It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.
It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.
I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.
But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.
(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)
I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.
I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell. (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.
But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.
And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here:
Second frame of third story (“Food for Thought”, written by Nick Briggs, art by Colin Andrew)
This had been on my shelves for ages, a compilation of six graphic stories from Doctor Who Magazine in 1993-95, featuring the first five Doctors. My particular discovery is Colin Andrew, a Scottish artist who did a total of six Doctor Who strips, two of which are collected here (see frame above); I think he captures both form and movement really well, and experiments with the boundaries of the frames on the page with interesting results. (Not everyone thinks so; I found another online review which says that his art is the weakest point of the book.)
I think most people will agree that the two Second Doctor stories by Warwick Gray, now known as Scott Gray, are the high points – especially the exploration of Doctor vs Daleks in the last one, “Bringer of Darkness”. There is lively commentary at the back from writers and artists (except Colin Andrew, who had died before this collection was put together), including an apology from Nick Briggs for his sexist portrayal of Polly in what is still his only comics script, thirty years on. This had lingered quite a long time on my shelf but was worth the wait. You can get it here.
This was my top unread English-language comic – next on that pile is Monica, by Daniel Clowes
‘Mollie, Mollie, Mr McCrimmon has been kidnapped. It means the end of us unless we can find him quickly!’
I wrote at length about the TV story, John Peel’s novelisation and Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on it just over two years ago; however I’m coming back to it now because Frazer Hines, who starred as Jamie in the original show, has produced an alternative novelisation, assisted by Mike Tucker and Steve Cole. The authors have taken the step of the framing narrative of the second (and last) showing the the TV story in 1968, when newly acquired companion Zoe was invited to watch it as an example of the Doctor’s previous adventures.
Is there a point? Yes, I think so; John Peel in his novelisation was trying to make sense of Dalek mythology in the context of the show as a whole, whereas here we have Hines and co-writers humanising the experiences of both Jamie and Victoria, giving a lot more back-story to the companions and indeedto the other characters.
One of the problems I have with The Evil of the Daleks is that quite a lot of the plot doesn’t really make sense. But the TV story keeps you entertained with the pace of events, and this novelisation does the same, from a slightly different direction to John Peel’s. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, as is the TV story. (Some argue that Ruth Maxtible telling Mollie to get some tea at the end of episode 2 crosses the Bechdel threshold, but this is incorrect, because the tea is for Jamie.)
When I first listened to the audio of The Underwater Menace in 2007, and watched what was then the only remaining episode, I had fully absorbed the fan consensus that it is terrible, and I wrote:
The Underwater Menace, from Patrick Troughton’s first season in early 1967, is notorious – even the normally upbeat Howe and Walker describe it as “undoubtedly the weakest of the second Doctor’s era, if not of the sixties as a whole”. Fortunately, in a way, only episode three (out of four) survives, and today’s fan can buy the soundtrack with narration by Anneke Wills who played Polly (the story featuring her, Ben and new companion Jamie). This means that we are not subjected to the awful production values and can let our imaginations fill in for the cheap-looking sets. As a sound only production it comes close to succeeding, with the main problems being the baffling ballet of the fish people in episode three (which in fact becomes more rather than less confusing when you actually see it) and the utterly clichéd villain, Professor Zaroff, who actually ends the third episode by declaring that nothing in the world can stop him now. The director, Julia Smith, went on to create EastEnders; this cannot have been a high point of her early career.
It does feature the most extensively featured Irish character in any Doctor Who story [arguably until Thaddea Graham as Bel in 2021], P.G. Stephens’ trapped sailor Sean (who is teamed up with Jacko, a trapped Asian sailor played by Paul Anil). As I have previously noted, there is not a lot of competition. It is not fair to say that he has “the least convincing Irish accent in television history”, as he has a long acting career both in Ireland [dead link] and England (playing mainly Irish parts, including a comedy IRA bomber [another dead link]), but he is certainly as wobbly in his acting as any of the rest of the guest cast, especially in the deeply embarrassing scene where he urges the fish people to revolt.
Ow. The Underwater Menace is the first really bad story for some time, in fact almost as bad as The Sensorites which is my least favourite story so far. The plot is dreadfully padded – the Tardis crew faffing around getting captured in the first episode, wandering around in caves in the second episode, the hideously embarrassing fish-people dance in the surviving third episode, more cave wanderings in the last episode. The plot is fundamentally stupid, and Joseph Furst intensely annoying as Professor Zaroff. (Likewise Peter Stephens, doing a reprise of Cyril the schoolboy as Lolem the high priest; and the risible parts written for Token Irish Guy and Token Black Guy.)
As minor compensation, it looks decent enough, and the early Dudley Simpson score generally works; and some of the supporting cast are good – Ara (played by 16-year-old Catherine Howe who went on to a successful career in music) is clearly deeply in love with Polly, in the most overt gay crush in Who since Ian and Marco Polo. And Troughton carries it well, conveying at least his own confidence in the story (however feigned that may have been). Episode Three is the thirteenth Second Doctor episode, but the earliest to survive. I can’t help feeling that any one of the previous twelve would have been better.
A year later, of course, the missing second episode was recovered, and I watched it for the first time last month in preparation for this post; and you know what? I have revised my opinion of the story substantially upwards. Perhaps it’s that the second episode generally looks good enough; perhaps it’s that the intervening decade since 2011 has seen Moffat and Chibnall stories which were easily as silly in their premises as The Underwater Menace; perhaps my own tastes have matured enough that I am confident in my own judgement without relying on fan wisdom. The fish people are still a bit strange, but we’ve seen similar in New Who. I think my tolerance for what Doctor Who should be like has been broadened by the last two show-runners. You can judge for yourself by getting the DVD with reconstructions here and the audio only narration by Anneke Wills here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation by Nigel Robinson, introducing Dr Zaroff, is:
Lolem stalked angrily up to the figure who had just entered the temple and had evidently given the black uniformed guards their orders. The newcomer was tall and dressed in a high-collared white coat; a short black cloak hung over his shoulders. A shock of prematurely white hair covered his head, and a pencil-thin moustache topped his cruel mouth. The skin of his long aristocratic face was sallow but his large eyes gleamed with an icy-blue brilliance.
When I read it for the first time in 2008, I was also unforgiving:
This is very poor. It’s not quite as bad as Robinson’s novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story’s most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.
Again, I don’t think I was being fair. It’s a perfectly adequate novelisation; a bit of back-story is given to Ara, Sean and Jacko, and even to Zaroff. You can get it here (if you are lucky).
This is the first time in this run of rewatches that I have found myself substantially revising my opinion of a story. Of course, it’s partly that there was a whole new episode here that I had not seen before. I was therefore in an open frame of mind when I started on James Cooray Smith’s Black Archive monograph; he had already done yeoman’s work on The Massacre and The Ultimate Foe, so my expectations were high.
And I was not disappointed. This is a more personal account than some of the Black Archives have been, as Cooray Smith was actually present at the BFI event in 2011 when, without any prior warning, the missing episode was shown to a crowd who had mainly come to the event for other reasons. Several of the Black Archives have made the point that our reception of past Doctor Who episodes is often dynamic rather than static; this is a very good case in point.
The first chapter, “Prehistoric monsters” looks at the reception of The Underwater Menace before 2011, pointing out that it was one of the most obscure of Old Who stories.
It neither introduces or writes out any memorable characters, nor features any popular monsters or villains. There are no references to it in subsequent television Doctor Who. It is one of a vanishingly small number of 20th-century Doctor Who stories to have no substantial sequel or prequel in any medium. With very few photographs taken during production, there was little visual material for use in the various glossy Doctor Who history books produced in the 1980s, whose printing of often striking colour photographs from black-and-white serials did much to shape fandom’s perceptions of the series’ earliest years.
The second chapter, “Hope it’s the Daleks”, describes the event on 11 December 2011 when Mark Gatiss presented both the third episode of Galaxy 4 and the second episode of The Underwater Menace. I remember this vividly too, though I was not there; the news hit Twitter as I was dining in a bistro near the main station in Luxembourg, on my way to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, possibly the first time I learned something important from Twitter as a news source. Cooray Smith also points out that the episode’s subsequent DVD release was a bit underwhelming.
The third chapter, “Please let it be… 1966”, briskly recounts the fraught writing and production of the story. Its second paragraph is:
The Tenth Planet (1966) had been rewritten as a swansong for William Hartnell’s Doctor and then its third episode had been hurriedly redrafted1 when Hartnell became unavailable. The Power of the Daleks required the temporary return of former Story Editor Dennis Spooner to the role (in addition to work performed by Davis in that capacity and rewrites by credited writer David Whitaker). The Highlanders (1966-67), made before The Underwater Menace but commissioned and initially intended to be made after it, was written by Davis after the contracted writer, BBC executive Elwyn Jones, failed to deliver any material at all, and was scripted with such urgency that all the necessary paperwork surrounding Davis’ commission was delayed until after most of the story had been made. 1 The original version, the Doctor playing a larger role in events, is retained in Gerry Davis’s novelisation.
The fourth chapter, “What have I come upon?”, looks in depth at Episode 2 and how watching it changes one’s perceptions of the story as a whole, exactly the experience I had had myself a few days before reading the chapter.
What the recovery of episode 2 has gifted us, however, in addition to a whole extra episode of 20th-century Doctor Who to enjoy, is a tremendous real-time demonstration of how any even only partially missing Doctor Who serial cannot ever really be understood as a piece of television, no matter how much secondary and supplementary material exists.
One utterly glorious bit of trivia. For many years, the only surviving segments of Episode 2 were those that had been cut from it by Australian censors for being too scary. The recovered copy of the episode turned out to have been the very one from which the Australian censors had cut the scenes, so they were reinserted into the master copy, half a century later on a different continent.
The fifth chapter, “Science is in opposition to ancient temple ritual”, looks at the tension between science and religion in the story, in the course of which the Doctor allies himself with the High Priest against Professor Zaroff, not the usual way around for these situations in Doctor Who.
The sixth chapter, “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”, offers a redemptive reading of the character of Professor Zaroff. Again, now that we have episode 2 as well, I can see that Joseph Furst’s performance, and the character as written, are much less over the top than fan lore would have had you believe.
The seventh chapter, “I should like a hat like that!”, looks at the question of the Second Doctor’s tall hat, which is seen for the last time in The Underwater Menace. Cooray Smith reckons that it was badly damaged in the filming of the previous story, The Highlanders, and thus quietly abandoned.
The eighth chapter, “Look at him! He’s not normal, is he?”, makes a good case that Troughton’s performance as the Doctor only really settles down after The Underwater Menace.
The ninth chapter, “A New Atlantis”, looks at the very little that is known of the writer, Geoffrey Orme, and examines the socialist elements of the plot – notably the strike of the Fish People as one of the few cases of industrial action in Doctor Who, and speculates that their infamous dance is rooted in the work of Ernst and Lotte Berk, with whom Orme had professional connections. I was convinced.
An appendix, “Vital secret will die with me! Dr. W”, looks in amusing and extensive detail at the question of whether the name of the lead character of the show is “Doctor Who” or not.
A second and final appendix reviews the production schedule of the story, whose studio sessions were recorded only a week before they were broadcast.
It’s all very satisfactory, and after a run of Black Archives which I was less happy with, this is reassuringly back to the usual excellent form.
Having said that, there is one very annoying production glitch. As has sometimes been the case before, it involves the footnotes; in this case, most of them are duplicated. It rather breaks up the reading experience.
Other than that, I really recommend this – after you have seen the recovered second episode. You can get it here.
They worked on the seventh floor of Lime Grove, assigned to different film editors. This was the same building where Alfred Hitchcock made The Thirty Nine Steps twenty years before when it was the Gaumont British Picture studios. Perhaps it was a portent for the future of the film industry when the BBC had bought tip and converted the studios in 1949. Situated in Shepherd’s bush, the building was on a cramped and enclosed site and the only way to expand was up. Lime Grove Studios became a multi-levelled rabbit warren of a building, easy to get lost in and was not much loved by those inside. Try as they might, the people who worked here in the 1950s find it very hard to describe the place as magical. Further down the road at Wood Lane, something magical had been postponed.
A couple of years ago, I read a biography of Robert Holmes, the greatest of Old Who’s writers; this book looks at the life of Douglas Camfield, one of the greatest of the Old Who directors (the top three must be him, David Maloney and Christopher Barry – and Camfield directed more episodes than either of the other two).
But Seely is very good at taking us into the world of the director, to the point that you can almost smell the static electricity in the studio gallery and the manure on location. Not every BBC director was as meticulous or professional as him; at the same time, he seems to have been genuinely charming, always bringing his guitar to finish the evening singing with those of the cast and crew that wanted to. (Though he also had his musical blind spots, and repeatedly refused to hire Dudley Simpson for incidental music.)
Camfield had a loyalty to a certain group of guest actors who tended to pop up in many of his productions, but in general they were good. This included his wife, Sheila Dunn, who got a small part in the Dalek’s Master Plan and a larger part in Inferno; though I remember her best as the daughter of Kessler, in the sequel to Secret Army, which had nothing to do with Camfield. Incidentally Bernard Hepton, the star of Secret Army, started his career as a director before turning to acting and was a peer of Camfield’s on the BBC training courses.
He did his best to move away from being typecast as a police and science fiction serial specialist, but did not quite success. He directed Duel, one of the great Blake’s 7 episodes, and the first episode of Shoestring and two others. His only close co-operation with the great Robert Holmes was not Doctor Who but the 1981 series The Nightmare Man, based on the novel Child of Vodyanoi by David Wiltshire; I have fond if scary memories of it forty years on, and would love to get hold of a copy.
Camfield’s health was always a problem, and he had to be taken off the Doctor Who story Inferno after a couple of episodes when he suffered a heart attack. Another heart attack hilled him at the age of 52 in 1984. Unlike Robert Holmes, who had sadly run out of steam when he died a couple of years later, one feels that Camfield was still innovating and finding new things to do, though he would have refused to return to Doctor Who. We must be grateful for what we have. This is a good book, with occasional rough edges. You can get it here.
The eleventh of the generally excellent Black Archive series of short books on individual Doctor Who stories addresses The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of the fourth season of the show, first broadcast soon after I was born in 1967, written by David Whitaker and directed by Derek Martinus, both big names in the history of Who. It had seven episodes, but only the second of the seven survives in video. When I first listened to the audio tape of the story, narrated by Fraser Hines from a script by Sue Cowley, I was taking B out of the way so that F could enjoy his seventh birthday in 2006. I wrote:
Spent most of this afternoon driving to the Ardennes and back, so finished listening to The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of Patrick Troughton’s first season as the Doctor, and the one voted the Best Ever Doctor Who Story by readers of Dreamwatch in 1993. Only one episode out of seven survives on video, and I haven’t seen it (yet).
I have to say that I was very unsatisfied with the plot of this classic story. The Daleks’ plan to manipulate the Doctor, and the Doctor’s attempts to manipulate Jamie, are both unrealistically convoluted as well as being very out of character. We never find out how the Daleks got photographs of the Second Doctor, whom they otherwise met only on the planet Vulcan, and of Jamie, whom they did not otherwise meet at all (unless you believe the Season 6B theory). (We also know that the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks are contemporaneous with The War Machines, so the Daleks would have been better off trying to grab the First Doctor who was elsewhere in London at the same time.) When we hit the nineteenth century, Arthur Terrall’s presence is not very satisfactorily explained, and the fact that he is a robot is just left hanging (or rather, Ruth is told to take him as far away as possible, as if this will somehow cure him of being mechanical). And it seems difficult to imagine that the Daleks are so bad at keeping track of individual units, however de-personalised they may be, that they simply lose track of the first three humanised Daleks. (The Discontinuity Guide further asks, “Why not just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie? Why does Terrall get Toby to kidnap Jamie? Since Jamie is so essential to Dalek plans, why are the traps set for him so lethal?”)
Having said that, the acting is great, and it’s clear from the BBC photosnaps that the series looked fantastic (Maxtible’s beard!!!!!). It’s also a really great idea to return to the Dalek City on Skaro (apparently the first time the Doctor had ever been seen to return to any planet except Earth) [other than a return within the same story, eg Kembel]. And I loved the Victoriana; I especially liked Waterfield’s horror-filled explanation, “We had opened the way for them with our experiments. They forced me into the horror of time travel, Doctor” – sounded very HP Lovecraft! And the references to Poe were clear (and even at one point explicit). And Troughton is great, dominating every scene (and this partly accounts for the flagging pace of episode 4 when he was on holiday).
So anyway, more good than bad, but I’m very sorry not to have actually seen any of it.
Well, I have revised my opinion of Evil of the Daleks upwards thanks to watching the reconstruction. I still rate it below Troughton’s debut story, The Power of the Daleks, because the plot has some large holes (why go to the bother of the elaborate entrapment via the cafe in 1966? how is the Doctor supposed to spread the Dalek Factor through history? what’s up with Terrall anyway?) and also I just don’t like Victoria (though again, maybe I will change my mind after doing her stories in sequence).
There are a couple of things about Evil of the Daleks, however, that really appealed to me this time. First, Marius Goring as the deranged Maxtible is a compelling vilain, especially as backed up by John Bailey as Waterfield – together they are the two sides of the scientist character portrayed by Lesterson in the previous story. Second, Dudley Simpson is on top of things as composer – the Daleks have a “diggerdy-dum” leitmotif, Victoria has a more wistful theme. Third, while I’m not a huge fan of turning the Daleks into something else by giving them humanity, Whitaker handles it better here than Helen Raynor did in Daleks of Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks. Fourth, it’s a nice early example (or perhaps foreshadowing) of the steampunk subgenre.
Finally, the two episodes on Skaro are an excellent climax to not just this story but the five Dalek stories of the black-and-white era; the return to their home planet somehow gives the Daleks more cultural depth than they previously had, with the thrilling appearance of the Emperor and the excitement of the civil war. So more of a thumbs up than I expected.
I took advantage of family travel earlier this month to experience Evil of the Daleks in two different ways – the Fraser Hines/Sue Cowley audio that I had first listened to in 2006, and the brand new animation released last year by the BBC, which I watched in colour rather than black and white, though I made an exception for the surviving episode 2. As it happens, I met Rob Ritchie who did much of the work on the animations on Thursday evening in the bar at Gallifrey One. He was interesting and disarming about the challenges of the process, and the flaws of the final result, none of which I spotted when watching. I have to say that I still feel that the telesnaps reconstruction, with Fraser Hines narration, which I watched in 2010 is the version that works best for me. But the animation does take us to places where the recon cannot go.
Somewhat sheepishly, I will admit that I liked the story as a whole even more this time than previously. Troughton is on top form; the varied settings keep you guessing as to what will happen next; Maxtible and the Emperor are suitably deranged; the essence of what makes us human and the Daleks monsters is core to the plot; we move from a stolen blue box in Gatwick to planetary destruction. And Victoria is given a new home by the Doctor and Jamie. I am amused at myself for liking this story more every time I experience it.
You can get the audio here, and the DVD including both animation and telesnaps reconstructions here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of John Peel’s novelisation is:
‘Bit of a bad area, know what I mean?’ the driver observed. ‘You want me to hang around?’ He was obviously hoping for another fare, since he’d overcharged the Doctor outrageously for their trip here.
This was the last official Target/Virgin adaptatation (a few remaining stories were produced in book form by fans subsequently) and therefore also the last Second Doctor novelisation and the last in the impressive series of five Dalek novelisations by John Peel. I have to say that I am among that heretical minority who regard the original story here as of less than top quality: the plot is absurdly convoluted, requiring both the Doctor and the Daleks to behave out of character, and Victoria as a new companion is awfully wet. But having said that, Peel improves on the original in a number of ways, giving the characters more comprehensible motivations, and embedding the narrative in the Dalek continuity he has been developing. I still preferred his others, but this is a good effort.
Oddly enough I also met John Peel the night before last, in the bar at the Marriott; he chortled with delight when I told him I had just been reading this – it had been great fun to write, he said. It shows.
I would add to the points made above that Peel resolves a number of points left hanging by the original TV plot – in particular, the situation of Arthur Terrell, who is not semi-robotic as I had thought, but a victim of Dalek experiments on mind control. You can get the novelisation here (for a price).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Simon Guerrier’s monograph is:
The Daleks were – and remain – a key part of Doctor Who. Their first appearance, in the second Doctor Who story, helped establish the series, and their subsequent stories saw peaks in the numbers of people watching. When the production team took the risky step of recasting Doctor Who’s lead actor in 1966, they cushioned the blow by having this new incarnation immediately face The Power of the Daleks. Viewers stuck with the programme.
This really is one of the best Black Archive volumes that I have read so far, and also I think the longest. Some earlier ones went rather far into the literary origins of particular Who stories, perhaps because there wasn’t all that much to say about the actual stories in question. Guerrier looks at that a little, but doesn’t waste too much time on it, and is much more interested in telling the story of Evil of the Daleks – both production and reception – as a social process, carried out in real time by real people. As I’ve done before, I’ll list out the (few and long) chapters in summary:
London, 20 July 1966: Looks at the difficulties of analysing a story that is mostly lost, and at the production background and influences on the fist episode and a half (no woman appears in the 1966 scenes; originally Ben and Polly would have been in the first two episodes, and the Samantha Briggs character from The Faceless Ones would have been the new companion);
Outside Canterbury, 2 to 3 June 1866: looks at the Victorian setting of the middle episodes and Victoriana in general, but also at the character of Maxtible (Marius Goring, the lead guest star, had a fixation with Henry Irving and his play The Bells, which is one of the artistic source for Evil) and what we learn about the Doctor;
Skaro: Date Unknown: goes into great detail on the Daleks and on what Terry Nation and David Whitaker might have argued about, given that Whitaker arguably had an equal share in their creation; and
Earth, 1967-2017: looking at the reception and preservation of the story over fifty years – lot of deep research into how and where the scripts were preserved, featuring in places my old friend Rebecca Levene; the Beatles’ song Paperback Writer was played during the original cafe scene in the first episode, but has been dropped from releases of the sound track for copyright reasons; new photographs and off-air recordings keep coming to light.
Guerrier ends by appealing for the animation of the missing episodes which has since been accomplished, but also (as usual for these books) has a decent bibliography. It’s a really solid piece of work.
My one complaint is that yet again the footnotes have been botched on the epub version. Clicking on any of the hundreds of footnote links in the text takes you to the start of the footnote section rather than to the relevant footnote itself. When you have found your footnote and ty to click back to where you were in the main text, you are taken instead to the start of the relevant chapter – and these are long chapters. No blame attaches to the author for this, but really, publisher, this is not rocket science and you got it right in several of the others.
Working through the Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who, I’ve now reached the seventh, on the 1968 story The Mind Robber, which features the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie transported to a Land of Fiction, and includes one episode where Fraser Hines is briefly replaced by another actor as Jamie because he had caught chickenpox. I like it. When I watched it for the first time in 2007, I wrote:
The Mind Robber features… Oh, let’s get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends like this. In the fourth episode she has a catfight with a caped and masked comic book superhero and wins. No wonder today’s Guardian lists her as one of the top five companions ever! I have to say that I can’t think of a more confident and sexy performance from any of the companions in any other old Who story; Leela, I think, comes closest but that is not very close. (Of course, if we count new Who as well, nobody can hold a candle to John Barrowman.)
And the confidence on her part (and indeed that of the rest of the cast) is remarkable because in fact the story very clearly doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The Doctor and companions are trapped in the Land of Fiction by its Master (not that Master but a different cosmic villain of the same name). We have a forest made of words. We have Jamie transformed into a different actor for an episode, to cover up the fact that Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox. We have clockwork soldiers. We have Rapunzel, we have E. Nesbit’s Five Children, and best of all we have Lemuel Gulliver, played superbly by Bernard Horsfall (and more on him later [in The War Games]). We have glorious moments of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictional, becoming hostile to the Doctor, being nostalgic for their lost homelands (to which of course they will be returned by the end of the season).
But we also have Doctor Who coming close to breaking the fourth wall, not in the overt way of the First Doctor in the Daleks’ Master Plan (or the charming Morgus in The Caves of Androzani), but in terms of exploring Story and what it means to be in one. It’s fascinating and bizarre and I’ll have to re-watch it soon, along with all the DVD extras. And not just because I want to ogle Zoe again.
When I did my rewatch of the whole of Old Who in 2010, I wrote:
The Mind Robber is one of the most extraordinary Who stories ever. The first episode, bolted onto Peter Ling’s script at the last minute by Derrick Sherwin, is full of wonderful moments of inspired lunacy; the only single episode that does a better job of dimension-hopping is Part One of The Space Museum, and it of course is let down by the rest of that story. In The Mind Robber we have the paradoxical idea of fictional characters (the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe) trying to avoid becoming fictional characters (like Gulliver, Rapunzel and Cyrano de Bergerac). Jamie’s temporary change of body – made necessary by circumstances totally outside anyone’s control – adds an extra element of surrealism to the mix. My one quibble is that the ending is a bit abrupt, and we never see what happens to the Master of the Land of Fiction.
Bernard Horsfall is particularly memorable here as Gulliver, aggravating the Doctor in a world of the mind as he was to do again under David Moloney’s direction in The Deadly Assassin. And having griped about the costumes for The Dominators, those for The Mind Robber – produced by the same designer – are superb; particularly Zoe’s catsuit. The moment when she is shot from behind clinging to the console of the destroyed Tardis is a moment when Doctor Who starts to grow up. Or at least enter adolescence.
Coming back to it again – with the production subtitles on the DVD – I still really enjoyed it, for all the reasons set out above. It’s worth noting that it was the first story directed by David Moloney, who also oversaw the production of such classics as The War Games, Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Patrick Troughton is very good, using force of personality to overcome the low-budget sets. I also must try and get to High Rocks near Tunbridge Wells some time, used both here and in Castrovalva.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
This is much more fun. The original TV version was one of the most surreal stories ever; the novel takes some liberties with the script, but basically improves it further to make it one of the better Second Doctor novels. Even the Karkus somehow makes better sense here. One to look out for.
I endorse this assessment. One point to add is that even though Ling did not actually write the first of the five TV episodes, he gives it more page time (38 out of 144 – 26%) than any of the others in the novelisation. Completists will already have it, but if you don’t, you can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Andrew Hickey’s study of the Mind Robber is:
The grafted-on opening by Sherwin means that the serial effectively has two ‘episode 1’s – the story proper does not really start until the second episode – and one could even argue that the plot doesn’t start until near the end of the story. For much of the adventure, this is a picaresque, with the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe exploring an unfamiliar landscape and the characters within it. We will look later at the similarities between the Doctor and Lemuel Gulliver, but in this story the Doctor has become part of Gulliver’s genre – he, like Gulliver, is our representative in a strange place, discovering the rules along with us, and this is enough to carry the narrative without having to have a plot per se.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Hickey’s writing online over the years, though he has more recently shifted to podcasting and Patreon, neither of which is really my thing, so I was looking forward to this. My expectations were not completely fulfilled. I felt it leant a bit too heavily on the traditional fannish resources for Doctor Who – articles from DWM, Howe et al, Cornell et al – and not enough on other sources. In particular I missed any reference to Who’s Next, by Derrick Sherwin, the writer of the first episode of The Mind Robber and script editor for the whole; his autobiography was published in time for the 50th anniversary rush in 2013, and Hickey’s Black Archive study almost three years later. So there was a lot more telling me what I already knew than telling me new stuff.
Having said that, for those less familiar with Whovian reference books, it’s a workmanlike summary of the state of play, comprehensibly structured and decently written. The chapters cover:
the production of the story, and its roots in Platonic philosophy and Alice in Wonderlandthe questions of authorship and the nature of fiction;
a very short chapter on the story’s structure;
a defence of Season Six and brief bio notes on the main cast and crew;
a much longer survey of the characters in the Land of Fiction, especially Gulliver, the Karkus and the Master himself;
another very short chapter on why The Mind Robber is different to the First Doctor story The Celestial Toymakerwhat a shame it is that a subtle story full of nuance is chiefly remembered for one male gaze scene [I plead guilty];
why the Doctor is not from the Land of Fiction (only one reference is given for this argument);
other appearances of the Land of Fiction in the Whoniverse, unsurprisingly omitting The Wonderful Doctor of Oz, published five years later.
The Mind Robber features… Oh, let’s get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends 
