The Moonbase

Chapter The 149th, which alternates between cartoonishness and animation.

Plot:

A moonbase in the year 2070; a multi-national - but single sex - team working here use a device called the Gravitron to control weather on the Earth's surface. A squad of Cybermen arrive on the moon, create a secret entrance into the base by stealth, then come through in force, attacking the crew and putting down all resistance swiftly and mercilessly. They make the crew operate the Gravitron to devastate the Earth with storms, win, and the human race is destroyed. Except, this doesn't happen. Instead, the Cybermen - because they are a cold, logical race - have a better plan: they send just a couple of their number in who hide in the storeroom or under a sheet, they then poison the base's sugar supply, which incapacitates anyone who consumes it, allowing the Cybermen to very gradually turn them into zombies who do their bidding; this all takes just long enough for the Doctor and his companions Ben, Polly and Jamie to arrive and defeat them. Polly mixes a cocktail of plastics which can be sprayed onto the Telos toughies and thereby gets rid of the scouting party, then the Doctor has the idea of focusing the Gravitron onto the moon's surface, which repels the rest of the Cybermen and their spaceships. 

Context:

All the family (Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) watched this, one episode an evening across a week, from the 2014 DVD. This contains the episodes 2 and 4 as originally broadcast, or thereabouts, but 1 and 3 - where only the audio is present in the BBC archives - are represented by animations aligned to that existing soundtrack. The children were very disappointed whenever the story cut back to real actors being filmed, and agreed that it would have been better if they had animated all of it. Interestingly, several years on and that's exactly what is happening. The latest animated story The Faceless Ones (see below) is the first - after wholly missing stories The Power of the Daleks and The Macra Terror were animated - where a story has been handled where some of the episodes (1 and 3 in this case) are intact in the archives. The decision has obviously been made, and I think it is the right one, that these new versions should stand alone for possible sales to broadcasters / streaming services (some Who animations are already available on Britbox) rather than just the niche enthusiast market (me included) who might have snapped up The Moonbase DVD when it first came out. 

First time round:

After a slow start, the releases of Doctor Who for home viewing and collection established themselves into a veritable range by the early 1990s, having started a few years earlier - a brief overlap before original series Doctor Who came off the air in 1989. It was almost as if a baton was being passed on to a new way - at least for me, who hadn't been alive to seen the old shows when they first aired - to get one's Doctor Who fix. The medium was VHS in those days, and the range was in fine fettle as the decade proceeded. As a new decade was starting, another baton handover took place as BBC Worldwide started to re-release titles from the range once more on DVD, now with higher definition and extras, and again there was an overlap with the new medium starting slowly as the previous one finished up. In the last couple of years, there's been the slow and gradual start of Blu-ray boxsets - more definition, more extras - overlapping with releases on DVD. At first glance, it looks like the classic Doctor Who range has been going uninterrupted for 30+ years, but there was a bit of a wobble. When the DVD of The Moonbase came out, those animated episodes could possibly have been the last original material from the classic era to see the light. A confident 'Coming Soon' trailer for The Underwater Menace appeared on The Moonbase DVD, but - as I describe in more detail here - months and months went by without that fishy epic coming out, and when it did, it was not so much released as it escaped.

I don't know whether The Moonbase being the final ever classic era story to come out, had that come to pass, would have been a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it is a very silly story, and almost half-formed - it's like a dress rehearsal for the more successful story The Tomb of the Cybermen, made by a lot of the same people soon after The Moonbase. On the other hand, the animation is great, and very much impressed on first watch, and the story as a whole being available was something new and miraculous. For, this is one of the few DVD releases (like The Underwater Menace, and The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear which were all released during the end stages of the range) which never came out on VHS, and whose existence on shiny disc might have seemed like a pipe dream only a few years earlier. For some, this was because the episodes had been recovered, but mostly this was because of the wonders of animation. In the VHS days, gaps would be plugged with a bit of to-camera explanation by a cast member. This enforced a rule that only stories with more episodes present than not could really have the full release treatment. The later innovations meant that Patrick Troughton was finally well-served, as his era was hardest hit by the losses in the archive. The total number of full story VHS releases for the second Doctor was a lowly eight. Thanks mainly to animation, the total number of DVDs will be double that by the end of this year.

The surviving Moonbase episodes were first collected on a VHS called 'Cybermen - The Early Years' released in July 1992, between my first and second years at university in Durham. I would no doubt have snapped it up from Volume One in Worthing on or near the date of release. Also on the tape were the surviving episodes (3 and 6) of another Troughton Cyberman story, The Wheel in Space. The 'Years' tapes were never intended to be anything other than a grab bag of different scraps, so no attempt was made to cover the missing bits. Because a middle episode and the ending was on there for both, though, it was possible - with a lot of imagination - to work out the story in one's head. I had nothing much to do over that long Summer Vac, and I seem to remember watching this tape a lot, wishing I had something more complete to enjoy, but making the best of it. I remember getting a bus over to Lancing to see a friend from my Sixth form days Alex (a different Alex from my childhood friend previously mentioned numerous times on this blog). Other Alex was fascinated by a minor subplot in the last episode where a relief ship is sent out to the moon, but deflected into a solar orbit by the Cybermen, with the ship inescapably drawn to the sun, even if it took them a week to die. He was incensed that the story just abandons them and everyone fixates on sorting out the Gravitron. His focus on it made me muse for quit a while about composing the story of that relief ship on their final slow mission to death, but I never got round to writing it.

Reaction:

There's always a tendency when a writer is researching the background of a story for them to fall in love with the interesting facts they uncover, and then not be able to resist putting them in somehow, even if they aren't relevant to the story and stick out like a sore thumb. Writer of The Moonbase Kit Pedler had recently become a scientific adviser to Doctor Who, collaborating with script editor Gerry Davis to create scenarios with greater verisimilitude. It did work to give a new feel to the series, and it went down well with audiences at the time (and is still popular now), but for me it has its problems. The main one is that Pedler is only interested in his research, or so it seems. The Moonbase is a story about a bunch of clever blokes using gravity technology to control the weather; the Cyber invasion is what's been shoe-horned in. This explains how Other Alex (see above) responded; he saw and felt a much more emotive plot (the fate of the relief ship) than the threat to the Earth of its own weather. It doesn't help that this threat is off screen: the Gravitron is a few flashing lights moving over a world map. At the very least, it needed some cutaways to stock footage of a monsoon or something to sell it, but we don't get that here, with action staying on the moon at all times. This scientific rigour doesn't stop some howlers slipping through either: did Pedler and Davis really believe that a hole in the Moonbase's protective outer shell could be adequately patched with a plastic tea tray, as depicted here?

The other drawback of Pedler and Davis's approach is that through working out this new approach they hit upon a structure that would showcase the science concept of the week, and that structure then stuck to the point where it became a formula, and then later became formulaic: a restricted and often isolated area, run by a stubborn authority figure with whom the Doctor clashes, is slowly infiltrated by aliens. The same structure is used for The Faceless Ones, and many many other Troughton stories. In The Moonbase, they're still honing it, and some aspects don't work as well as others. Patrick Barr as Hobson, for example, seems half-hearted when doing the stubborn authority bit as Moonbase leader, and it's probably down to the writing: one moment he's suspicious of the Doctor, next he's letting him access every part of the base and its crew, one moment he's threatening to turf the TARDIS team out, next he's placated by having a cup of coffee made for him. Even when he's telling the Doctor to get off the moon, it's so laid back he may as well be asking him to pass the sugar. This lackadaisical attitude infects the rest of the cast too, as epitomised by the ending of episode 4, where the defeated Cybermen, supposedly violently uprooted from the moon's surface, skip into the air waftily like they're playing a weightless skipping game, then the crew who've been standing around watching this give a perfunctory cheer, and then all get back to work. Is that really the thrilling climax to the story? One wonders for a few seconds, before realising that - yes - that was it.

I'm almost hesitant to say it with the current Doctor on screens almost making it work, but three companions is most definitely too many, particularly when it's by accident rather than design as it is in here. Frazer Hines was cast as a one-off guest character in The Highlanders, a couple of stories before The Moonbase, but they made a last minute decision to keep him on; so, the next few scripts including The Moonbase's had some hasty rewrites to encompass the new guy. This leads to a bit of line sharing where Ben acquires a sudden amount of scientific knowledge he's never had before. They can't keep that up, so knock out Jamie early on, and he spends a couple of episodes unconscious. This leads to an interesting concept being introduced, the "phantom piper" who appears to McCrimmons before they die, but it is a stretch that even in a concussed state Jamie would believe that the silver robot man, who has no bagpipes or anything, could really be this personage.

Polly gets a rubbish time of it for most of her stories - it's not just the sexism, but there is plenty of that in The Moonbase. The people representing the diverse nationalities of future international cooperation are all male, and Polly - the only woman in the cast - makes coffee for them. It really sticks out watching these 1960s episodes when they slip back to some of the less acceptable attitudes of the time. Doctor Who is usually better than this, which makes the lapses seem all the worse. A similar one in The Faceless Ones is when the Doctor's farewell to his two exiting companions lacks balance somewhat. The Doctor tells Ben he can be an admiral some day, then adds: "And you Polly... you can look after Ben". At the recent BFI screening (see below), this elicited an astonished response, with a lot of nervous laughter. Worse than this, though, is that Polly can be written well, as clever, strong and resourceful. But the writers can't sustain it, and fall back into having her screaming and needing to be rescued, to fit some template of what they think the companion should be. This means there are frustrating inconsistencies in Polly's character, often in the same story: on the Moon, for example, good Polly is using her intelligence to deduce a weapon they can use, mixing up cocktails, and taking the fight to the Cybermen. Bad Polly is screaming and dropping trays and wimpering, and serving drinks. 

There is some great material here, though. The filmed scenes of our heroes, and the attacking Cybermen, on the moon's surface are very well done. The continuing use of the stock music "Space Adventure" as the Cyberman theme is great. The new more streamlined and metallic Cyberman design is very effective - I like the practise golf balls on the joints too, though some people find them a bit silly. The animation is good, with very good likenesses. The story as a whole, though is just a bit disposable. But popular enough that things could be further refined in the next story, and set up this monster to be the returning baddie of the next few years. 

Connectivity: 

The Five Doctors makes this an easy game: both The Moonbase and Doctor Who's Twentieth anniversary Special feature Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, Fraser Hines as Jamie, and lots of Cybermen; in both stories, one of these Cybs when attacked spews out goo.

Deeper Thoughts:

Scotland Yard case file on Chameleon Tours: The Faceless Ones animation screening + Q&A, 29th February 2020. The first BFI Doctor Who event of this year; it seems like ages since the last one, and I enjoy them very much, so I happily took shelter in the NFT (or BFI Southbank if you insist) on a wet and windy Saturday. I met up with some of the growing group of attendees for these events - David, Chris, Tim, and Dave, and we settled in our seats. David and I speculated on how soon our hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy would introduce their first customary "Dick" joke, and we didn't wait long. Before proceedings proper began, Anthony Townsend of the Diva Loka Brighton fan group got up on stage to talk about a forthcoming charity event G'Day of the Doctor, and after a round of applause to greet him, Justin obligingly said "They like you more than dick". Ho ho! After Andrew had plugged this worthy event, the standard quiz got underway, with Justin asking the assembled audience trivia questions, and Dick roaming with a mic. Anneke Wills, who played Polly, won a DVD for answering a question about herself correctly, and - in a nicely shambolic and unrehearsed group show of hands response - someone narrowed down Frazer Hines's total number of Emmerdale Farm appearances (where he starred as Joe Sugden) to a mighty 1519 times.

(L to R) Fiddy, Johnson

The animated episodes were prefaced with a short video clip from Ben actor Michael Craze's son, Ben Craze, who couldn't attend in person. Ben was accompanied by his two daughters, Michael's granddaughters, one of whom did most of the talking (and was clearly a star in the making); sweet gems from this included "My granddad, who was called..." followed by a thoughtful pause and then "Granddad Mike", and an admission that she didn't watch Doctor Who because it is too scary. You had to see it, really; alas, it's probably too late (and too personal) to be included on the discs of the imminent release, but it was so lovely. After this, the first three episodes were shown. I have already blogged The Faceless Ones, but it seemed apt to include the write up of the animation screening here with The Moonbase, as they were transmitted as part of the same season (only one story apart on broadcast) and the animation link too, of course. I enjoyed The Faceless Ones when I was watching it as an audio and photo reconstruction, but the work done here lifts it even more. Colour seems to particularly work for this story, bringing the Swinging Sixties 1967 production to vivid life, highlighting much more of the fun and humour of this tale. An airport with all its machinery and planes gives Rob Ritchie's 3D animation freer rein, and he does exemplary work throughout. The character designs and 2D animation improve with every new release. Notable this time is that character's hand movements are featuring more - in places it looks a bit odd, but it's great that they are pushing the envelope.

(L to R) Fiddy, Walsh, Ayres

In between the two halves of the animation, there was a short panel with a couple of the people responsible for this new version: director AnneMarie Walsh, and audio supremo Mark Ayres. AnneMarie talked about the limits of how much the two existing episodes could be used as any basis for the animation: they are different media, with different needs including the number of shots and cuts. The two existing episodes seem barely to have been needed at all, as Mark confirmed that the audio used for all six episodes comes from the off-air recordings made by fan Graham Strong in the 1960s, as it is better quality than the audio of the surviving film copies of episode 1 and 3. Mark had to borrow sound sources from elsewhere in the episodes in places to aid the needs of the animation, and his audio was then what was used as a guide, with AnneMarie and the animators building animatics to fit this, which were then developed into the final version. Through this process, AnneMarie fell for Colin Gordon's Commandant, her favourite character in the piece. She also gave a shout out to Martin Geraghty for doing a great job with character designs. Dick Fiddy had a final question about whether the show Archer was something of an inspiration for the style used for The Faceless Ones, and both panellists confirmed that this was true, although they added that the people making Archer have more money, more time, and "more swearing".




The final three episodes were then shown. Unlike The Macra Terror, no major liberties have had to be taken with the story (a scene featuring the Rough and Tumble machine had to be excised from the animation of the Macra story as it was too complex to animate). The Chameleon's natural alien form has been re-imagined; the version created for the original TV show was probably too blank to come across as a drawing. The replacements are a little too 'generic green alien' for me, but it's a very minor niggle. One area where I almost wanted the animation team to take liberties was in the final sequences, where they could have featured an additional scene of Ben and Polly (at least a non-speaking Ben and Polly) before their final scene. These two characters had a very abrupt leaving scene as it had been filmed on location, and they were no longer employed by the time of the studio sessions of episode 6, so we are robbed of the moment when they are reunited with the Doctor and Jamie. That moment could have been inserted during the sequence of searching in the Chameleon's spacestation or searching the cars in the long-stay car park (although the logic of the plot is a little unclear, and I'm still not certain after many watches which place Ben and Polly would have been hidden).

One other point of note in the animation is the liberal sprinkling of in-joke Easter Eggs for the sharp-eyed to spot. [If you would rather be un-spoilered and find them for yourself, skip over this paragraph.] The earliest one is a Wanted poster in the airport police office. This appeared in a clip that was released online ahead of the screening, which shows the Roger Delgado Master's mugshot up on the pinboard, but added to that since has been another picture - this time of Sacha Dewan's incarnation. This got an audible gasp of a wowed reaction in the room. Comparing notes after the screening, my fellow attendees and I also spotted references to International Electromatics, Magpie Electricals, a newspaper with a "War Machines Defeated" headline (this story taking place on the day after the events of The War Machines), plus familiar names to fandom Hickman, Ridgway and Condon hidden in the settings. The aforementioned Rough and Tumble machine finally appears in an animation too: it's advertised in a newspaper that the Doctor and Jamie both read. There are certainly more there to find, so - if you plan to buy the DVD or Blu-ray - happy hunting!

(L to R) Wills, Hines, Johnson

After the screening had finished, the final Q&A of the day was with Anneke and Frazer. They were both in good form, working the room: the former as twinkly and naughty as ever, the latter in full on convention anecdote machine mode. Anneke talked first about reading the BBC Audio recordings of the novelisation for this story amongst others; this was a subject she returned to a few times, to some affectionate mockery from Justin Johnson. The Commandant had been the most fun character to play, as he was so strait-laced but had to deal with "the forces of chaos" as represented by the Doctor and his friends. Despite a lot of coaxing, she would not give her "Jamie" audio voice with Frazer in the room. On the subject of voices, Frazer was surprised by his slipping into English "Received Pronunciation" when playing the Chameleon version of Jamie, something he'd forgotten doing. They both enjoyed the finished animation, but are looking forward to their favourite stories one day being done. For Frazer, that's The Highlanders (although AnneMarie had told him that the tartan and kilt folds will be a nightmare to do); for Anneke, it's The Smugglers, which holds special memories as the cast got to spend a night away in a pub in Cornwall during its filming - the nearest a poor young actor could get to a holiday then.

Many things were learnt during this energetic session, not least how much each person got paid for The Faceless Ones. Anneke was on 68 pounds per episode, Frazer only 57, to which he reacted in mock outrage "I'm not sitting here to be insulted"! Troughton was on a whopping 262 quid per ep. There was an interesting discussion on actors watching recordings of themselves performing - Anneke doesn't, Frazer does, as he feels it's the only way one can improve, noticing bad habits (he mentioned he used to do too much scratching of his head and pointing, which he forced himself to phase out); Frazer topped this chat off with a zinger of a reply he gave to Peter Purves, who told him he would not watch his own performances back; Frazer replied: "You should do, 'cos we had to!" Anneke jokingly proposed that Frazer likes watching his performances as "You love yourself", to which Frazer replied, mock crestfallen "Somebody's got to love me". Anneke always feels that when you look back, you will always beat yourself up about what you could do better, but did find herself watching herself on TV one day, while drinking a glass of wine. She thought: "I'm rather good actually" and finished the bottle.

There were some well-worm but nonetheless welcome anecdotes griping about "control freak" director Morris Barry (who helmed The Moonbase as well as The Tomb of the Cybermen"). Apparently, Morris came down to the studio one day to find that the sets had all been put up slightly wrongly. Instead of amend his camera script, the actors and crew had to wait, while the set was broken and reassembled 6 inches to the left. When asked - with reference to the recent Blu-ray trailers that have caught up with some companions later in their post-Doctor life - what their characters would be up to in their later years, Anneke felt Polly would not be married to Ben, but would be living in a cottage in the depths of Dartmoor growing vegetables. Frazer thought Jamie, if he avoided being dead on a battlefield somewhere, would be married to Kirsty (Hannah Gordon's character in The Highlanders) with 5 kids, as there was "no TV back in those days, you see".

Talk turned to the superfluity of companions because of the last minute introduction of "cuckoo" Jamie, and the subsequent exit of Ben and Polly. Both actors agreed that three is too many, with Frazer remembering that the hasty rewrites imposed on The Moonbase meant that he was laying on a bed for three episodes moaning about the phantom piper, with Anneke mopping his brow: "Easiest money I ever made".  The producer decided to get rid of Michael Craze, asking Anneke if she would stay on as Polly, but she decided to be loyal to Michael and go. This also was an excuse to get off herself, as her partner of the time Michael Gough had told her when she started not to get stuck with one thing, and to be fluid. After he left the show, Frazer and Pat Troughton had kept in touch with one another. "We played golf for the next 16 years," said Frazer, "Very long game - he was a terrible putter!". When he, Pat and Wendy Padbury met up again during filming of The Five Doctors, they were rolling around on the floor laughing and joking in rehearsals. The other Dcotors, according to Frazer, were looking on jealous as they never did anything like that with their companions. By this time Anneke had forgotten about Doctor Who and was living in Canada, and - devastatingly - she revealed that after their final shooting day, she and Craze might have had a drink with Pat at the pub, but after that she never ever saw him again. After this, though, more happily, she said that she hopes they do more animations as "this is the highlight of my year". Though I wouldn't go that far, it is a very enjoyable day out. I'm looking forward to the next one, which is only in a few days' time...

In Summary:

The Moonbase, semi-animated, is neither one thing nor t'other; the fully animated Faceless Ones is much better; but, it's great to have both on the shelves!