Midnight

Chapter the 260th, Ecouter et répéter: Allons-y! Molto bene!

Plot:

The Doctor and Donna visit a tourist resort in the far future that, like all futuristic resorts in Doctor Who, see The Leisure Hive and Orphan 55, is a shielded bubble on a planet with a lethal atmosphere outside. He leaves Donna to go off with a touring party in a "space truck" for a day trip to a local beauty spot. The craft breaks down, having had to take a detour onto a path never travelled before. Something in this supposedly uninhabitable terrain knocks on the outside of the vehicle trying to find a weak point, then attacks destroying the front cabin and killing the pilots. It gets in and takes over one of the passengers, Sky. She starts to repeat what everyone says. Some of the other passengers want to throw Sky out through a pressurised exit door, and the Doctor doesn't have much luck persuading them to stop, as they are a panicky, accusatory and aggressive bunch under pressure. Sky's repeating starts to get closer and closer to the others' voices until she is saying the same words simultaneously. Then, having realised that he's the smartest, the creature inhabiting Sky stops copying anyone but the Doctor and then overtakes him: she's speaking first, and he's copying. The others argue about whether this means that the creature has passed into the Doctor or just stolen his voice. A majority think the former, and start to drag the Doctor to the door. As the possessed Sky eggs them on, she lets slip a couple of the Doctor's pet phrases "Allons-y" and "Molto bene". Realising the truth, the last remaining member of the crew, the Hostess, grabs Sky, and opens the exit door. They are both sucked out of the craft, and the door slams behind them. The survivors realise that they didn't even know the Hostess's name.

Context:

Watched from the DVD (part of the Complete Fourth Series box set) on a Sunday in late March 2023. It was a rare occurrence for an old Doctor Who (and I have to accept that Midnight is now an old Doctor Who - see First Time Round section below) in that all the family - the Better Half and three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) - were in attendance. This full house may be because the children have never seen the episode before. They were too young / not born when it first went out. Then, when they became interested in Doctor Who around the later Matt Smith / early Peter Capaldi years, and I started to share some older stories with them, the Better Half and I always thought this one was too scary. Once they'd watched it, they scoffed at the very idea that the story could be in any way scary when nobody got mutilated and there was no gore, and it was "just zombie possession". Kids today, what are you gonna do?! Before those comments, the main fixation was Colin Morgan featuring as the character Jethro, a role he got before playing Merlin for the BBC for many years. "Is this the one with Merlin in?" asked the BH at the start, followed by such comments from the children as "Ooh, look it's Emo Merlin" and "Emo Merlin is rude to his parents" and "Whose side is Emo Merlin on?".

First Time Round:

Watched on or near to its original BBC1 transmission on 14th June 2008 with the Better Half (we may have time-shifted it slightly to put our eldest - then only - child to bed). I did a calculation of one of those timey-wimey phenomena, as it's sometimes hard to believe that a story like Midnight that still feels recent to me was broadcast almost a lifetime ago. But my son has indisputably turned from a toddler to a lanky teenager in that time. Take the number of days between the 14th June 2008 and the present day at time of writing, and go back in time that many days from the 14th June 2008: one arrives in early September 1993. Doctor Who on TV had been cancelled, but old stories were coming out on VHS. Fans were gearing up for the 30th anniversary of the show, and to commemorate this a couple of Dalek stories were released in a celebratory tin. A two-part mini-story would be broadcast later in the year featuring all the still surviving Doctors, including Tom Baker donning the scarf once again. The equivalent classic series gap, if one should take a trip the same number of days back in time from there, would lead to late November 1978, when Tom Baker was the current Doctor. From 1978 to 1993, or from 2008 to 2023, is a length of time enough for the charismatic incumbent of the title role to bow out and be followed by three more Doctors' eras, then find himself back recording scenes in character as the Doctor again for special episodes to be shown in November to celebrate a big series anniversary. Wheel turns, civilisations rise, wheel turns, civilisations fall...

Reaction:

I think Midnight is one of the best new series stories, but I wasn't in any hurry to watch it this time. The reason is that I'm a bit of a scaredy-cat where horror is concerned, and Midnight is an effective little shocker. It uses many of the same techniques as low budget sci-fi horror films like Cube or Circle or Exam, and no doubt many others - even the short one-word title is in keeping. A small group of people in a single location are each put under pressure by a strange situation, and their characters and inter-personal reactions in that situation push the narrative to its grim conclusion. The Doctor Who production team hadn't run out of money or anything, it was just that head writer Russell T. Davies had to create a script from scratch fast to replace another that they decided not to progress, and he was keeping it simple. He had to work with some restrictions like not being able to feature the companion Donna in the main action, as Catherine Tate was off shooting the next 'double-banked' story, Turn Left. He turns this to his advantage, though, as the Doctor has nobody to vouch for him and so is distrusted by the others. Midnight doesn't have everyone getting killed off one by one as some of those films do, but this somehow makes it even more grim for me. At the end, everyone still living is a little bit diminished by the awful events that have taken place, even the Doctor. It's a particularly sad moment where they all realise that they didn't even know the name of the person that saved them from becoming murderers, and let's face it probably saved them from fates worse than that (if the creature inside Sky had got back to civilisation, it wouldn't be just seeking to learn more French or Italian, I'm guessing).

The psychological horror in the story is created with minimalist staging. There is barely any significant visual effects work in the story, some CG establishing shots of the twinkly planet and that's it. Everything else appears to my eyes at least to be practical and lighting effects. It's also only right and proper to give kudos to sound recording and design to allow for the many stages of Sky's repeating dialogue: the virtuoso moment where the Doctor and Sky are talking simultaneously and then she starts to overtake him is both technically brilliant and hair-raising. The creation of conflict and menace, though ably supported by those departments, is mostly the responsibility of the actors, and they all meet the challenge. To facilitate this, the most old school techniques were put in to practice in Doctor Who again: the cast had much more extensive rehearsal that would be normal for this period, and they shot in story order. Essentially, they were creating a TV play, just like the people working in front of and behind the cameras on Doctor Who in the 1960s, and its heartening as a long term fan to know that those approaches can still have their uses. The result is an ensemble cast that are all delivering the goods. To pick out an individual for special praise, though, Lesley Sharp is phenomenal in this. After her possession, there's a moment where she turns and has become a different person before one's eyes, and a scary one to boot (no doubt there are some imperceptible changes in hair and make-up to help that transformation along, but it is 90% acting). I also like the lizard-like darting head movements as she takes in the people around her. Tennant's work in the story shouldn't overlooked; he evokes the frozen fear of someone trapped in their own body to remarkable and once again scary effect.

The story isn't overburdened with elements from series arcs. One of the characters researching the lost moon of Poosh (part of the plotline where the Daleks are stealing planetary bodies to power some big destructive gizmo) slots nicely in. Rose appears briefly on a monitor trying to break in from her parallel universe, which looked jarring to me, but the children - who'd never seen this story before and presumably have forgotten the wider context - took it in their stride. More interesting is the script utilising some of the tics and idiosyncrasies of the Doctor as a plot point; not just the "Allons-y"s and "Molto bene"s, but also the habit he sometimes has of admonishing his companions with a "No, don't do that". This is deployed to Donna at the end when she starts copying what he says, but it's no longer a joke. The script is wonderful in its economy. There's no TARDIS, interior or exterior (it's only mentioned in passing as part of the stream of consciousness when the Doctor is testing Sky's ability to copy anything he says) just straight into the new situation. The structure is a simple but devastating succession of story beats to ratchet up the tension, as the possessed Sky starts to copy everyone, then just the Doctor, then syncs, then overtakes. If it was a treatment document just listing those out it wouldn't seem like much, but it's written and played with conviction. It might just be Davies's best script for the show, though he makes it seem effortless as next up is Turn Left, and that also might just be Davies's best script for the show.

Great as they are, these stories aren't exactly laugh riots. If I have one criticism of Midnight it's that it's a bit too bleak. Turn Left is similarly a tale of the worst traits of humankind and grim things happening, but it's bleak specifically because the Doctor's not there. In Midnight, the Doctor is present but still can't help matters. This, plus - something very rare for Doctor Who - the lack of any explanation for what the monster was, makes it very dark. The creature was only stopped because of a fluke, and it assimilated the essence of the smartest person in the room (maybe even the smartest person in the universe) within a few minutes, while nobody else including the audience captured even the tiniest fact about it. Shivers! It's not so dark as to break out of the acceptable shape of a Doctor Who story (unlike Sleep No More, at least in my view), but the Doctor is supposed to be the hero. To have him powerless to help isn't a trick that can be pulled off too many times.

Connectivity:

In both Midnight and The Highlanders, there's a performance by one of the Troughton family, and in both stories the Doctor finds himself trapped inside a craft surrounded by hostile people.

Deeper Thoughts:

Made it through the wilderness: a book report on The Long Game by Paul Hayes. It felt like a while since I'd bought any Doctor Who product, and then a few things all arrived through the letterbox around the same time. First was the Blu-ray box set of Season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third year as the Doctor), which I will cover in more detail in a future blog post; alongside it was the latest Doctor Who Magazine special on all the 'Showrunners' of the series to date. The latter was an interesting read, though the team putting it together have had to stretch the definitions somewhat to be able to cover both classic and new series Doctor Who together (they count the 20th century producers including the TV Movie's Philip Segal as showrunners, when for most of those years the script editors had a lot of influence too, then cover lead writers / executive producers Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall for the 21st century). In the section on Davies, The Long Game by Paul Hayes, which tells "The inside story of how the BBC brought back Doctor Who" was quoted. This reminded me that I had meant to buy the book and read it when it came out recently. Somehow, in what felt like the blink of an eye, 'recently' has turned into about 18 months ago - the book was published in late 2021. How time passes. Anyway, it is still available to purchase online, so I got a copy delivered and dove straight into it after the Showrunners special. I thoroughly recommend it as the definitive guide to the second stage of the so called "wilderness years" of Doctor Who, from 1996 to September 2003.

The narrative starts after the US broadcast of the Paul McGann TV Movie. Even before it was shown in the UK, it had become obvious that the programme hadn't done the numbers stateside to kick-off a series there. Universal TV's option was extended a year to the end of 1997, but it was clear to everyone - both in the BBC and in fandom - that it wouldn't lead to anything more on the telly. There then follows a good summary of everything that happened from that point to the long awaited announcement of Doctor Who's return in the September of 2003, as a series that would subsequently grab everyone's attention and would star Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper and David Tennant, and eventually have last minute script scrambles and experimental episodes like Midnight (which coincidentally shares a title with The Long Game's final chapter). In the background was the activity of many a burgeoning "cottage industry" (each covered in its own chapter) of Doctor Who books, magazines, audios and the programme's online content like the Scream of the Shalka animation. Meanwhile, people were joining the BBC who would be instrumental in bringing the programme back: Peter Salmon, Mal Young, Jane Tranter, Julie Gardner, Lorraine Heggessey. The BBC, and particularly BBC One drama, was gradually pulled out of the doldrums of the late 1990s by the new intake, and by changes made to its structures and processes. Just like in many a big organisation, there were lots of different fiefdoms that sometimes pulled in opposing directions.

In this period, two areas both saw Doctor Who as a property that could serve their requirements. BBC Films with BBC Worldwide wanted to make a Doctor Who movie; BBC Drama and Programming wanted to create an ongoing series on BBC One Saturday nights. Conflict between these two caused a false start chronicled in the book. From 1999 to 2000, Russell T. Davies, having established himself as big name with Queer as Folk, made it clear he would work at the BBC but only on Doctor Who, and was in discussions with contacts there who wanted him to do it. Ongoing negotiations related to the movie stymied this, but then those negotiations came to nothing anyway. It's unfortunate that but for this the return of Doctor Who might have been a few years earlier. Maybe it wasn't the time, though. Two years later - with the movie no closer to being a reality - the critical mass appeared to be forming. Four or five different groups were all pitching - at varying stages of conversation with the BBC - to return the show to TV. There was a "bid" from Dan Freedman, who had previously got a radio pilot made, which was then retooled to become the first online Doctor Who story Death Comes to Time. There was a bid from the trio of Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, partially as a reaction against what they feared Freedman would do with the show. Matthew Graham had his hat in the ring, too, and maybe others who have now been forgotten. From reading the book, though, Davies was the only contender who had a chance at the prize. Still nothing progressed, though, because of "rights issues".

It's always interesting to read the inside story of history one witnessed from the outside. In the First Time Round section of The Vampires of Venice blog post last year, I talked briefly about the barren feeling of those first few years of the new millennium for a Doctor Who fan. In the book, my thoughts are somewhat echoed by Stephen Cole and Gary Gillatt (BBC Worldwide Doctor Who range editor and Doctor Who Magazine editor of the time, respectively). They felt, after all the disappointments and raised hopes of the past, that it might have been a relief if Doctor Who was just left alone. During that period, part of the misery was hearing often about those "rights issues" as a stubborn stumbling block. It turned out, though, that they didn't exist. There was a perception, held in good faith by many people within the BBC, that the rights issues for bringing back the show were intractable; but, once there was someone in a position to research it (from the BBC Cult website team, ensuring they were fine to produce Scream of the Shalka, and also to be able to answer the frequently asked questions on this topic from fans), it boiled down to just contention with BBC Worldwide, who still wanted to make that movie. By 2003, senior people in the BBC believed they'd had enough of a chance, and Davies et al finally got the go ahead. Paul Hayes structures all this history into an engaging page turner, talking to most of the main players in new interviews, and using extensive archive material too. As we approach the beginning of Russell T. Davies's second stint of running the show, it is a timely read to find out what happened to make the first one a reality. I urge everyone to get a copy, if they haven't already: it even has a happy ending.

 

In Summary:

Sparkly but dark.

The Highlanders

Chapter the 259th, features the young pretender (in his second appearance as the Doctor).

Plot:

The Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden in Scotland 1746. They meet the local Laird and members of his clan, including a piper called Jamie McCrimmon. The Laird is ill and the Highlanders believe the Doctor can help him. Polly goes off to fetch water with the Laird's daughter Kirsty, and while they are gone everyone else is arrested by the Redcoats. A solicitor called Grey saves them all from the noose. Grey, with his clerk Perkins, is involved in some dodgy dealings, and takes the Doctor, Ben, Jamie and the Laird to become slaves and be transported off to work the plantations. The Doctor bamboozles everyone with many ruses and disguises, and manages to escape. The others are held near port, in a ship stolen from a Scot and captained by the piratical Captain Trask ("Arrr!"). Meanwhile, Polly and Kirsty get the better of an effete Redcoat Lieutenant Algernon Ffinch, and use him to track down their friends. Reunited with the Doctor, they buy up weapons using money stolen from Ffinch, and row out to help the others. Trask is killed in their uprising, and the Highlanders sail out towards the safety of France, leaving the time travellers at the docks with Jamie who has stayed behind to show them back to the TARDIS. When they reach there, they are almost recaptured by Grey, but Ffinch turns up and arrests him. Jamie decides to travel with the others in time and space.

Context:

Over a few days in early March 2023, I watched an online reconstruction of the four episodes which used off-screen images, surviving clips and the full soundtracks (taped off the telly by fans in the 1960s) to recreate as closely as possible these now lost episodes. This version also had the explanatory narration by Frazer Hines taken from the official BBC CD audio release, so the website hosting it was definitely breaching some copyright regulations. Thus, here is where I state that I have in the past fully supported the official releases, purchasing The Highlanders audio and surviving clips in the formats on which they have been made available for sale (more details in the First Time Round section below), and would buy them again if they came out with or without animation on a Blu-ray.

First Time Round:

The first time I would have seen any material from The Highlanders would have been in November 1998. The big Doctor Who VHS release in advance of Christmas that year was The Ice Warriors; this came with official reconstructions much like the ones I watched this time of The Highlanders (see Context section above) of its missing two middle episodes. Additionally, it had an extra tape with a documentary about missing episodes in general. This featured a lot of excerpts from otherwise long-gone visuals including recently found material that had been excised from Doctor Who episodes by Australian censors. Archiving vicissitudes had meant that the bits not felt suitable for broadcast had ended up being retained, the rest thrown away. So, there were a couple of clips on that VHS from The Highlanders showing brief shots of a stabbing and a hanging. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see any glimpse of an otherwise lost story, however brutal or short. The audio of all four episodes with that explanatory linking commentary came out a couple of years later, and I snapped that up too.

Reaction:

The Highlanders was Patrick Troughton's second story after he took on the role, and the final regular Doctor Who historical (i.e. a trip into history for its own sake, not as the backdrop for a science fantasy tale). To an extent, it's a try-out in the same way as his first story: how is this new Doctor going to comport himself within a historical context, now we've seen him ace the previous sci-fi one? However well he did, though, it would turn out that there weren't going to be any further stories of this kind; as such, it's a bit of a curio. Troughton's Doctor lands in only two further historical settings in his tenure, and both of them could really be anywhere / anytime as the history is not essential to the story being told. If this was going to be the last, it's at least a fun, engaging story to go out on, and Troughton does indeed perform well. He's not calmed down to become the Doctor he would be later, but the story gives ample scope for some of the wild antics that were intrinsic to his earliest days: there's lots of disguises and putting on funny voices, trying on of different hats and causing mayhem. The scene where - pretending to be a German Doctor with an outrageous accent - he bangs the clerk Perkins's head repeated on a table only to then enquire whether he suffers from headaches reaches remarkable heights of anarchic comedy. It's not something one could ever imagine William Hartnell doing, which is maybe the point. Troughton (like the second Doctor) has less and less to prove as his stories continue, hence why the play-acting and slapstick lessens.

The story doesn't make any attempt at realism or examination of the period. Bonnie Prince Charlie is mentioned a few times (the reward for his capture becomes a plot point as the Doctor uses it to bamboozle his enemies occasionally), but he never appears. The story seems to have been commissioned more as a literary pastiche than an exploration of history. As The Smugglers a couple of stories back displayed the influences of Stevenson's Treasure Island, this story seems to have taken a little from another of his works, Kidnapped. It hones the formula; like The Smugglers it is populated with a colourful collection of rogues, but they seem a more diverse and rounded selection than in the earlier story. Each, though, is unified in one purpose - to make money. An abiding theme of the piece is how every non-Highlander character is motivated purely by avarice. It's not exactly uncommon for this to be a motivator for Doctor Who villains, but it is rare to see it done so comprehensively, with every lowly Redcoat featured having their hand out expecting corrupt remuneration at some point. The Highlander characters meanwhile are concerned only for their own survival. As such, it doesn't make any sense at all for Jamie at the end to forego the safety of a journey to France so he can instead help the Doctor, Ben and Polly find where they parked. This, of course, only happens to allow Frazer Hines to join the TARDIS crew.

Note that I worded it above that Frazer Hines had joined the TARDIS crew, rather than Jamie. The most significant long-term contribution of this story is a new addition to the regular cast, but there's nothing much in the action that makes Jamie stand out. He's personable, but has hardly anything to do in the narrative. It seems very likely that the decision to keep him on had more to do with the actor's behind the scenes working relationship with Patrick Troughton (they'd worked together before The Highlanders), and maybe a smidge to do with him looking pretty on camera perhaps, than anything in the character of Jamie. It was ultimately the best decision for the show, but it means there's too many people in the time machine; this leaves less for Ben and Polly to do, and ultimately would lead to them leaving the series. This is a great shame, as The Highlanders is one of the best stories for the pair of them. Sailor Ben gets to be aboard ship again, and do a Houdini-style escape; Polly is resourceful and ruthless, besting poor Algernon Ffinch at every turn, and in a flirtatious manner to boot. The actors Anneke Wills and Michael Craze have lots of fun with the material. Beyond that, there's a couple of good fight scenes (as well as one can tell from the audio, anyway) and some nice bits of comedy. It's not perfect: Polly and Ben's historical knowledge waxes and wanes depending on the plot point of the moment: Polly knows that France is a safe haven for the Highlanders when moments before she was surprised that the Redcoats and Highlanders couldn't get along as friends. But it's fun, and rattles along at a good pace without ever overstaying its welcome.

Connectivity:

Both The Highlanders and Timelash see the TARDIS travel back in time to the Scottish Highlands of yesteryear.

Deeper Thoughts:

A visit to Riverside Studios for Time and Riverside, 11th March 2023. When I started this viewing of The Highlanders, it was coincidentally 56 years to the day since the master video tapes of the story were wiped. It was the very first story to suffer this fate, on 9th March 1967, only a few weeks on from the story's debut BBC1 broadcast. The policies of the broadcaster that allowed this to happen are not easy to understand with the benefit of decades of hindsight. A couple of days later, it was time for looking back at the BBC's activities again, but this time more fondly. I had a ticket to a Doctor Who Appreciation Society event at Riverside in Hammersmith, an arts centre and cinema built on the site of the studios where all four parts of The Highlanders were shot (just four of something like 80 Doctor Who episodes that were created there - the original building having been demolished in 2014). The format of the day was for three individual episodes of Doctor Who from William Hartnell's tenure that were made at Riverside to be shown, each followed by a panel. Before all that, I arrived and met up with a number of the friends that I've been attending BFI events with for a good while, all of whom have been mentioned previously on the blog: David, Trevor, Alan, Chris and Scott. For the event, a full-size TARDIS police box replica had been erected in the building, near to the doors down to the cinema theatre where the episodes would be screened. All of us got our picture taken with that beauty. This was also the chance to say hi to a few familiar faces that attend these events regularly, and to chat to new people too.

Yours Truly pictured with TARDIS prop

The first episode shown was Flashpoint, the finale of The Daleks Invasion of Earth (my blog post for the whole story is here), and the ending with Susan leaving still packs an emotional punch, leaving me moist-eyed in Riverside. The prints being used to project the episodes were a bit of a surprise after recently seeing this (and all the episodes shown on the day) restored for the season 2 Blu-ray set; they appeared to be masters based on the original VHS releases. Seeing all that film dirt and video wobble brought about a nostalgia rush for this viewer at least. The panel afterwards featured Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, Jessica Carney, the Doctor's other granddaughter (or rather William Hartnell's real life one), and a surprise guest Nick Evans, a Dalek operator in Flashpoint. Evans was hilarious, describing himself as "the oldest Dalek living in captivity" and covering some well-worn anecdotes like the queue of bursting Daleks on location waiting to relieve themselves down a grating. Although he was a bit frail, Evans didn't need as much help to get to his seat down the steep steps of the Riverside cinema theatre as did a cosplayer in an accurate Sensorite costume including full mask. That's commitment. Ford was her usual slightly reserved but professional self, answering questions she must have answered hundred of times before. Carney eloquently summarised the appeal of Doctor Who as mostly "nonsense" but occasionally true, and highlighted something I'd not consciously noticed: Hartnell fluffs when dealing with unreal situations, but is very rarely anything less than superb when he has material with emotional truth (not just his big speech to Susan at the end, but little moments like his reaction to Westminster bells sounding out over the desolate but now liberated London "Just the beginning, just the beginning...").

(L to R) Evans, Carney, Ford + Interviewer

The quality of any Doctor Who might be judged on its nonsense to truth ratio. Perhaps that was why a large number of the audience got up and left before the start of the next episode, The Centre (the final episode of The Web Planet). I found it relatively easy to sit through just 25 minutes of the story, but that's probably the maximum I can do in one go. The informative panel afterwards featured the director Richard Martin, and vision mixer Clive Doig. The 88-year old Martin had clearly decided not to even try to get down the steep steps, so talked with a microphone from the back seats about the challenges of making the story, sleepless nights before studio days spent planning with a bottle of whiskey. His memory was good but not perfect. At one point he said "We should have got a dancer in" to choreograph the action of the Menoptera characters; cue everybody in the audience inwardly screaming "But you did!! Her name was Roslyn de Winter and she was credited for supplying 'Insect Movement'". After the panel was a two-hour break for photos and autographs; I don't do either of those, but Doig was probably the only person there that Saturday for whom I might have broken that rule. Everything he's been involved with I've loved, from vision mixing many episodes of early Doctor Who to the children's programmes of the 1970s and 80s he produced like Vision On, Jigsaw and Eureka, and even the puzzle page he wrote for the Radio Times for many years. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth queueing as I didn't want a photo or signature, I just wanted to say thank you; hopefully some other fan did this for me on the day.

 

Doig (on left); Martin (not pictured) was sat in 'the gods' 

We spent the break looking for the pub nearby that's anecdotally noted as Riverside Studio Three by cast members (there were only two studios, so this is a joke akin to calling a golf club bar the 19th hole). I couldn't find anything online to specify exactly which watering hole it is (answers on a postcard), so we had a drink in the Blue Anchor, and then a spot of lunch in the Rutland Arms - both of them have been around since decades before the 1960s, so are both potential candidates. Given the date, one topic of conversation dominated. It was another BBC policy that was not easy to understand, but this one brand new. Gary Lineker, a popular sports broadcaster, had been banned from presenting that day because of comments he'd previously made that were critical of the UK government. Every other BBC sports presenter, pundit and commentator had refused to work in sympathy, and there was breaking news throughout the day about all the different programmes that were being cancelled. It must have been seismic to get six of the least sporty men in London that day talking about it. I couldn't help but compare what was happening to all those lost Who episodes, including the many filmed at Riverside (only about 50% of which survive): an inadvertent institutional persona developed that forgets about all the things that made it great in the first place. After the break, we were back for the final screening, of The Planet of Decision, final episode of The Chase. This was followed by a panel of Maureen o' Brien, who played Vicki, and Peter Purves, who played Steven.

O'Brien (Middle) and Purves (Right)

After a couple of questions about the usual - irascible Bill Hartnell who had a heart of gold, etc. etc. - it got more interesting as the interviewer moved onto other less familiar areas of their careers. O' Brien talked about why she stopped writing crime novels ("My editor hated my seventh book"), and some of her notable theatre roles, including playing Rosalind in As You like It at the Sheffield Crucible in a cast with the young Alan Rickman. Purves talked about some of the interesting films he was part of for children's television programme Blue Peter, including building houses in Tonga and walking the suspension cable of the Forth Road Bridge. He also talked about having directed 30 pantomimes in his time (I wish I'd been brave enough to shout out "Oh no you haven't" from the audience, but alas I wasn't). Once the panel was over, and artist Alister Pearson had raffled off a print for charity, it marked the end of an enjoyable event, and the six of us then spent a few hours in the Riverside's bar / restaurant. After having to miss the last couple of BFI Doctor Who events because of other commitments, it was nice to go to something similar and celebrate the history of the show as it reaches its 60th anniversary year. That's a big birthday, and a long lifespan for a show. Everything that was lost because of the BBC's inadvertent throwing out the baby with the bathwater policies is nothing compared to what the ravages of time can accomplish: every fan should appreciate having living links to the earliest parts of our favourite show's history, while we still have them. The next Time and Riverside event is concentrating on a single story, The Crusade, and will be taking place on Sunday 21st May. Further details can be found here.

In Summary:

A fun final Highland fling before this sort of story fell out of fashion.

Timelash

Chapter the 258th, where the Doctor and Peri go out on the Lash and get wasted (i.e. the lead actors' talents are wasted on this.)

Plot:

The planet Karfel is a brutal dictatorship, policed by blue-faced androids and beekeepers (alright, they're guardoliers, but they look like beekeepers), and ruled by the Borad, who's only ever seen in public broadcasts never in person. He has many experiments going on, including those involving a time/space tunnel called the Timelash, which he has the occasional rebel thrown into. He is also stirring up interplanetary war with the neighbouring Bandrils. The corrupt Tekker takes over as the Borad's second-in command, and starts being mean to everyone. Vena, a noblewoman of Karfel, in possession of a MacGuffin that can be used to control the Timelash, inadvertently falls into the time tunnel. At the same time, the Doctor is navigating the TARDIS through the Timelash. The Doctor has been to Karfel many years before, and had become a hero of legend before the Borad banned everyone from talking about him. After arrival, Tekker takes Peri hostage to force the Doctor to fetch Vena and the MacGuffin. This takes him to 1880s Scotland, and someone from there, an aspiring writer called Herbert, stows away in the TARDIS on the trip to take Vena back to Karfel.

There's stand-offs and squabbles once they all return. The Borad turns out to be a scientist that the Doctor reported on his first visit for performing unethical experiments on the local large reptile life, the Morlox. The Borad has experimented on himself, making him half-Karfelon, half Morlox. He wants to do the same to Peri, who will then become his mate; then he'll wipe out every other non-Morlox on the planet. Tekker stands up to the Borad but is killed. The Doctor uses a gizmo powered by crystals from the Timelash to get the Borad to shoot himself with his own death ray, then flies off in the TARDIS with Herbert (after a long conversation with Peri that one wouldn't think there was time for in the situation) to deflect the approaching Bandril fleet. It appears that the TARDIS is destroyed, which makes the Bandrils retreat. A clone of the Borad turns up and grabs Peri. Luckily, the Doctor has survived (somehow) and distracts the Borad, allowing him to be pushed into the Timelash. The Doctor believes he'll travel back to the other end of the tunnel, Loch Ness, and apparently just swim around in it forever, occasionally being mistaken for the monster. This seems unlikely. Herbert wants to stay on Karfel, but the Doctor suspects he'll return home. He shows Peri Herbert's card that he'd dropped earlier; he is a young H. G. Wells.

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc in the season 22 box set with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10), an episode a week over two Sundays in late February 2023. The Better Half declined to join us and said things to the effect that putting on Timelash for the kids was edging towards child cruelty. But  - I thought, on pressing play on episode one - it's not that bad, is it? The trouble is, and this may come down to one's frame of mind when watching, it isn't often so poor as to be fun - though it sometimes is - it's more often just a weary slog to get through. It didn't hold the children's attention al all, with the younger two giving up and leaving the living room before the end of each episode. Only the eldest stuck around to the end to give his one word verdict - "Shit" - before leaving too. We watched the story as broadcast, by the way, without the whizzy new effects available as an alternative viewing experience - effects are the least of Timelash's problems.

First Time Round:

The 22nd season of Doctor Who was broadcast in early 1985, back on Saturday afternoon's after a few years on weekday evenings. It was the final season to be broadcast before my family had a video recorder, so whenever I - as a burgeoning teenage gadabout - didn't make it back home by 5:20pm, I would miss the episode with no way of watching it, perhaps forever. Given that the 1985 stories were mostly two-parters, that meant missing 50% of the narrative, and this happened a few times. Luckily or unluckily, I caught both parts of Timelash in full. Didn't miss a second of it. The story was somewhat overshadowed by the recent hoo-hah of the announcement of Doctor Who's 18-month hiatus; I remember that being in my mind when I watched for the first time. I also remember thinking that Herbert was going to join as a new companion, and the reveal of his true identity at the end came as a nice surprise.

Reaction:

Many an online wag over the years has been tickled by the simple fact that 'Timelash' is an anagram of 'Lame Shit'. It seems apt, but is it really? The production saddled with the pre-scrambled moniker doesn't need any thought or analysis to uncover its lameness; it's pretty obvious to anyone watching it for even the shortest length of time. A truly apt title for the story would be just to call it Lame Shit and get it over with; nobody's going to be fooled for long. Is that a smidge unfair? Maybe. When I watched as a teen, I thought the story was okay if not exactly top drawer. Every time I've watched since, though, I've seen more and more flaws. The script development process seems to have generated a story with significant problems, and then - bad luck upon bad luck - the execution in all departments has made things worse. There's examples at the macro or the micro level, but just to take one: mirrors are banned on Karfel, so the script mandates that the sets and props literally be dull. Peri even points this out at one point, picking up a matt grey drinking vessel. Why, though? Is it because the Borad hates his face after his genetic experimentation, and doesn't want any risk of seeing his reflection? But he never comes out of his secret lair, anyway. Maybe it's because they interfere with the androids, as the Doctor demonstrates to extricate himself from the episode one cliffhanger at the start of episode two. But that comes out of nowhere - how did the Doctor know it would work? The script doesn't explain. There's only a couple of small moments where the mirrors have any relevance, and for that visual interest has been sacrificed.

I suppose the sets and props might have ended up being dull anyway. There's nothing in the script to mandate dull performances, but that's what the director mostly elicits. It's hard to watch the early scenes where rebels in beige clothes run through beige corridors and spout beige dialogue (it's particularly infuriating to see this material given to the couple of them - Tracy Louise Ward and Stephen Mackintosh - who became much more famous subsequently). Eric Saward script editing (and reportedly doing some significant rewriting of relatively inexperienced writer Glen McCoy's scripts) attempts to achieve narrative dynamism by bumping characters off one after the other, without the audience having sufficient time to get to know them: Renis, Kendron, Brunner, Mykros, Tyheer - I couldn't pick any of them out of a line up and I've just watched it. Where a performance is memorable, it's usually for the wrong reasons. Jeananne Crowley as Vena delivers every line staring into the middle distance, displays inappropriate emotion seemingly at random, and sounds out individual words as if she's reading phonetically written Latin from an autocue. The script doesn't help: Vena's father obeys the Borad's order to redirect power knowing that it will mean his wife on life-support in a hospital will die. The Borad then has him killed anyway. Vena never mentions her mother ever (maybe she thinks she's still alive?), and when she finds out her father is dead, her scripted reaction is as if someone's just told her it's beans for supper.

The Doctor arriving livens things up a bit, but - like in most of the stories of season 22 - that doesn't happen until far too late in the first half. Before that, he's stuck in the TARDIS expounding on the wonders of the universe while Peri snarks at him (why does Saward think this stuff is clever?), fiddles with technology, and fits seatbelts to the TARDIS console (it's like something out of a comedy sketch, except it isn't funny). Why does it occur to nobody writing stories in 1985 to just have the Doctor and Peri arrive at the beginning and start having adventures straight away?! Even with delaying tactics reducing the duration of the character's time on Karfel, McCoy and Saward still can't fill that time with anything for Nicola Bryant as Peri to do: she spends the whole story standing about, sometimes chained to something, sometimes not. At least she gets to wear reasonably sensible clothes after spending the previous few stories in garish leotards. Paul Darrow as Tekker chews the scenery, and the lighting rig and a couple of cameras. His OTT performance is always watchable - I love the relish with which he talks of the Doctor not living up to the legends told of him - but there's no coherence to his actions. He just does scene after scene of random panto bad guy stuff like provoking a war in which he must at least suspect his planet could get destroyed, then at the end does a volte face and gets himself killed standing up to the Borad.

Robert Ashby is great as the Borad, and the make-up and prosthetics are excellent. It's not quite enough to offset the feeble model work, the invading alien race portrayed by one glove puppet, or the Timelash made of polystyrene and tinsel. Plus, again, the character's villainy is blasting out in so many random directions: he experiments with time, and genetic hybridisation, and cloning. Pick one thing. The reason for this sci-fi smorgasbord is to hint at the many topics of the works of H. G.Wells. David Chandler's performance as Herbert is fun, and the reveal at the end that he's going to one day be the famous English author is a satisfying moment. It would be better, of course, if the character had any biographical details in common with the real Wells, but as the audience only finds out who he is in the very last shot of the story, that's not something that can trouble one too much on first watch. The script tries to pull the same retrofitting history trick by suggesting that the Borad, banished to the Scotland of centuries before by the Timelash, has been sighted since and taken for the Loch Ness Monster. But he doesn't look anything like the Loch Ness Monster, so that doesn't work. There's some truly honking dialogue, from the swallowed a thesaurus insults favoured by this era "You microcephalic apostate" to the on-the-nose exposition that doesn't even need to be said in the first place, such as this exchange: "He will destroy every Karfelon in the Citadel" "All five hundred of us?!"

Poor Timelash can't catch a break. It starts to build to the climax, with the Borad killed and the Doctor flying off in the TARDIS for a last-minute effort to stop the approaching war-fleet. Then, everything slows to a near halt, and the last-minute effort turns into a last seven minutes effort. Saward has to introduce a long scene of padding as the second episode was found to be seriously under-running. The footage was filmed during one of the next story's studio days, so options were limited: it has to happen in the TARDIS control room (the series' only recurring set) with minimal cast (aside from the two regulars, they got Chandler back to play Herbert again). It would be a tall order, but possible, to maintain the rising tension through many minutes in one location, but Saward doesn't appear to try. It's just the usual comic business and characters arguing, and it kills the ending stone dead. He doesn't even add a retrospective explanation for how the TARDIS survives a collision with missiles in space. In the already shot footage the Doctor waves this away with an "I'll explain one day - it's a neat trick" cop out. Because everything's slowed down, when the Doctor returns to Karfel to face another Borad (the baddie having cloned himself), a development that's silly but not entirely ridiculous for this heightened genre, it doesn't feel like a final exciting corkscrew turn of the plot, it just makes one internally scream "Is this not over yet?!". The anti-cherry on the cake is the Doctor then proceeding to defeat the Borad by taunting him about how ugly and deformed he is. It verges on being ableist for me, and I fear it would fall foul of a 21st century sensitivity reader (if they managed to get that far).

Connectivity:

Both Timelash and Demons of The Punjab feature scenes in Earth history where benign aliens are witnessed by a male human who takes them to be demonic.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who without the Doctor. Infamously, the producer of Timelash John Nathan-Turner took his two lead actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant out of rehearsals for the story to work on a pantomime that Nathan-Turner was directing as a side hustle, and which he had roped them into to star. At the time, and for a good length of time afterwards, it was de rigueur within fandom to criticise JNT for everything he did. I think people were mostly being unfair, but in this case it's hard to defend him. Throughout the making of Doctor Who, before and since Timelash, there have always been the pressures, logistical headaches and compromises that come from needing to get x number of episodes in the can per year without enough time or resources. To make that situation even worse for a somewhat frivolous side venture (albeit one that I'm sure was well made and enjoyable for those who attended it) seems like an obvious, unforced error. What couldn't happen in the 1980s was that the characters just be written out for a while; that was unthinkable. I talked in the last blog post about how the expectation is that the Doctor will almost always be the protagonist of any Who story's narrative, so obviously he or she has to appear. It was not always thus, however. In the 1960s, Doctor Who production involved the rehearsal and recording of a new episode every week, for almost every week of the year. The workload and turnaround equivalent to that of a soap opera today.

Unlike a soap, though, Doctor Who only had a maximum of four regulars to take the weight of the narratives. If someone was absent for a week's work because of illness or holiday, it was much more noticeable. Clever (and sometimes not so clever) strategies were required. This wasn't restricted to the 60s either; every year for a good few years after Doctor Who returned in 2005, they needed to squeeze one more episode out of the schedule than they had time for, and had to employ what was called double-banking. Two stories would be made simultaneously, meaning that another character (either the companion or a guest character) would take the majority of the action in one of them, while the Doctor starred more fully in the other. This gave rise to the so-called 'Doctor lite' episodes like Love & Monsters or Blink. They were never 'Doctor-less' episodes, though. Some footage of the Doctor, maybe gathered in only a few hours, would be intercut with the action to give the lead character a presence. This was sometimes employed in the 60s too, with a bit of pre-recording - on film or sometimes just audio - done of the Doctor or companion who was otherwise out for that week's multi-camera shoot in studio. The production line approach to making the episodes didn't leave as much time for this to be done as there was in the 21st century, though - it would usually mean an actor missing some of a previous week's rehearsal to go to Ealing studios, and would be limited to short scenes (editing anything into the finished product was a lot less easy than later too). Sometimes, it just wasn't possible.

So, are there any episodes without the Doctor in at all? The answer is yes, but very few. Every Doctor from Jon Pertwee up to Jodie Whittaker appears in every one of their episodes in new footage; so, it's only the black and white years we need to look at. Patrick Troughton was away for four episodes in all. In the first of these (episode four of Evil of the Daleks) he's in pre-filmed sequences; in the second (episode two of The Web of Fear), he appears at the start in the reprise from the previous episode. Often a reprise would be performed by the actors again as part of the recording session for the next story; the rest of the time (particularly if there was an actor featured who was not in the studio that week), it would be edited in from a film recording of the end of the previous episode. For the last two of Pat's holidays (episode two of The Wheel in Space, and episode four of The Seeds of Death), the Doctor's knocked out and represented by a body double sleeping with face pointing away from the camera. Not the most imaginative method, but it suffices. So, the Doctor appears but not played by the usual actor (though the use of Doctor doubles in scenes is by no means limited to holiday cover, so it counts).

William Hartnell had ten weeks off in all, either for holiday or illness. Body doubles were used for two (The Dalek Invasion of Earth four and The Tenth Planet three) who were both depicted in their first scene, shot from behind almost identically, to faint, then kept out of the way after that. A couple of episodes (The Space Museum three and The Time Meddler two), the Doctor is present in the film-recorded reprise, plus in the latter Hartnell has recorded audio that's played in to simulate him talking to another character through a door. In the two middle episodes of The Celestial Toymaker there's pre-recorded audio again, plus a body double. Well, really, its just a hand double - the Toymaker makes the Doctor invisible except for his hand, which can be seen moving the pieces of the Toymaker's trilogic game. The two middle episodes of The Massacre are open to interpretation: Hartnell appears (albeit in one he's only present in pre-filmed sequences) but he's maybe not playing the Doctor. When I covered the story for the blog many years ago, I came down on the side of the Abbot of Amboise shown in the episodes being a separate character. This is the consensus view of commentators over the years, but there is a possible reading (though a stretched one) that it is in fact the Doctor impersonating the Abbot in some scenes. That leaves three where the Doctor is most definitely absent: Mission to the Unknown (which features none of the regular cast), and episodes three and four of The Keys of Marinus from the very first Doctor Who season. So just three (or five depending on your Massacre interpretation) Doctor-less as opposed to Doctor lite episodes. Unless current showrunner Russell T Davies takes things in a very unexpected direction, that's how it's going to stay.

 

In Summary:

Karfel now! Down with this sort of thing!