The Web of Fear

Chapter The 131st, which is quite the underground hit.

Plot:

The TARDIS is forced to land in the London Underground, c. 1975. A web-like fungus is everywhere up top, London has been evacuated, and robotic Yeti are on the prowl. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria team up with Professor Travers, whom they previously met when he was approximately 40 years younger during their last encounter with the Yeti. He is working with the army alongside his daughter Anne in an HQ underground at Goodge Street. Our heroes seem to be blocked at every turn: bombs laid elsewhere in the tunnels to blow up the Yeti are covered in web fired from guns the Yeti carry, and the explosion is contained. Extra ammunition is brought in, but the troops bringing it are ambushed. Slowly but surely, the web / fungus / foam encircles the HQ, trapping our heroes. Mutual suspicion reigns: someone is being controlled by the Great Intelligence, sabotaging things, and planting cute mini-Yeti on people that the bigger more ferocious kind home in on. Could it be one of the two soldiers who turn up allegedly from the ambushed ammunition party: cowardly Welsh driver Evans, and some fellow called Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (whatever happened to him?)?  People are picked off one by one, and Professor Travers and Victoria captured, to force the Doctor out into the open. The Intelligence wants to drain the Doctor's mind and use his abilities to conquer time and space. The Doctor has a plan and has reprogrammed a Yeti to work for him by remote control, and he also opportunistically manages to reverse the Intelligence's brain-drain machine; but, he doesn't inform anyone of this, so his friends intervene and the Intelligence is merely banished not totally defeated, leaving open the possibility of a final rematch...

Context:

In mid-August, while packing and preparing for a very welcome holiday in the sun (10 days in a villa in Majorca - just what the Doctor ordered), I wondered what Who story or stories I could take with me. It has become a tradition to watch and blog a serial on my hols since I stayed in the location where a Tom Baker story was filmed a few years back. In the old days it would involve bringing along a DVD in my suitcase, but more recently - even on holidays in cottages within the UK - the provision of a DVD player in amongst the mod cons has become less than guaranteed. Everyone carries a screen around these days which can provide downloaded or streamed entertainment, even in the Balearics, but it does limit the choice of material - essentially, it's only usually going to be stories from 2005 and after that are accessible to me, and nothing before that.

Last year, I lucked out that the stories coming up randomly for blogging for the period when I was in Tenerife happened to be in the post-2005 batch and were downloadable from iplayer. I fancied some classic Who this time, so was even more lucky that the selection was pretty much the only pre-2005 serial that I owned in a portable form. I had bought The Web of Fear on itunes when it was returned to the archives and released in 2013 (see First Time Round section below for more details). It was reminiscent to me of another holiday I went on years before where I brought along the CDs of the audio version of the story and listened to it abroad (see First Time Round section below for more details). As I was watching on a tiny iPhone screen, I did not gather the family around me, but waited until people turned in and watched with a glass or two of vino, an episode per night. The last couple of episodes had to be viewed through a fearful web of cracks after my screen lost an argument with a tapas bar floor, but it was all watchable and enjoyable (and I know the plot inside out anyway).

First time round:

I always seem to be out of the country during significant moments regarding The Web of Fear. It was Lanzarote we went to, if I remember rightly, around 2002 - myself, the Better Half and another friend. I had a new Discman (even writing that sentence makes me feel old!) and wanted to take something to listen to on the plane or during quiet moments, so packed the three CDs containing episodes of The Web of Fear as well as music. I'd had the audio version - released by the BBC from cleaned-up off-air recordings and with Frazer Hines narration - for a year or two, but the first listen didn't register enough to be remembered. I do though strongly recall my holiday listen, snatching the odd moment - on the coach transferring us from the airport and so on - to hear noisy Yeti vs. army battles and such.

Then, just over a decade later in Autumn 2013, I was on a working trip to Paris for the day job, checking an online message-board in the hotel one evening, when I first saw rumours of an imminent announcement that some old episodes of Doctor Who had been recovered. For weeks before that, a different rumour had been circulating that a massive haul had been made in the region of 90 episodes (which would have been 90 percent of what was missing from the archives at the time). This was presumably exaggeration of the whispers that must have been around about this legitimate find - not only four of the five missing episodes of The Web of Fear, but all the five missing episodes of its preceding story The Enemy of the World had been returned. Alas, the rumblings preceding it made what should have been miraculous - it was after all the most episodes found in one go ever - seem a little underwhelming in comparison to the crazy fantasy.

It wasn't long before one could obtain the episodes themselves, but only as itunes downloads. DVDs were only available after a number of months had passed. In marketing terms (that I just made up) this is called a Combined Options Narrative... or con, for short. The DVDs were no frills, and could easily have been got ready in advance, but an opportunity was obviously spotted to sell desperate fans like me the same thing twice. Yes, I fell for it hook line and sinker. On a night a few weeks after the announcement, a night when I had work the next day, I stayed up until midnight when the episodes became available. I couldn't stay up all night long, so had to choose which few episodes I could watch before I got too tired. I viewed the first couple of episodes of Enemy of the World, and episode 2 of Web of Fear, just to cram in as much newly found stuff as I could, sampling both stories; I then watched the full serials over the following couple of days.

Reaction:

It’s not just the eerie Bela Bartok music used prominently in episode 1 (which is also famously used in the movie of The Shining), The Web of Fear reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s work in another way too. I remember seeing an interview with a colleague of his explaining that Kubrick liked to find several ‘islands’, sequences or set pieces within a story, and the screenplay would be constructed to string a connection between these. This was an explanation offered for why Kubrick’s films tended to happen in distinct phases or chapters, and The Web of Fear is similar. The first part is a full on 1930s-style monster horror of the Yeti coming alive with the aforementioned sinister underscoring, noir-ish shadows, and our heroes creeping around dark, silent tunnels with all escape routes blocked, finding cobweb-covered corpses. The middle three episodes, with less film inserts, switch to something with a very different feel, much more naturally lit, performed and scored - it’s an isolated professional outpost horror, as people are picked off one by one (conforming to the ‘Base Under Siege’ formula of many Patrick Troughton stories).

These three episodes are also interspersed with militaristic action sequences that feel like a different genre again, although they’re very successful and you can feel that Douglas Camfield is having the time of his life directing them. Everything peaks with the impressive Covent Garden attack sequence, where the last of the soldiers under Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s command is killed. The Colonel returns to the base and gives a haunted speech to the ragtag band of survivors about their unstoppable enemy - some of Nicholas Courtney’s best work incidentally - and that’s that. The problem is that there are still another two episodes to go. The final phase of The Web of Fear is a bit less successful. The last two episodes do seem to involve a lot of scenes of the cast standing around on tube platforms, waiting for some plot to arrive. On first watch – and it was only designed for one watch, lest we forget – you’re carried through this by the mystery of who exactly is under the control of the Great Intelligence and who isn’t. I’m not going to spoil here exactly how that is resolved, because some people may not know, and it’s a genuine surprise, I think. I’ve experienced the story too many times now to ever forget the twist, but even someone who doesn’t know suffers a mild spoiler compared to those seeing this on broadcast in 1968: one of the suspects is Lethbridge-Stewart, and alas anyone who knows anything of the history of the show will realise he’s not going to turn out to be the bad guy.

Once the big reveal has happened, the climax is a let down. The cast and production team give it their all, but coming after the magnificent sequences in the first four episodes, the fumble and scrabble and abruptness of the end is a disappointment. But but but: this is forgivable when seen in context, as this was only ever intended to be the middle part of a trilogy. The Yeti were planned to feature again, and the Great Intelligence be finally defeated, in The Laird of McCrimmon, a proposed storyline by writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln set back in Jamie’s original time and place that would also likely have written out the plucky Highlander. It sounds like it would have been excellent, and it’s a shame that it got kiboshed by a backstage falling out between the writers and the production team.

Those writers manage to produce probably the most vivid and memorable set of characters to be trapped together in a base under siege of any Troughton story. Obviously, the Brigadier is introduced here (pre-promotion), but a lot of the other characters were of sufficient quality that they could have become long-running semi-regulars too. Professor Travers returns, of course; his daughter Anne, played by Tina Packer, is a prototype of future companion Liz Shaw and could easily have returned also (I believe there were plans for both professor and daughter to return with the Brig in the next season's The Invasion, but the actors weren’t available). All the other squaddies are distinct and interesting, and it’s very shocking when they meet their different ends. Best of the bunch for me is Driver Evans. Evans is not just a coward, he is a relentlessly clever and tenacious character always slipping out of trouble and looking after his own skin. He’s played by Derek Pollitt with such likeability – there’s no side to him, and the script is careful to keep his behaviour on the right side of acceptable – that you can’t blame him for doing as he does. It was an interesting and refreshing choice; Evans doesn't die, but neither does he learn or grow, not ending up in the hackneyed and obvious climax where, when up against it, he turns out to be brave after all - Evans stays consistently cowardly all the way through.

Even with the last two episodes treading water a bit, the serial as a whole is still something very special. There's a few other little negatives, though: is it a web, or is it a fungus? The characters and the script don't seem to have made up their mind. Also, web and/or fungus don't have anything to do with Yeti symbolism at all, but then neither do the glass pyramids and silver balls featured in the Yeti's first outing The Abominable Snowmen, I suppose. One really needs to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the tube map to follow the significant movements of the encircling fungus wall, even with visuals as an aid (I seem to remember the BBC Audio team wanted to print a tube map in the inlay sleeve of the CD box, but couldn't as it's a image under copyright and so would have cost them). And did I miss something, or was there never a real opportunity for the Intelligence to retrieve the web sample from the tobacco tin? Did Evans maybe just smoke it by accident?

Connectivity: 

Both The Web of Fear and The Curse of Fenric feature members of the armed forces, most of whom get killed; both contain a disembodied evil force that takes over multiple people during the course of the narrative; also, both are of the admittedly common sub-genre of Doctor Who stories where people are stalked through subterranean tunnels by unrelenting monsters.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Guv'nor. At this time of year, I normally indulge myself writing a bit of travelogue to detail the lovely sunny context in which I watched the Doctor Who story I’ve smuggled in to another country. Events, though, have postponed that, as there is only one person I want to write down my deeper thoughts about right now - Terrance Dicks, who very sadly passed away within the last week at the age of 84. Many, many wonderful and talented people who’ve worked on Doctor Who have died since I started this blog, and I haven’t felt it necessary to give them a mini-obit (it’s not really the point of proceedings, and others could no doubt do it better), but Uncle Terrance is a special case. That affectionate nickname clues you in to the special regard in which he is held by Doctor Who fans worldwide.

Reading the news in a tweet on Monday, I felt a metaphorical sucker punch. It felt very similar to the moment I found out Jon Pertwee had died in 1996. As then, there was shock, sadness disproportionate to the death of someone I didn’t know personally, but also a total lack of inevitability. Call me naive, but - just like with Jon - I don’t think I ever expected Terrance to die. If it had been Tom Baker, I doubt I’d have felt like that: Tom’s always had a particular darkly comic obsession with mortality, and talks about his own death a lot (although he may well outlast us all, who knows). Terrance just lived, just was: solidly, unpretentiously, marvellously, he was always there.

This is why I didn’t need to worry about how I would link Terrance in to the randomly chosen story at hand. The Web of Fear was made just before Terrance joined the production team of Doctor Who, but he novelised it, of course: the first time I experienced the story would have been courtesy of his prose. There was no era that he didn’t connect with in some way. He wrote or edited TV scripts for the first five of the classic series Doctors, and wrote novels for all of the classic series Doctors. And he did it so so well. It is no exaggeration to say that his input saved Doctor Who from cancellation around 1970, and turned it into the long-running series it became, all the way through to post-2005 Doctor Who which was heavily influenced at the outset by the style of stories that Terrance was making alongside producer Barry Letts in the early 1970s. He may not have added his name to any of them during his days as a script editor, but every script contains a large amount of his input.

All that TV work, though, as important as it was, pales into almost insignificance when stacked next to the novels Terrance produced for the Target range. These were books that taught quite a few of us to read, and taught a more select few (but nonetheless a significant number) to write. They were a publishing phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s and that is down to Terrance, pretty much 100%. Other writers may have their name on more TV stories, or more well thought of books, yes: Terrance was never a lead guitar sort of person, but he was the dependable, professional and accomplished rhythm section of Doctor Who, providing that background beat that you can still hear echoes of in the stories being made today. He never stopped loving Doctor Who, as is clear from every interview he ever gave. That this was all done with an almost careless modesty only makes it that much sweeter an accomplishment. It would be very easy to take him or his work for granted, but we should not. He was and is the guv’nor of Doctor Who, and I’m very sad that he’s no longer with us.

In Summary:

Down in the tube station at midnight, oh-woh-oh-oh! Don't wanna go down in the tube station at midnight, oh-woh-oh-oh...