mass murderer, a rotten heart of darkness. Someone who always finds the ‘other’ to blame to cover up his own foulness, who exploits the person he poses as protecting and terrifies them into siding with him, who will throw aside anyone at all for his own gain. Under the pretence, this is someone horribly familiar. Though ironically the man in a monster suit looks far more effective than the monster of the week, fans have often speculated why, in a later story, the Doctor’s visions of past monsters as part of his inner fears should include an image of Koquillion, because he wasn’t even a monster. I wonder if they’ve ever watched it.

What Else Should I Tell You About The Rescue?

I’ve always thought The Rescue a lovely little story, not quite one I’d put in my ‘best of’ countdowns but played, written and directed so neatly that I can’t help enjoying myself more every time I watch it. It was only the second William Hartnell story I ever saw – brought along by an older friend to a bootleg showing by some university club in Manchester – and it opened my eyes to how endearing a character he was. I still remember falling in love with his comedy scenes at the start, and his shy delight on overhearing Vicki talking about him. There are a couple of moments that don’t work – a monster that tries to break up the human form and really doesn’t succeed, and the Didoi being defined as another ‘Planet of the Hats’ people who all think the same way – but it’s a neatly-formed story, well-told, and gently relaunches the Doctor and the series while handling its first big change, all at the length of a modern Doctor Who episode, a rarity in the Sixties. You can buy it in a double-DVD set with the more comedy-toned The Romans which I’ve heard called, but which you sadly won’t find labelled as, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vicki’.

Ian Marter’s novelisation has a very different flavour to the TV version – where 1965’s The Rescue is a small-scale story with an innocence that’s marred by one terrible betrayal, 1987’s reworking takes place in a much more cynical universe and expands the action considerably. The rescue ship is very of its time, going from an occasional voice on the radio to scenes on an explicitly American spacecraft – a “heap of Reaganium” – whose crew are shaken by the TARDIS and snap, “Don’t press my button!” It all makes the subtext of the damage done by ‘settlers’ to Native Americans much more the text, linking it to gung-ho ’80s US military clichés and, with the author seizing on the original serial’s New Year broadcast dates, giving a bitter festive commentary on the show’s hopeful ending. Not all the humour is so black – the Tracey Pollock moment always makes me smile, and the Doctor gets several new entertaining lines, particularly an incisively bitchy comment on the villain’s story and at the TARDIS’ next destination – while Dido is given a feel of ruined grandeur and horror at the end of a civilisation well beyond the TV’s budget. The science is rather dodgy, but the main flaw for me is that the structure falls down badly in the second half; as with the innuendos, I suspect Target Books’ editor didn’t want to alter the text of Ian Marter’s final book, but when the story comes to a head and the climax is then deferred for forty pages of sub-sub-Tolkien ruins and giant beasties, it could have done with another draft. You can buy it on audiobook, read by Maureen O’Brien in a warm, intimate style, with a vulnerable Vicki and an endearingly querulous Doctor.

And, if you need one, my score:

8/10

If You Like The Rescue, Why Not Try…

The Evil of the Daleks, utterly marvellous, another script from David Whitaker, introducing the exemplar of the companion as Victorian orphan innocent of her sinister sort-of-guardian. And much more. Voyage of the Damned, another Christmas hangover with an ill-fated ship and a blatant companion audition piece, with a twist. The Ambassadors of Death, another tale of aliens who aren’t really hostile being used as cover by scheming humans. Dragonfire, a refreshing change to the timid Victorian orphan companion trope and another fearsome monster concealing something unexpected. But to stay with something short for the New Year…

The Sontaran Experiment. Another brisk two-part story set on a rocky wasteland of a world where the population’s extinct – or is it? – and we meet the survivors of a destroyed spaceship, one of whom is not what they seem, all of which is later greatly extended by an Ian Marter novelisation.

Next Time…

The Christmas hangover’s not quite over yet – but assuming I go back to finish a couple of still-tasty leftovers, and with the still bigger assumption that I manage to go on writing…

Another new companion is caught up in a whodunnit that’s not really a whodunnit and finds both that humans can be more alienating than the aliens and that stepping on board the TARDIS and leaving it all behind was only the start of her problems.

Labels: Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, New Year, Personal, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, The Rescue, William Hartnell

Introducing Doctor Who – Home Truths…

A ghost story for Christmas featuring one of Doctor Who’s shortest-lived companions as the heartbeat of one of its most intimate and personal tales. Jean Marsh recreates Sara Kingdom for this creepy Big Finish audio two-hander (3.05 in their Companion Chronicles series) where she poses a challenge to church, state and listener simply by being there. For all that she and the visiting Night Constable scoff at fairy tales, she embodies perhaps the oldest fairytale lesson of all…

“There’s a house across the waters at Ely where an old woman tells a strange story.”

Five Reasons To Listen To Home Truths (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – Sara Kingdom.

From the beginning of December 1965 to the end of January 1966 – but also from the year 4000 – Jean Marsh played Space Security Agent Sara Kingdom in Doctor Who. It may have been a short time for her character on TV, but she made an impact. Ms Marsh is possibly the Doctor Who star with the most glittering career; Agent Kingdom was a startling change from the Doctor’s other companions; and the end of her story is still talked about today, even though it’s long gone and you can no longer see it, just listen. Sara Kingdom reluctantly teamed up with William Hartnell’s Doctor and his friend Steven Taylor, after first being sent to kill them – and in a sort of shocking sort of The Apprentice twist, killing another of the Doctor’s companions to get there, who haunts her still. In many ways she seems a New Adventures companion long before her time: hard as nails; personal tragedy and betrayal; always the shadow of the Daleks and death hanging over her; but some part of her always remains, because she travelled with the Doctor. Sara died an old woman, but there’s still no time after her travels for the Doctor for more adventures. So the most obvious way to bring her back is to give her an exciting Space Security Agent adventure before she ever met the Doctor (see “Lost Story” The Destroyers, also from Big Finish). Older, sadder, gentler, Home Truths is not the obvious way to bring Sara back…




2 – Is she or isn’t she?

“Hear the old woman’s story. Then decide her fate.”

Fans argue. And one of the oldest fan debates in Doctor Who is whether or not Sara Kingdom counts as a ‘real’ companion. She travelled in the TARDIS. But only for one story. But it was a very long one. But not even for all of that. But she deserves it. And so on. Or in later years, are the Doctor Who stories that begin as books or, here, CDs ‘real’ stories? To ask the question is to miss something about stories, for me, and while I make lists and write about esoteric story points too, those two questions aren’t ones that engage me, so perhaps I’m predisposed to take one side within this story. Because Home Truths itself takes such questions and ambiguities and weaves a story out of the very criticisms that people are bound to come up with before they’ve even heard it.

So the story starts with Robert the Night Constable, the sceptical listener, arriving with the intention of judging Sara, not of enjoying her company. Jean Marsh is enchanting as she tells her story for him, remembering pain and excitement long ago, gently sparring with him as he concentrates on finding fault. Home Truths has much in common with Ghost Light, though with a very different feel in its sparse settings, adrift from any one time: the stories are confined within a house; there’s a hint of M R James, with a religious scientist investigating the unknown; and like the ultimate villain in Ghost Light and like the fans this story is challenging, Robert has a list of categories that count and, because she doesn’t fit into them, he can’t accept her. It’s not real if you can’t see it. Can he, and the sort of fans who police the list, give her a chance by listening? And so their frame story, and the mystery found by the Doctor, Steven and Sara, and the meta-story of the listeners interweave as he questions what to him are her unreliable narrative devices, and says that he won’t allow the bits that contradict his continuity of facts, without being aware of the gaps in any of his own assumptions, the ghosts of his own superstitions, even as he unconsciously echoes the old wariness of eating ‘fairy food’. He’s putting her on trial as a danger to church and state while not really believing in the church side of his role, but you can see how although he doesn’t like the superstition built into the law, following its rigid doctrine has warped his ability to ask questions and do his job. The rules have even made science into a dogma of its own rather than akin to his sense of enquiry – which makes her real threat more to his own worldview than to his world, and all the harder for him to listen without prejudice.

“Well? What’s it going to be?”

3 – Asking questions about human nature.

The discussion between Miss Kingdom and Robert isn’t just about the people in the stories she’s telling, but about how we’re all wired – and tangentially between the two of them, both night constables of a sort, the conflict between orders and individuality, duty and empathy, and how all choices have consequences for which we must take responsibility. You have to ask questions, even if it’s hard: Sara’s original sin and Robert’s choice can’t be passed off as just obeying orders, and perfection doesn’t suit humanity. These are ideas that go to my wider political fear that utopias never have room for people who complicate things and that if you don’t count, you can’t exist, just as the story within the story speaks to inner fears of thoughtlessness (or of thoughts). And, ultimately, throughout this poignant tale, Miss Kingdom in Jean Marsh’s beautiful voice is the soul of it all, someone with reason to empathise with murderers who don’t really wish to be murderers, and in reaching out to them, might save herself.


4 – Opening up more stories.

Sara Kingdom’s original story, The Daleks’ Master Plan, was Doctor Who’s longest TV adventure (subject, naturally, to debate). So it’s a cheeky ambition for Home Truths to put another story into the middle of it and open it out to be even longer, with a promise of more in there still. Author Simon Guerrier’s Doctor Who writing keeps coming back to William Hartnell’s Doctor, captured here in many facets – loving to explore, treating his companions as children but like a mischievous child himself, irritable when made to look foolish but almost serene at the end – and for Big Finish he’s created several rather marvellous adventures for the Doctor and neglected companions Sara and Steven (Peter Purves). Home Truths itself has two sequels (though not necessarily in that order), The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System.

While the events of Home Truths are resolved as far as the Doctor, Steven and Sara’s travels go, not only is the story of Sara and Robert left unresolved, but the hints of the world they inhabit fire the imagination. It’s far in the future, but after war, flood and disasters we can only guess at. What might have caused the downfall of the civilisation after next? And how did another rise, seeing A Canticle for Leibowitz through a crooked glass, in the stern dogma of strictly defined church and science, though tantalisingly neither defined for the listener? Is this strangely past-future even Earth, or have names been carried over the stars like Robert across the fens? And why is he a Night Constable? Does this world ever see the light? Miss Kingdom herself tells Robert that she has a hundred stories to tell about the people who have stayed with her – though he’s deliberately asked to hear one he doesn’t believe. It’s no wonder that her conversation with him has more than a hint of Scheherazade, and the whole thing a sense of The Twilight Zone (a series in which Jean Marsh herself starred in another lonely two-handed psychological horror story / psychological character study).


5 – This creeps me out more personally than any other Doctor Who story.

“The corridor in which the woman lay led to a wide staircase, littered with flowers and paper-wrapped gifts. The Doctor examined the labels: they were wedding presents for Richard and Alex.”

Did you ever think idly how gratifying it might be to find yourself in Doctor Who, in whatever small way? I imagine I did. As the fairy tales warn us, be careful what you wish for.

Home Truths author Simon Guerrier is a friend of ours and gave us a wedding present. Nothing of Home Truths, though, which is perhaps for the best (his lines that we weaved into our wedding reading weren’t from here, either). My husband is a careful driver, and the only time I can remember him swerving the car in shock was on a dark and stormy night coming up to Christmas 2008 and driving up to see our parents. The story is quite creepy enough, with the mysteriously, suddenly dead bodies of two newlyweds in their ideal home. We were already feeling for them, and then Sara Kingdom told us their names in track seven. Thanks, Simon. Of course, they’re not a perfect match: Simon’s been to our place and knows it is not in all honesty uncannily pristine; Alex has been gender-swapped (thinking about it, the story itself might have a trans character, from a certain point of view).

What Else Should I Tell You About Home Truths?

You can buy it on CD or download from Big Finish Productions here.

This is where I often mention things other fans don’t like about a story and turn them on their head, but I’m not as familiar with reviews for extra-televisual Doctor Who. So my contrary view on Home Truths is that the opening mystery and the aftermath are both brilliant, but some of what would ordinarily be the climax (to the ‘old’ story, at least) doesn’t engage me as much, though it captures the Doctor well and I can see how it’s a necessary bridge. Perhaps it’s just because in some ways it’s an extended ‘action’ sequence, which despite being a harrowing moment for Sara, those are always less effective on the radio, and though she has to ‘earn’ the resolution, I can see it coming and am impatient to get there once I think I know the answer (one of them, anyway).

Simon Guerrier is also the author, with Dr Marek Kukula, of a less fictional book on The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who. A lot of people who don’t review his stories have nevertheless found this fascinating, so you might still find him popping up on the radio or at your local library to talk about Doctor Who and science and things, and he’s always worth listening to (and questioning). Whatever you think of this pair’s scientific views, at least they don’t wield them with the authority to unperson you if you disagree.

And, if you need one, my score:

8/10

If You Like Home Truths, Why Not Try…

More Sara Kingdom: The Daleks’ Master Plan. This is a thrilling epic from 1965-66, including in the middle Doctor Who’s first ever Christmas special episode (which isn’t very M R James at all). Unfortunately the BBC burnt most of it, but you can buy the whole soundtrack on CD, and see the three complete surviving episodes on the Lost In Time DVD set. You might also look out for Reconstructions online, which combine the soundtrack with photos to make the missing episodes easier to follow. I recommend Simon Guerrier’s sequels to Home Truths, too, and just this month he has a new Early Adventure out from Big Finish where the Doctor, Sara and Steven face the Sontarans as played by Dan “Strax” Starkey, bringing together some of the oldest and newest Doctor Who.

For more Jean Marsh, there’s the 1965 historical adventure The Crusade (for which most of the same limitations apply), and 1989’s Battlefield (all of which, thankfully, you can see on DVD or download from BBC Store). Ms Marsh plays different characters in all three stories, though all three have complicated relationships with their brothers – see especially her soliloquy at the end of Battlefield, her coldness in the middle of The Daleks’ Master Plan and a terrific The Crusade scene in which she tears strips off Julian Glover.

Labels: Big Finish, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Fandom, Home Truths, Personal, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, William Hartnell

Introducing Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks…

…as it was named when first published. Remarkably, the title’s still true. Even more remarkably, it’s now back in print in two different editions, one of them under the original title and the other simply as Doctor Who and the Daleks.

David Whitaker’s 1964 novelisation of the Doctor’s original encounter with the Daleks on their dead planet Skaro was the first ever Doctor Who novel. But on the page here William Hartnell’s original Doctor is less the lead character than one of many threats faced by first-person narrator-hero Ian Chesterton – a stylistic choice which both adds depth and feeling and gives the book an unusually ‘rugged adventure’ flavour.

Fifty-three years ago this Wednesday, the TARDIS first landed on Skaro and the Doctor and the viewers thrilled to explore the Dalek City with no idea what they would find there. This book came a year later, at the height of Dalekmania, and while by then everyone knew what a Dalek was, the book is its own way another go at starting the series rather than a straightforward adaptation – though it was another decade before the novel series really took off, spearheaded again by Doctor Who and the Daleks.

This blog post is also a sort of reprint or Special Edition, once again from a celebratory series I began last year. That was largely brought to a halt by my terrible health. Now it came to a standstill again a few weeks ago when I was hospitalised, and I’ve fallen behind, and my mojo’s fallen further. But I blench at the thought of starting it all a third time next year, so I’m making an effort to catch up. I hope…

Five Reasons To Read Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – The first person.

“I began to feel better. The Doctor had told me the wisest thing to do would be to open my mind and accept what had happened.
“I did.”

Reviewers tend to talk about how influential the first ever Doctor Who novel was. By definition, of course – it started the lot, twice. Its Target Books 1973 reprint spearheaded a massively successful series of novelisations over the next two decades. But the moment you start reading, one thing jumps out that sets it apart from almost all the others – the first-person narration by Ian Chesterton gives it much more of a different feel to the TV version even than the many changes of story detail. It was more than twenty years and nearly a hundred more novelisations until Target published another first-person narrative, and though Donald Cotton’s three books (The Myth Makers, The Gunfighters and The Romans) also featured William Hartnell’s Doctor they’re played for comedy, and that’s nothing like the tone here.

This novel starts starkly: Ian is in a savage mood after a terrible day, and it’s about to get worse than he can possibly imagine. Where on TV Ian was paired with fellow teacher Barbara and they discovered the mystery behind their pupil Susan together, here he begins utterly alone, trusting nothing and nobody he encounters, with even Barbara a stranger to him. All of this makes the book far more about Ian and his feelings, perceptions and prejudices than any other, seeing the Doctor in particular as incredibly alienating and even malevolent, in contrast to the TV’s more impish mischief (down both to Mr Whitaker rewriting the Doctor’s lines and actions and losing Mr Hartnell’s irrepressible fun in the role even when he’s playing Doctor Git). It’s a great relief when he eventually starts to relax a bit.


2 – The first person being read by the first person.

Back in 2005, this was also the first Doctor Who novel released (in various formats) in what’s become a continuing audiobook series. Perfectly, the reader is William Russell, who played Ian on TV and many years later inhabits the role again vividly. He still has a marvellous voice and sounds like they’re his thoughts, rather than just reading them, and it’s still one of the best, despite its music and sound design being much more minimalist electronica than later releases.


3 – Author David Whitaker was Doctor Who’s original lead writer.

David Whitaker was one of the main creative forces at the very start of Doctor Who, its first Story Editor, and this novel breathes with his understanding of ideas for the series. One of his fascinations was the TARDIS itself. For TV he wrote scenes of its fabulous food machine; given a novel to play with, he adds more of it – plus similar details for the Thal people, who serve hot Ratanda because every civilised race must have something like tea – along with a little buzzing barber robot and the TARDIS home appliance I most wanted, the oil and water shower that cleans and tones you and exercises your muscles without your having to do anything. It’s this more than anything else that seems at last to start rubbing Ian up the right way, so to speak.


4 – The pictures.

Published all over the world and with many different covers, the most memorable and the one on the current paperback edition is Chris Achilleos’ striking image used to launch the Target Books range. It isn’t technically a great likeness of William Hartnell, with fabulous comic strip-influenced Daleks and a stylised TARDIS… But for all that, it’s one of the most iconic covers in the series, thrillingly composed with flaming Dalek gunfire and a Doctor that contains all the swirling galaxies, making him mysterious, dangerous and unforgettable.

The early novelisations also had internal illustrations, and this is the only one to have had two contrasting sets. Arnold Schwartzman’s are detailed sketches based on BBC photos and have lasted from the first edition through to the current ones – but for me the unique 1965 Armada paperback wins with its odd pictures out, Peter Archer’s less ‘correct’ but more excited drawings inspired by the book rather than based on the TV. He gives us a very buff Temmosus dying in a blaze of Dalek fire – the first – for example, and a memorable glass Dalek…


5 – The glass Dalek.

Terry Nation’s TV script was given massive boosts by the actors, by Brian Hodgson and Tristram Cary’s eerie soundscapes and, above all, by Ray Cusick’s fantastic designs both for the petrified jungle and metal city that make up the world of Skaro and for creating the Daleks themselves. David Whitaker is stripped of all these advantages and just left with the script. So, like the writers of several Doctor Who adaptations after him (perhaps most notably Malcolm Hulke), he makes sweeping changes, not just obviously cutting scenes where Ian’s not present – losing much of both the Doctor’s and the Daleks’ roles – but changing story and characters to fit his own.

The most famous change is the book’s opening. The Daleks had been Doctor Who’s second story on TV, but with novelisation (let alone video release) in prospect of the first, An Unearthly Child, Mr Whitaker offers an alternative beginning, starting with a meeting in the fog on Barnes Common, dangerous from the first in a very earthbound death followed by an unearthly twist. It offers none of the plot of An Unearthly Child but a similarly abrupt coming together of Ian, Barbara, Susan and the Doctor (with several of the same lines, suggesting dialogue Mr Whitaker had added to the initial scripts).

The most pervasive changes are in the characters, with the relationship between Ian and Barbara here developing from resentment to romance (‘Women are strange!’) and in the Thals, the other race on Skaro, who here are much more physically ‘perfect’ for Boys’ Own adventures like climbing the impossible cliff, with Kristas promoted from ‘Thal at the back with a few lines’ on TV to a giant with the most magnificent musculature and so the most lines to go with it (‘Men have admirable bodies!’). Mr Whitaker also has a very different conception of their pacifism than Mr Nation: in this version, Ian arranges a boxing match to teach them to be suitably manly which then goes hilariously wrong, and there’s none of the TV story’s ‘dirty coward who must redeem himself by dying like a Man should’.

But the most memorable change is in the Daleks. The book’s erratic descriptions of their machines and their voices pale next to the TV, but Mr Whitaker revels in more ghastly descriptions, none more effective than their leader in a glass casing, jumping up and down in constant fury before being smashed in the book’s own far more effective climax. One of the most strikingly influences Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks had was in inspiring a glass Dalek design that finally appeared on TV more than two decades later, though it had a little earlier success in influencing other novelisations: the chapter title Escape Into Danger becomes iconic and much-repeated (for some reason The Last Despairing Try didn’t catch on).

What Else Should I Tell You About Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks?

From the 1964 edition first published by Frederick Muller, through launching the Target Books range in 1973 that carried on for another hundred and fifty novelisations and many New Adventures beyond, to the 2011 BBC Books ‘special edition’ with background notes and an introduction by Neil Gaiman, Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks has been republished more often than any other Doctor Who book. Just last month, the latest reissue went right back to the beginning with a hardback facsimile of the original Frederick Muller. And no wonder. It’s still a cracking adventure story, and it was based on one of the most important Doctor Who stories: The Daleks (sometimes called The Dead Planet or, by pedants, “The Mutants”), the Doctor’s second ever adventure with the first monsters, the reason why the series is still going strong today. You can buy the TV version as part of the Doctor Who – The Beginning DVD Box Set and in several other releases.

The book’s downside is that its attitudes sometimes show its age, magnified by giving us Ian’s inner thoughts and making it all that heroically physical Boys’ Own adventure. Women are stranger creatures than the Daleks at times, and while Ian is attracted to Barbara he finds heavily muscled Thal men far easier to bond with (Thal women getting about a paragraph and likened to precious jewels). On the bright side, just because Ian doesn’t understand Barbara doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a personality, even if we have to infer the bits Ian misses and she’s a long way short of Jacqueline Hill’s terrific character on screen. I’m still taken aback every time he meets an injured “girl” in the fog and it’s not teenage Susan but grown woman Barbara, though. Even to set up threats with petrol and introduce the Doctor’s “everlasting matches,” Ian’s cigarettes are briefly startling and won’t be found anywhere else (just as the Doctor only ever smokes a pipe in An Unearthly Child, which in this case I’ll call the television alternative first story). Perhaps the element of the adaptation that works least well is in Mr Whitaker’s enthusiastically hideous descriptions of what lives inside a Dalek casing, and the reactions he has the Doctor and Ian give to it. There’s always been a tension between Doctor Who’s wonder in the alien and ‘green scaly rubber people are people too’ ethos and its presenting ugly monsters to scare us, and rarely is that more blatant than in The Daleks, the first time viewers were given that contradiction. On screen, the Doctor says it doesn’t matter what form an intelligence takes and the Daleks are evil because they dislike the unlike – but they’re also physically repugnant, while the Thals are presented as attractively Aryan. In the novel the awkward subtext becomes the text, as on seeing the slimy, hideous thing inside the Dalek machine, the Doctor confirms that if he’d not made up his mind about them, one look at it tells him it’s evil! So that rather undermines the moral.

And, if you need one, my score:

9/10.

If You Like Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, Why Not Try…

Practically any Doctor Who novel owes a debt to this in one way or another, most immediately the other two 1960s novelisations, Doctor Who and the Zarbi and David Whitaker’s own Doctor Who and the Crusaders (each now also back in print both in paperback ‘special editions’ and in hardback nostalgics). And of course the original TV version, the feature film adaptation and even the colouring book adaptation of the film version. The 1985 TV story Revelation of the Daleks finally brings a glass Dalek to the screen, and is brilliant. They should have built another one to be the Dalek Prime Minister in 2012’s Every Dalek Ever Except the Ones That Aren’t story…

But I’m going to point out Mark Gatiss’ docudrama about the early years of Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time, starring David Bradley as William Hartnell, for its opening on a police box in the fog on Barnes Common.

Labels: Books, Chris Achilleos, Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, Pictures, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, The Daleks, William Hartnell

Introducing Doctor Who – An Unearthly Child…

The first ever Doctor Who story begins with ordinary people who follow someone extraordinary to a blue box that’s bigger on the inside than the outside and travels in time and space.

The best idea in the world hits the ground running: William Hartnell’s fantastic Doctor; a mysterious girl who’s both genius and hopeless, living in a junkyard; mind-expanding maelstroms of light and noise; prehistoric power struggles; throwing people into another time, throwing violence, dirt, role-reversals and every emotional and physical trial at them. Their world, and ours, will never be the same again.

I restarted these posts again last Wednesday with the first Doctor Who I ever saw – celebrating the series’ fifty-third anniversary. Now it’s time to go back to the very beginning. Again. Which I can pretend is completely appropriate, because the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, was repeated a week later, immediately before The Cave of Skulls, the second episode of this story, was first broadcast. It’s almost as if I planned a repost – I mean, a ‘Special Edition’ – on its own fifty-third anniversary. So this is another post that I wrote originally last year with the idea of fifty-two-weeks’-worth of idiosyncratically selected Doctor Who. I hope it’ll still go on to be an exciting variety but, again, with my timing as reliable as the TARDIS, the next one may turn up later or sooner or just vanish completely. I’m having fun so far, though.

This is the point where I’d usually say to press “Play All” on the DVD. Just this once it’s more complicated than that. If you’ve bought An Unearthly Child as a DVD on its own or as a download, that probably works. If you have it – as I do, and probably the best value, as the other discs are excellent too – in the Doctor Who DVD box set The Beginning, then it’ll make things much simpler and much more watchable, although it seems weird, if you press “Play All” but then skip forward seven chapters. I’ll explain later.

Ten Reasons To Watch An Unearthly Child (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – The Beginning.

From the first second, everything says ‘This is a television programme like no other.’ On Saturday 23rd November 1963 Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire’s incredible music and Barnard Lodge’s swirling howlround titles first grabbed people like nothing on Earth. The direction’s terrific, the lines memorable and the actors superb, and by the end of just the first episode you’ve been plunged from an ordinary school into the astonishing futurism of the TARDIS and then an eerie prehistoric wasteland. It’s inspired, but it delivers on all of that inspiration. This may just be the most brilliant piece of television ever… And there are still three episodes to go of this story alone, or, if you take a longer view, at minimum at least another eight hundred and twenty-seven more to follow. And counting.


2 – The Doctor.

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds – and watch them wheel, in another sky – would that satisfy you?”

I first saw An Unearthly Child when it was repeated in 1981. Tom Baker had just stopped being the Doctor; I knew there were others, I’d even thrilled to many of their adventures on the page, but I’d not seen any of them. This wasn’t just spellbinding, but startling. The Doctor here is so different from the Fourth Doctor even at his most alien – he’s so different, I know now, even from how William Hartnell’s character will become as he shows different facets from the brilliantly sparkling git in his introduction. This story introduces the central mystery and the TARDIS perfectly, but is it the right place to start with the Doctor? Well, of course. What other story can be more exciting to discover for the first time? And where else can you see the Doctor discovering humans are people for the first time and starting to become the character we know? He’s as ruthless and hostile-seeming here as you’ll ever see him, but by the second episode, he’s already saving the companions he’s previously chewed out and kidnapped, then starting to cheer them up, then before the story’s out making his first of many moral judgements. Though his instinct is first to explore then, when that lands him in tricky situations, to escape, he’s already starting to flex his brain to achieve more than that.

For me, William Hartnell’s performance here is one of the greatest of any Doctor in any story. He’s at first calculating and almost sinister – because he’s under threat. He becomes a lot more fun once the worst has happened and humans have forced their way into his TARDIS, seeing them much as he’ll call them “stupid apes” many years later. He might start off making life difficult for two nice teachers, but then he’s unexpectedly kind, then spoils it by hardly being able to keep his face straight (there’s an absolutely gorgeous touch at one point where he keeps having to turn away from Ian, smiling as if looking directly at him would crack him up). His unpredictability feels like a person, and a fascinating, charismatic one, even as you think ‘He can’t say that!’ He’s fiercely intelligent and utterly irreverent. He shows off outrageously. He has enormous authority but is anti-establishment to his core, and childishly sulks or shouts when he doesn’t get his own way. And he gets your heart in your mouth when he suddenly shows the ache of tragedy. Too many ‘wise old men’ characters are dull or paternal, but this one starts as an explorer who asks all the difficult questions, and it seems a natural progression from that to discovering the sheer fun of toppling empires – helped enormously by William Hartnell, who’d done the authoritarian roles and wanted something different. The Doctor is as different as you get.


3 – Susan.

“Of course, the decimal system hasn’t started yet.”

The Doctor’s granddaughter is the start of it all: wanting to live like human people, she’s the brightest, strangest teenager at school. She’s an utter genius but makes incredible mistakes – in a brilliant gamble by the writers, she assumes Britain’s using its decimal currency nearly a decade before the actual switch, and there’s a great evocation of an alien way of thinking when she can’t solve a problem without adding other dimensions. Carole Ann Ford is convincingly alien even after being ordered to tone it down, treating teachers absently like just slightly dim people to patronise and then utterly confident when at home in a space-time Ship. In her very first scene, a teacher shows off with his pop knowledge, but only to highlight that Susan’s in a world of her own, grooving along to an aristocrat who’s masquerading as an ordinary person…

I knew Susan, Ian and Barbara first from outstanding novelisations of stories from long before I was born and that I never thought I’d see. For some reason, as a boy the TARDIS teams that felt most right to me from the books were three different groups of several different people around the Doctor. I wrote about Polly, Ben and Jamie a few days ago, and here’s another – the original crew. Each of the companions that really stuck with me are a mix of men and women, but especially each with one woman who shows she’s got a brain and some gumption, who can stand up to the Doctor. That really should have been Susan, but she doesn’t always make it. Fortunately, another woman decides to intervene…




4 – Ian and Barbara.

Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are the most utterly reassuring people in this: 1960s schoolteachers who clearly know what they’re doing and are just the people to find out what’s strange about their pupil Susan. But, marvellously, though they always remain reassuring and endearing, they’re at the centre of everything about the way this show turns things upside-down.

Ian is a handsome authority figure and so obviously going to be the lead in any programme made in 1963, with actor William Russell a star who’d had his own series as Sir Lancelot, and who’s engaging from the word go. So it’s a treat that it’s Barbara who’s done all the investigating and only wants him to back her up – and that, after Ian’s sure there’s a perfectly normal explanation, he’s the first one to nearly have a nervous breakdown when the explanation’s nothing of the kind. He reaches one of the lowest of all companion low points on disembarking from the TARDIS for the first time, utterly bewildered by the Doctor’s prophetic poetry coming true around him, touching the cold sand, hearing the mocking cries of strange birds, then clapping his hand to his head for all the world as if one of them’s just capped his terrible day by dropping something on it.

Jaqueline Hill is fabulous, and Barbara starts by confronting point-blank the stereotyped ‘hysterical fantasist woman’ dismissal which Ian and the 1963 audience might be tempted to put on what she says, and is proved right. Then they take it in turns throughout to be the sensible one who’s coping or the one who’s losing it, just as they take it in turns to be helpfully the science teacher and the history teacher who can help us make some sense of the science-fictional or historical settings in which they’re going to find themselves. They make a wonderful couple.


5 – The making of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who was created by a remarkable group of people for the BBC in 1963 – the BBC’s iconoclastic Canadian drama supremo Sydney Newman didn’t just want a programme that would be unlike anything else in the establishment Corporation, but people that would shake it up. He made Verity Lambert the BBC’s youngest and only female drama Producer. The first director she chose was a young, gay Anglo-Indian, Waris Hussein. To the rest of the BBC, they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time – naturally, they became television legends. For some reason much of the BBC establishment fought them tooth and nail, but even given the smallest, oldest and grottiest of studios they still made Doctor Who incredible.


6 – Into the TARDIS.

“Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you? To be exiles…?”

The first mystery the show ever presents us with is a mysteriously humming police box in a junkyard, and it’s the mystery to which Susan’s mystery leads the two schoolteachers. From the moment Barbara and Ian plunge into the TARDIS, everything is astonishing. The dazzling scene that forms the second half of the first episode is just about the best the series ever has. All the mysteries we’ve encountered so far erupt into this one impossible place, abruptly, the biggest idea ever, in the smallest box, the world changing and the Doctor and Susan suddenly in their natural element. The TARDIS control room still looks extraordinary, but it’s the dialogue that’s really compelling. William Hartnell is absolutely commanding here, taking the script and flying with it from irritated to endearingly distracted, kindly to mischievously entertained, vulnerable to ruthlessly determined. And in a brilliant piece of mutual reinforcement, exactly at the point that the Doctor explains the TARDIS with reference to television, the television camera is telling us that he’s the lead character by pointing directly at him, the others backgrounded. Ian the handsome young lead character the viewers expected is left floundering – it’s not his show after all. And the Doctor’s judgement that humans would only fight over himself and his ideas if given the chance is proved right over the following episodes…


7 – Inspired games with role-reversals.

Doctor Who was designed as a drama aimed at children watching with their families, not just to talk down to them as a ‘kids’ show’. So in the very first episode we get the perfect deployment of the show’s anti-establishment ethos to get the kids on its side: show up the teachers. Susan goes from verbally patting “Mr Chesterton” for knowing something unexpected to exasperation with him being much stupider than she’d expected. It’s far more effective than making the teachers cartoon idiots or having child leads, especially when the Doctor joins in – an authoritative old man who acts like a mischievous child, but also talks down to authority figures who don’t like their own medicine at all, while children across the land must have enjoyed it immensely.

But it’s not just getting the audience on side. The role-reversals are crucial to the story and the developing relationships between our four main characters. The Doctor chooses a simile about television to explain the Ship’s dimensions, kindly thinking of a way within the teacher’s limited grasp to explain something incredibly simple that’s quite beyond his tiny mind, as Ian might to a child – made all the more delicious when Ian still can’t see and the Doctor can’t help but laugh. It’s a satirical pre-echo of the ‘primitives’ part of the story: the Doctor’s among primitives already. On moving from modern London to prehistoric cavepeople, the Doctor first regarding Ian and Barbara as savages prevents the audience from feeling too smug about the Tribe, but it also means he’s rapidly shoved together with the teachers so he can start thinking of them as semi-civilised. If they’d landed among the Daleks and Thals first, he’d probably have dumped the teachers, or at least spo-ken ve-ry slow-ly and clear-ly to them and apologised for bringing a pair of savages to meet futuristic peoples: ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse them, they’re from the Twentieth Century.’ Just as Ian becomes less narrow-minded and insular with the Doctor’s influence, the teachers’ presence gives the Doctor the opportunity to start learning from them more subtly, starting here. The Doctor’s moral sense, appropriately, is more a flickering ember and a wisp of smoke here than a beacon in the dark yet – but even in Twenty-first Century stories, he still has a ruthless streak without human friends to talk him out of it.




8 – Old Mother.

This is a grim tale, with its sweaty, dirty, horror brought home to us perhaps more than any other Doctor Who story by the raw emotion of our heroes. There’s not much humour after the hilarious put-downs of the teachers. But if you’re in the right mood for it, there’s an undercurrent in the horrible life of the Tribe that makes me laugh. On the surface, the story is a battle for supremacy between two alpha males, Za versus interloper Kal. But it isn’t just Kal who jeers at Za for not being the man his father was. The Tribe’s older generation are still around to threaten him with several varieties of conservative prejudice, and the worst of the lot is the Tribe’s Queen Mum, known as Old Mother or just “the old woman” (played superbly by Eileen Way). She hates fire and thinks it a waste of time, but still laughs at his impotent attempts to light up. It’s very hard not to see some sort of metaphor in Za rubbing his bone while his Old Mother gives a spiteful commentary on how unimpressive his manhood is. Za’s “woman” Hur – no, it’s not an especially feminist Tribe in naming its women – has problems with her father too, at one point shouting “You should lie on the old stone ’til your blood runs into the earth!” when he grumbles too much. It’s all deadly serious, but also very funny intergenerational conflict.


9 – The Doctor invents courtroom drama and Columbo.

“This knife has no blood on it.”

By the start of part four, Za’s cleverer but nastier rival Kal has murdered Old Mother and pinned the blame on Za and our heroes. Things look bleak. Kal’s great strength has been as a demagogue, yet as he waves Za’s stone knife before the Tribe, weaving his story before them, the apparently frail old Doctor shows he can not only defeat a physically much stronger opponent with superior brainpower, but beat him at his own simple declamatory style and even muster the physical force to drive him out. It starts with the Doctor’s simple observation that Za’s knife has no blood on it, and from that point Kal unravels: he calls it a bad knife for not showing what it has done; the Doctor needles his vanity, saying it’s much better than his; Kal falls for it, proudly pulling out his bloody weapon; and the Doctor parades it around the Tribe like a prize lawyer. Rousing the whole Tribe against the strong fighter, he throws a stone at him and gets everyone else to do the same, forcing the murderer to retreat under a barrage of rocks.

It’s a terrific scene. William Hartnell is outstanding, slipping effortlessly between quiet, naturalistic instructions and a theatrical display of Stone Age rubble-rousing, but it’s a brilliant idea, too: years before Columbo ever aired, Doctor Who invents the format. The TV audience has already seen the murderer, and the Doctor exposes him through a combination of psychology, demagoguery and forensic evidence. And while he’s settling the rivalry between Kal and Za, at the same time he’s settling with argumentative teacher Ian just exactly who is the leader of the TARDIS crew, and the star of the show (fifty-three years later, he still is). Just as with the Twentieth-Century humans, the Doctor can speak their language and then get into their mindset and manipulate it, which makes you wonder just how much he’s talking down to our level, too.


10 – An optimistic and wonderful show that’s “steeped in death” (as Russell T Davies put it many years later).

“Well, fear makes companions of all of us, Miss Wright.”

Mass death prompts the Doctor to make his first moral judgment; being forced together in the same setting starts our heroes bonding. The Tribe’s struggle for power is fed by the fear they all have of death, from the cold, from the tiger, from each other. And Waris Hussein’s brilliant direction uses images of death as a motif throughout. Skulls keep recurring in close-up, from the smashed dummy in the junkyard, to an attack on the Doctor cross-cut with an animal skull and smashed equipment to suggest the violence it doesn’t quite show, through the Cave of Skulls and several dead beasts, to the climax when it all comes to a head. Are we meant to associate them with palaeontological discoveries of early human skulls and therefore the deep past, or the Tribe’s animalistic nature, or simply the visceral closeness to death in a constantly dangerous environment?

Though Doctor Who doesn’t have its first really full-fledged ‘undead’ story until William Hartnell’s final adventure, most of his first season has some hint of it, and how is the very first story resolved? By using a combination of the idea of the undead and special effects to frighten the people watching, which is what the series will be doing for ever after (and, with the Tribe obsessed throughout with fire and using skulls to terrify our heroes, it’s the perfect con to employ at the climax).

And then our heroes start running.

What Else Should I Tell You About An Unearthly Child?

Seriously, on just this one DVD – at least the one in The Beginning – press “Play All” and then immediately skip the first seven chapters.

“It’s true! Every word of it’s true!”

Here’s why. The BBC had more than one go at making the very first Doctor Who episode. Sydney Newman, the BBC Head of Drama who more than anyone else had driven through the initial idea of the show, didn’t like the first version they shot – mainly because of technical problems and the Doctor being too harsh. For the second go a few weeks later, there were minor changes to the script, significant changes to the way the Doctor’s played and Susan became much less ‘unearthly’. That was the version that was transmitted, led into the following three episodes and the following fifty-three-and-more years, and it’s the version I’ve given reasons to watch above. The first attempt was retrospectively called the “Pilot” episode, and miraculously still exists, in multiple pieces (they had another go on the spot to fix some of the technical faults, which means there are actually three versions of some of the first ever episode). It’s fascinating, and I love it. But I love the final version more, despite preferring Susan weirder, some brilliant alternative lines and getting to see what the Doctor’s like when he’s really alienating and without a sense of humour. It’s great, but the ‘proper’ version is better – not least because it doesn’t seem like our four leads are going to kill each other within a fortnight.

The trouble is, if you just press “Play All” you get a version of the Pilot episode, An Unearthly Child. Then the first episode, An Unearthly Child, which is a different version of the same thing. Then the next three episodes, which finally get on with more of the story. So while I often go back and watch the Pilot version as interesting in its own right, it’s a confusing place to start. If you skip the first seven chapters on the DVD you’ll start where the producers intended you to, it’ll make a lot more sense, and you’ll get the best version first. As you play on through the rest of the story, I suppose I should point out that some people think the second, third and fourth episodes are a different story, or not as good, or even disposable. They’re wrong. See above.

“Footsteps in a time in which they should not have walked.”

Sometimes this whole story is given a different title – usually “100,000BC” or “The Tribe of Gum”. Back in 1963, just as with Doctor Who today, multi-part television stories weren’t given overall titles, just titles for each of their individual episodes. This year’s been an exception to a post-2005 run of mostly one-episode stories, but when the series started almost every story had several episodes. It’s one thing to list a story as, say, “The Magician’s Apprentice / The Witch’s Familiar”, but calling the very first one “An Unearthly Child / The Cave of Skulls / The Forest of Fear / The Firemaker” is cumbersome and, by the time you reach 1965 and start on a story that’s twelve episodes long, all gets a bit silly. After 1966 until 1989 they just gave every story one title, no matter how many parts it was in, but for those early stories people like to disagree. Some adventures had what might have been an internal BBC title or maybe just a description to file all the episodes together, but though those are occasionally used by pedants, the only titles the public saw on TV or in the Radio Times were for the episodes. So call this one “100,000BC” if you like, although there’s no evidence that’s when it’s set, or “The Tribe of Gum”, although none of the Tribe call themselves that. This first story is titled An Unearthly Child on the DVD. The novelisation’s called An Unearthly Child too. And it starts by getting us curious about an unearthly child. It’s “An Unearthly Child” for me.

Eternal thanks to many people at the very beginning, particularly BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman, Script Department head Donald Wilson, script editor David Whitaker, scriptwriters Anthony Coburn and before him C. E. Webber, director Waris Hussein, soundscapers Delia Derbyshire, Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson, legendary producer Verity Lambert, and, of course, William Hartnell. The Doctor.


And, if you need one, my score:

I’d give 10/10 to the proper transmitted version of An Unearthly Child, the first and possibly even best episode of Doctor Who – or of television itself. And I’d give 9/10 to the next three episodes. So I considered giving the whole story 9 ½. But I’ve decided half-marks are weaselly, so I won’t be awarding any. That means this and a handful of other stories coming up in the 52 that might be 9 ½ in my head will be rounded up to:
10/10

If You Like An Unearthly Child, Why Not Try…

The Pilot version of An Unearthly Child, obviously, which is weird and jarring but also brilliant. Every other Doctor Who story featuring William Hartnell makes him kindlier and funnier – which was what the actor wanted anyway. So you might instead pick a story from Doctor Who’s second season, where the Doctor’s personality is more fully formed.

Deep Breath is for now the most recent of all the many new beginnings for Doctor Who, 2014’s introduction to the current Doctor. It’s a very different adventure, but like William Hartnell, Peter Capaldi plays a Doctor in a much older body, one who’s abrasive and alienating at times, or funny, or brilliant, and I love them both. Surrounding a new Doctor with familiar friends from the previous Doctor to help him and us adjust to his new self has a touch of Robot, too. I could also point out that it’s in London but has characters from prehistoric times, and that the Doctor’s companion is a teacher at the same Coal Hill School where Ian and Barbara taught and Susan mystified, but – despite that – Deep Breath really isn’t very like An Unearthly Child at all. Still marvellous, though.

Next Time…

The beginning… What, another one? Fantastic!

Labels: An Unearthly Child, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, William Hartnell