Nightmare in Silver

Chapter the 295th, where Gaiman's in again, and seems game, but perhaps without as good an aim, man.

Plot:
The Doctor takes Clara and the two children she nannies (the Maitland kids) to a theme park planet in the future, a thousand years after a war with the Cybermen. The park is all but abandoned, with only a squad of soldiers on the planet plus the last of the original carnival folk Webley remaining, waiting for someone to give him a lift out of there. He shows the TARDIS travellers his main exhibit, a chess playing Cyberman. It's just an empty shell, though, with his assistant Porridge inside controlling things. Or is it? There are small Cyber-creatures scuttling about, and they reanimate Webley's Cyberman, as well as having built up an army of thousands of other new design Cybermen hidden on the planet. Webley and the two children are brought under cyber-control, as is the Doctor. The Time Lord fights the efforts to turn him into the Cyber Planner, mentally visualising this as two versions of himself battling for control. Meanwhile, Clara and the troops attempt a rearguard action, holding off the masses of Cybermen. This is difficult as the Cybermen have new powers to move very fast and silently (luckily only one of them uses these powers). The Doctor manages to free the kids from Cyber control; then, just when all hope is thought lost, he briefly halts the Cyber advance and the remaining soldiers and Clara are not killed. Porridge - who turns out to be the runaway Emperor of many galaxies - transmats everyone and the TARDIS onto his ship and they nuke the entire site from orbit.

Context:

I watched this from the BBC iPlayer over two nights in March 2024, on my own. The reason I split it in half was because of writer's cramp. I watch stories taking notes longhand in a pad, but the initial action of Nightmare in Silver is so busy that I could barely keep up, and had to have a break. After the first fifteen minutes or so it settles down a bit, but it never settles down completely - there's a lot of stuff crammed in there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can work for a Doctor Who story to pack in a lot of different elements and concepts at a fast pace in a limited time, particularly in the more modern era of post 2005 Who; but, it's always a bit of a risk...

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 23rd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

A clear memory about this story is from long before it was shown, November 2012, when I saw a news article that confirmed its working title The Last Cyberman. Eve de Leon Allen, the young actor playing Angie Maitland - who must have been mortified, poor thing - left her copy of the script in the back of a Cardiff taxi. A student found it and handed it back to the BBC without leaking any details (see here for the full story). It ramped up the excitement a good six months or more before the broadcast to know that Neil Gaiman was writing a Cyberman story. I didn't watch it go out live, as I was in Hamburg because of a big project for the day job. It was such a big project that they'd had a rehearsal of the launch over a weekend a couple of months before (coming home from which I endured a difficult journey in the snow, as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). The real thing was over the weekend of the 11th and 12th May 2013. I did at least get to watch some new (to me) Who that weekend, as there had been a leak of a recently recovered episode of The Underwater Menace, and it was available to watch online for a while. I celebrated the day job project's success by watching a Troughton episode on my phone in a hotel with the worst wi-fi in the universe (as retold in the First Time Round section of this blog post). I got home late on the Tuesday, and watched the recorded Nightmare of Silver on the Wednesday. I found it crushingly disappointing on that first watch, alas. Watching episode two of The Underwater Menace episode was more enjoyable; heck, struggling to get home in a blizzard was probably more enjoyable, or at least I thought so at the time. Would I change my opinion after this latest watch?

Reaction:

When I covered the writer of Nightmare of Silver Neil Gaiman's previous story for the show The Doctor's Wife, I wrote some things that are worth repeating here, as they are even more relevant when discussing Nightmare in Silver. I wrote that Gaiman has "always been a fan writer in the best sense of the term" and that consistently in his work "he revels in upending the toy-box of myths and legends, both ancient and pop, and playing with them in new ways". In the first of his two Doctor Who stories he polished up a cornerstone of Doctor Who mythology, the TARDIS; but, there is so much else in the show's long history. The chance to write about the Cybermen, who have built up a mythology of their own in all their appearances since first appearing in 1966, must have been enticing. Despite appearing in almost every story, the TARDIS had accumulated very little information to be assimilated into a 45-minute narrative: it's a constant companion of the Doctor, a bit telepathic, it rarely arrived where intended - that's about it. The Cybermen though come with a lot of backstory, mostly fragmentary, often contradictory: they're from Mondas, they're from Telos, they're from a parallel Earth, they died out years ago, they're still going strong, they were involved in an interplanetary war with humans, people on Earth have never heard of them, they're allergic to gold, they're not allergic to gold. Trying to put even a fraction of all that together in one screenplay is likely to produce something, well, fragmentary and contradictory. Gaiman's script appears to be attempting to include everything (even down to specific in-jokey references such as a weightless moonwalk sequence harking back to 1960s Cybermen story The Moonbase), and the result is predictably a mess.

A good way to see something has gone badly wrong is to look at Jason Watkins' character Webley. Watkins is a good actor, and a guest appearance by him is something of a boon. The character is introduced early on, an impecunious showman with a faded grandeur: it seems that he will be a significant presence in the narrative. A few minutes in, though, he's grabbed by a Cyberman long thought inactive (a nice jump scare, to be fair), is converted to cyber-control, and after that he just stands around. For nearly forty minutes, he just stands around, very occasionally spouting some exposition. Does he live or die by the end? Did that ever even get confirmed on screen? If so, I've already forgotten. The two Maitland children too spend a lot of the running time doing nothing of any consequence. In the wider season outside of this story, there have been a few clunky story beats required to engineer their presence in this story. In an easy to miss snatch of dialogue it's mentioned that the Cybermen needed children to create their Cyber Planner, but the Doctor's brain is even more suitable. So, the Doctor could have incited all the subsequent incident just by landing there, as he always does every week without two children in tow - they aren't needed at all. A big question that was in my mind most of the way through the story was 'Why now?' and I'm not convinced that snatch of dialogue adequately explained it: the Cybermen have built up a ridiculously large army, vastly outnumbering any resistance forces. Did they really need to wait for a Cyber Planner before they took action? Don't they have some standing order inbuilt along the lines of 'kill the rag-tag band of misfit soldiers and take over the planet'? It wouldn't take a whole lot of planning. And if they haven't had a Cyber Planner up to now, who planned the rebuilding of their forces?

Once the Cyber Planner is established, there are still logical flaws in the Cyber activity presented. In a bravura sequence, a redesigned (and it's a good re-design) Cyberman is shown in new speedy, silent mode zipping around lethally. So, why would any of them move any other way? Why does the army revert to stomping around later? Why is there even an army? One stealth mode Cyberman could wipe out every human on the planet in the blink of an eye. It's a long-standing flaw of the steel giants that they are presented as invulnerable, so any script has to give them a new vulnerability each time as otherwise they'd easily win, which would get boring quickly. These vulnerabilities are often not very convincing, but in Nightmare in Silver there isn't anything offered at all. In fact, it's shown - Borg-style - that the Cybs can adjust and upgrade to any weapon used against them. There's certainly no reason given why they can't all be in the stealth / zip / bullet-time mode all the time. This links in to a difficulty the script has in choosing between the two different styles of Cyberman story historically: creeping horror where there may be one or a few Cybs infiltrating a human base, hiding around corners, or quickfire action where they attack in large numbers. In a longer story, it has been possible to do both as different phases, but this story's too short for that; the setting of an eerie abandoned space funfair seems to have been picked (and perhaps the children included) for scenes of the first type, but then there aren't any, and the story lurches into the action sequences (which could have been set anywhere). This is possibly down to the director not accentuating the horror enough in the early scenes, but the script is not helping by trying to do too much.

There isn't very much for the Doctor to do in the action either. Gaiman shunts him off to one side, tied up (sometimes literally) in a mental battle with the psychic force of the Cybermen. This is personified by Smith playing the darker side in a battle against himself: Doctor and Cyber-Doctor. The trouble is that the Doctor isn't shown as that heroic before or after this battle is joined, so the two sides are not in sharp enough relief; he deliberately sticks around investigating instead of getting two children to safety, making comments to suggest he knows full well that he's putting them in danger. Later, he makes comments objectifying Clara (including an unforgivable line about her wearing a skirt that's too tight, which I suspect came from showrunner Steven Moffat). This is all when he's not under the influence. Gaiman has gone on record as saying he wanted to show people that Matt Smith could act, but it only shows me that he can overact. The material is too static and Smith perhaps thought he needed to go a bit wild to give it some oomph, or maybe the director didn't know exactly what tone for which he should aim. The Doctor's not the only character that doesn't contribute much to events; Tamzin Outhwaite is wasted in this as much as Jason Watkins; Warwick Davis has a bit more to do, but his character on the page is inconsistent - it might have been better to have his runaway Emperor backstory outlined a bit more rather than just be hinted, but maybe there wasn't time with everything else going on. The story's not 100% bad, but when judged in terms of the ratio of potential to result, it's one of the worst misfires of Doctor Who's history.

Connectivity:

Both Nightmare in Silver and The Sensorites feature a four-person TARDIS crew being transported between a planet and a spaceship without using the TARDIS. Both planets contain many members of a race of creatures that can communicate telepathically (well, sort of in the Cybermen's case - they are all linked by the Cyberiad). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Never go back? In an acceptance speech on his being given a Hugo award for The Doctor's Wife, its author Neil Gaiman joked that "only a fool or a madman would try again – so I'm on my third draft now", confirming that he was working on another script for Doctor Who and giving away that at some level he knew it was a risk. His first story for the series had been pretty much universally loved. Could lightning strike twice? Early on in his tenure, Steven Moffat, lead writer and exec producer (and the person who commissioned Gaiman), occasionally tempted writers who were names, but not necessarily for stuff like Doctor Who, to contribute a script for the series. Simon Nye and Richard Curtis, each known more for comedies, both wrote for Moffat's first season in charge; Gaiman's first script was made in Moffat's second year, and Nightmare in Silver for the third. Nye and Curtis's efforts (Amy's Choice and Vincent and the Doctor respectively) were both well thought of, but perhaps not to the stratospheric heights of The Doctor's Wife, but neither writer was tempted back. Gaiman's history as a writer up to this point was more aligned with Who in terms of genre, though he was at the pure fantasy end of the spectrum, but he wasn't by that point known for television. He'd written screenplays periodically in the past, some for TV, but it was by no means his full-time job - he was much more used to writing comics or bestselling novels. He didn't need the money, and could presumably have found more lucrative ways to spend his time. As noted in the Reaction section above, he was doing this for love of the programme, and he had at least enough love for two stories, not just one.

Looking back, the throwaway joke of the acceptance speech proved hauntingly prophetic. Nightmare in Silver was greeted with a reaction that was pretty much the polar opposite of that received by The Doctor's Wife, and in the years since it has not had any critical re-evaluation. It's generally seen as a misfire. Gaiman went on record a few years after Nightmare in Silver's broadcast that the treatment of his second story left "a bad taste in [his] mouth" saying - perhaps a bit generously - that the story was "widely regarded as having some good bits in it – but being rather a curate's egg". He also said at the same time of both his two stories that as far as he was concerned "both of the scripts were of equal quality". This goes beyond generosity for me, and I struggle to believe it, at least of the shooting script. I cannot think that all the issues in the final product came in between the page and the screen: as set out in the Reaction section above, there's just too many elements, many of which are not used well or barely at all. No director or production designer or even showrunner added all of those. I can only think that Gaiman is talking about the scripts he produced in toto, including the changes of multiple redrafts. The vision in his head may have been as good as The Doctor's Wife, but the process of making that into an episode of Doctor Who, with the compromises inherent in that process, mangled it. So, what went wrong? There's nothing on record to definitely confirm it, but there are strong indications that it was something to do with work between the writer and the showrunner, Gaiman and Moffat.

A caveat is warranted here: we're entering the theatre of rumour now. I've seen some wild theories out there, and I won't give them an airing. Moffat's job was to help Gaiman to tailor his vision to best fit the show's format. They'd worked together to this end successfully on The Doctor's Wife, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't happen that way again. Moffat didn't want a bad story in his season - who would? - and had indeed laid down the challenge to Gaiman in the first place with the commission to make the Cybermen "scary again". Gaiman generated a lot of ideas, but this was reportedly what he did for The Doctor's Wife also (there's no definitive source for this, by the way, but it chimes with Gaiman's work elsewhere which is always chock-full of different elements, some that might challenge even the biggest of budgets). Some have speculated that Moffat just wasn't as available as he had been first time round; but, based on everything Doctor Who fans have learnt about the showrunner's job over the years, there's never a moment of peace, it's always busy. Moffat would have had no less but probably no more distractions from focus on Gaiman's Nightmare in Silver script. He might have had less time in a different way, though. It may have been forgotten in all this discourse that The Doctor's Wife was originally scheduled for the series before the one in which it eventually aired. It was deferred because of worries about the overall season budget, but this presumably allowed a longer gestation period. It's easy to say with hindsight, but perhaps the same should have happened with Nightmare in Silver: leave it a year, work on honing things down to a central idea and visual, and produce something wonderful for Capaldi's first season. Some things are worth waiting for.

History, alas, went a different way; but, there is a happy ending of sorts. Gaiman has said that he was "really glad" in one way that his second Doctor Who episode didn't work out as he intended, as it inspired him to take more control of his future projects, becoming showrunner for the TV adaptation of the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett Good Omens. "I can't just write the scripts, hand them over to somebody and hope that I get something fantastic back. I may or I may not. If this is going to be f**ked up, it's going to be f**ked up by me personally, with love and dedication. And I will hope that it isn't, but it needs to be done properly, and I need to care."

In Summary:

A mess, which is a shame.

The Sensorites

Chapter the 294th, covers a pair of Hartnells, one from early on, and one that's brand new.

Plot:
The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan materialise on a 28th century spaceship in orbit around the planet Sense-Sphere. Two members of crew appear dead, but they are instead mind-controlled by the Sensorites on the planet below, who are keeping them in orbit. The TARDIS team manage to wake them up. There is also a third crew member John who has been driven mad by the creatures. The lock mechanism from the TARDIS is taken by the Sensorites, preventing it from leaving; the Doctor soon works out the weaknesses of these seemingly fearsome creatures. The Sensorites explain that they are fearful of exploitation of their planet, which is rich in the vital element molibdi- molybdu- molydem- ... iron, let's just say iron. Years before, a group of Earthmen arrived and caused trouble, but they're now missing presumed dead. Since, Sensorites have been dying from a suspected infection. If the Doctor can cure this, the Sensorites will allow him access to his TARDIS again, and will fix John. The Doctor, Susan and Ian go down to the planet with John and another member of the crew, his fiancé Carol. Barbara and the captain of the ship stay behind, though Barbara joins them on the planet later. Despite the City Administrator Sensorite working against them, and despite Ian falling ill, the Doctor works out that the water supply is being poisoned and provides the antidote. Ian and John are both healed. In some tunnels, the Earthmen are discovered to be still alive and poisoning the water supply with Deadly Nightshade. They are apprehended, and the TARDIS travellers are free to resume their journeys in time and space.

Context:

The plan was to watch an episode a day across six days in late February and early March 2024. Such is the reputation of The Sensorites as being a bore-fest that if I told you I enjoyed it so much I tore through it much quicker than that, you wouldn't believe me, but that is five-sixths true. The first episode proved a hell of a chore, such that I couldn't keep watching it on first attempt and instead split my viewing over two days, 10 minutes on the first, the remaining 15 on the next. After that, though, the story picks up, and though I didn't exactly binge them, I got through through the rest of the episodes much quicker than originally planned.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 22nd season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I met fellow Doctor Who fan, David, mentioned many times before on this blog, at university in the early 1990s and we've remained friends ever since. In the immediate years after my graduation, when none of my peer group had serious jobs or partners or families, there was a lot of time for visiting each other. Usually for no particularly special occasion apart from having a day or two of leave, we would traverse the country and meet up. In November 1997 (I can date this as I remember us both sitting eating breakfast in his kitchen with BBC Radio 1 on and hearing the first radio play of Help the Aged by Pulp) I was on such a visit to him. David had through various contacts and sources collected a video copy of pretty much every Doctor Who story that existed in the BBC's archives at that time. I only had collected what had been commercially available, though I'd borrowed some of his tapes from time to time. Being together and both fans, it must have seemed a good and obvious idea to sit down and watch some Who, probably with a beer and some snacks. Why we chose The Sensorites, I do not remember. Maybe it was the best of what I hadn't seen by other means by then. But all the available evidence - see the First Time Round section of this blog post for more details - suggests I hadn't seen Horror of Fang Rock by November 1997. Why didn't we watch Horror of Fang Rock? We got to watch that story together on a big screen recently at least - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details. It can be hard to remember details from that long ago, Was this the trip where David persuaded me to purchase his entire Target Doctor Who book collection from him, as he needed the space, and I had a challenging time getting it back home? Maybe that was a few years later. Jarvis Cocker isn't always around to help me date stuff, unfortunately.

Reaction:

Stories from Doctor Who's first 1963/64 season can't help but innovate in some way or other. The series was shiny and new, and trying out different types of stories each time, seeing what best fit. The Sensorites, though, innovates in a rather profound way in that the titular alien race are complex; individuals within the ranks of Sensorites have different motivations and form different factions, there's disagreement and dissent. They are not a monoculture, and they are the first aliens presented that way in Doctor Who. You don't get that with Daleks or Voord, and you won't get it with Zarbi or Cybermen. Most of the time in Who, alien races are there to be monstrous forces of antagonism, usually unreasoning, blank and implacable. There is a story type that would be used later, though, that is very like The Sensorites, such that the Hartnell story feels like a try-out. That is the suite of 1970s stories often of six episodes length written by Malcolm Hulke. In these stories, the 'monster' races had understandable viewpoints and different factions (The Sea Devils, The Silurians), or the antagonism comes from the machinations of humans instead (Invasion of the Dinosaurs), or all of the above (Frontier in Space). Put it in colour, swap in the appropriate TARDIS pilot, and The Sensorites would not look out of place during the Jon Pertwee era. Exploring this race of creatures provides lots of story potential for the portion of the narrative that takes place on the Sense-Sphere. It also provides a great villain in the City Administrator, who obstinately refuses to believe any good of the aliens visiting his planet. He may be a villain of the more hissable panto kind (so were Hulke's), but his presence lifts the scenes he's in.

That first episode really was a chore, though (see Context section above) and a fair part of the second episode isn't much better. Again, in line with many a 1970s story, it has the typical 6-parter blues, not quite having enough plot for the duration. Like many a 1970s 6-parter, generally after Hulke's time, it has a narrative structured as a two and a four, the first section on the ship, and the second section on the planet. The realisation of the ship in the studio is pretty good, with a nice continuous shot early on of the TARDIS travellers walking out of the console room and into the spaceship; but, the minimal cast can't sustain interest, and the sets don't feel big enough to contain the action. This can be seen when, in order to get into trouble, Susan and Barbara have to miss the very obvious sign saying 'WATER' and instead wander through a door looking for refreshment. They know there is danger elsewhere on the ship, but there's only one flippin' door, so you'd think they'd realise it's the one that leads to the danger. The only thing left for the cast to do to create dramatic tension is some very stagey and very 60s psychodrama about the impact of the Sensorites' mental powers. This has the unintended effect of talking up the Sensorites too much. Aside from the memorably creepy moment at the part one cliffhanger where we see the first glimpse of one floating outside of the ship, they are very disappointing and don't match up to the terrified reactions of the crew earlier.

Everything is fully explained in the script, if you pay attention: they are protective of their planet but didn't mean any active harm to the humans, so just left them in orbit in a sort of mental stasis, not knowing what better to do with them; the crewman John's excitement at discovering riches on the planet dropped his mental defences, and the Sensorites inadvertently altered his mind. All that material comes later, though: in the second episode, this terrifying unseen presence that has turned people into zombies or driven them mad is finally revealed... and it's a set of slightly cuddly creatures who are frightened of the dark and loud noises, and are at risk of tripping over their own feet. It can't help but seem risible. When it settles down to the more grounded conflict of the City Administrator's distrust, it's much more believable. As such, the story doesn't really need the creatures to be telepathic at all, particularly as it creates some plot holes. A lot of the double-dealing relies on the Sensorites not being able to easily distinguish between each other based on sight, but they don't need to - they're a telepathic race, wouldn't they just distinguish each other telepathically? The City Administrator's nefarious shenanigans involve disguising himself with another's sash of office, but couldn't other Sensorites work out his real identity by, I don't know, looking into his brain. The telepathy at least allows Carole Ann Ford to do something a bit different as Susan; her moments of discovering a telepathic link with the Sensorites causing conflict with her grandfather, and the love story subplot between Ilona Rodgers as Carol and Stephen Dartnell as John are nicely emotional scenes, done quite well.

There are other flaws in the story, but none of them felt big enough to trouble me much: the solution to the mystery of the Sensorites' affliction, that their general water supply is being poisoned, is so telegraphed as to be screamingly obvious; the writing out of Barbara, so that Jackie Hill can have two weeks' holiday, is terribly contrived (she spends the time alone on the ship with its captain for no apparent reason, though one could provide one's own subtext, then turns up on the planet with a nice new suntan); some of the dialogue is very on the nose; the schoolroom science of Molybdenum feels a little shoe-horned in. The worst mistake to my mind is that there's no comeuppance scene for the City Administrator, he's unmasked as the villain off-screen. This is because the focus switches in the final episode to the three surviving humans, ragged and mad and still fighting a war that's long over. The scenes with them were fine, with John Bailey's Commander keeping up an insane parody of military discipline, though I would have been fine with them just having been driven over the edge by their desperate situation, rather than there being an explanation included that the Sensorites' mind powers are responsible. I'd still rather have seen an ending where the City Administrator's plans come to a climax, but are roundly defeated. I'm reminded of Captain Dent, the love-to-hate-him baddie of Colony in Space, who similarly disappears from the story in the last episode and doesn't get a comeuppance scene. And who wrote that story? Why, Malcolm Hulke, of course! 

Connectivity:

Both The Sensorites and The Girl Who Died feature a grey haired Doctor played by an actor in his late 50s interacting with a race of aliens who are mostly indistinguishable from one another at a distance without their sashes of office / hologram projections of Norse gods. 

Deeper Thoughts:

From the Sense-Sphere to a realm beyond sense: BFI The Celestial Toymaker animation screening 2nd March 2024. It was a very rainy Saturday in early March as I made my way to the BFI Southbank for another screening. I'd bagged a ticket, and suspected that this one might have a bit less interest than the Horror of Fang Rock screening in February. The animations sometimes have less appeal to our little - but probably representative - band of regular fans than the Blu-ray tie-in screenings, the latter usually having better panel guests, and it's not the strongest story (a couple of our number expressed this opinion). Myself, I was wary of the possible audience reaction. The trailer showed that this was far from the usual style for these animated stories, and it was possible it would divide opinion. The panellists that there are at these events are usually those who've worked on the animated versions; I didn't like the idea of an awkward panel with rude audience questions from people who didn't care for what they'd seen on screen. My concerns were unfounded for a couple of reasons. First, the screening had sold out and the auditorium was full; second, there were no panels with audience questions at all. Our hosts, as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, informed us that the animation team are based in Australia, but even if they'd had the budget to fly them over, they wouldn't have been able to come: they were working on what we were about to watch right up to the wire, with the final files having been sent over the previous evening ("They're still drawing the third and fourth episodes," joked Fiddy). As such, outside of the team working on it, nobody had viewed the animated story in advance; those of us in NFT1 that day would be the first.

Aside from the animators, the issue with forming a panel for the story is that almost everybody credited on the original production, both in front of and behind the camera, is no longer with us. They had apparently tried to engage Peter Purves, who played Steven, and one of the non-speaking dancers who appear in one episode, but diaries did not align. They are really the only remaining options. "You've got Dick here," quipped Johnson, "What more could you want?!" In the absence of a full panel, our hosts endeavoured to keep up all the other rituals of these BFI events, including double entendres. Johnson did a round-up of online and social media activity connected to the event, noting that - even though nobody had seen it yet - the DVD release of the Toymaker animation already had many reviews, apparently all either ones or fives out of five. There was also the usual quiz with giveaway goodies for those that could answer trivia questions; one of the prizes, in Fiddy's words, was "One of the rare medium-sized Doctor Who T-shirts." After this, sound supremo Mark Ayres was up on stage, for the first of two times on the day, to introduce the animation. He confirmed that he had still been working on the sound mix the previous day, but said that Fiddy's earlier remark about the latter episodes still being finished was not accurate: the episodes were delivered in reverse order, so it was the first episode that was the last to be worked on. Alas, it wasn't quite done in time. There was a sequence where the watermark 'NOT FINAL' showed over the action, and there were a few parts that had errors that Ayres had spotted in his last-minute review. If there were more that he hadn't spotted, he said, then "Twitter will inform us in due course." He summarised it thus: "You're all going to see something nobody else is ever going to see ... I hope."

Johnson (L), Fiddy (R)

The screenings of the first two episodes then followed, and the first part was fine, not nearly as bad as Ayres had set up. The only previous animation by Shapeshifter Studios, using their motion-capture process, was for one missing episode of The Web of Fear (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). It was an experiment, and it was not well received. It remains to be seen how people will react this time, but I liked it. Lots more work has clearly been put in, and the overall quality (and in particular, the movement of the characters) has vastly improved. The character designs are of a different type of abstraction than usual for the animation range, which takes a little getting used to; but, once I was acclimatised, I very much enjoyed the style. This is the perfect story to further the experimentation. Only the three regulars and the Toymaker need appear in any way naturalistically (and the Doctor is invisible for half the time, depicted in the animation as a glowing translucent outline); the animators are freer in designing the other characters - human beings turned into toys - and it gets very inventive. The playing card characters have a lovely origami look, and move in a distinctive way (achieved, as Ayres explained later, by them appearing at a different frame rate to everything else). There's a hint of 60s psychedelia in the imagery, with some characters looking like they've walked straight out of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie. After the end credits rolled on the second episode, Fiddy made the droll aside: "They still have LSD in Australia then". The scare factor is also increased; the sequence of Dodo turning to ice after sitting in a booby-trapped chair is genuinely unsettling in a way that the original would likely have struggled to achieve.

Johnson (L), Ayres (R)

Ayres came back up on stage for a quick interview in between the first and second half of the story. He talked about how the script, what he thinks of as the only outright fantasy in early Doctor Who (even The Mind Robber having something of a scientific explanation), is extremely inventive. Anyone who can remember my write-up of the story many years ago for the blog will know that I disagree. The scripting is simple and repetitive such that it could only work with ambitious visuals far beyond the resources of the time. On the strength of the first half, the animators were making a good stab of finally achieving such visuals, with Ayres hinting that the third episode went even further and was his particular favourite. He had not been slouching on the audio front either. 1960s productions often let the audio fall back to just actors in the studio, which has a hollow sound, and often the music - pre-recorded and played in to the studio - could drown out the dialogue; he's tweaked things to fix both issues. He's also done an elegant editing job to remove an 'of the time' offensive version of 'Eeeny Meeny Minie Moe'. For the first time, the source for the audio was the so-called Randolph tapes. These were provided to the archives in 2018 after having been found years before in a skip. They have the word  'Randolph' written on the reel-to-reel boxes, hence the name, but who recorded them and how they came to be there is still a mystery. They provide better quality recordings for some stories than exist elsewhere, and may be counted upon for future releases. Episodes three and four followed the interview with Ayres, and a sequence in the third was indeed breath-taking, and very in keeping with the more hyperactive sequences in the villain's recent rematch The Giggle. The nasty schoolboy character Cyril's death got a round of applause from the assembled.

The best kudos I can give to this animated Celestial Toymaker is to say that it makes one want to see The Web Planet animated, or the Sensorites for that matter, or indeed any other story where the ambition for the imagery exceeded what could be achieved in Lime Grove or Riverside by several light years. Obviously, I'm not suggesting they don't animate all the missing ones first - I want to be alive to see them all. The final treat for us that day was another exclusive, and another investment that's going to pay off over a long stretch of time. The first 10 minutes approximately were shown of a bonus feature from the planned Toymaker release; this is the first of a series where seven different teams of three people - themed for each of the first seven Doctors' eras - all grapple with a specially designed Doctor Who escape room. Each team gets their own episode, with the attempt of the First Doctor trio (Peter Purves, Maureen o' Brien and - erm - Lisa Bowerman) going on the Toymaker disc. The remaining six will go on appropriate animation or Collection box-sets in future. As the presenter of the series Emily Cook said in a brief onstage interview, it could take 20 years to get to the end, but it will be worth it. The concept is one that you can't believe nobody's thought of before, and it looks like a lot of fun based on the excerpt shown. Emily talked about the difficulty of balancing the right tone in her role between being supportive and being gently mocking. The escape room was put together as a set, and all the different sessions were filmed over a scorching two days in the Summer of 2023. The puzzles are styled after various elements of set dressing from classic Doctor Who (references to the Trilogic game from the Toymaker story, the colourful puzzle from the Pyramid of Mars and the gameboard from The Five Doctors were clear from the clip).

Johnson (L), Cook (R)

The Doctor Who-themed escape rooms in the UK (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for details of one of them) don't require any knowledge of the show to complete the puzzles, as that would likely be too niche for wide customer engagement. As such, the escape room of the bonus feature series would be much better appreciated by the fans than the stars of the show; alas, the sets have been struck and it is no more, so we will just get to experience it through watching others trying it. This seems like a fundamental flaw, but is somewhat the point, I suppose: it wouldn't be as much fun watching people smoothly and successfully work out a set of puzzles. Cook hinted at some humorous meltdowns: Peter Davison gets somewhat frustrated, and the antics of the fourth Doctor crew of Matthew Waterhouse, Micheal E. Briant and - erm - Toby Hadoke were hilarious according to Cook. After this final interview, the event was done. The three of us (myself, Trevor and Alan) went to the BFI cocktail bar, and met up with Tim and Dave, who I hadn't seen for a couple of years. Then, Chris came out to join us for a drink and some food, though he hadn't had a ticket for the screening. It was almost a full house of our usual group (only David and Scott were not there); the talk was good, the food and drink were good, and I said hello to a few other fans. Having been worried that the event would be negative, I left that evening to travel home in the glow of the most enjoyable and positive BFI session for an animation to date. I'm looking forward to the physical release (date TBC at time of writing) to see the final version of the animation, and to see if Purves and Co. ever manage to escape from that room.

In Summary:

Never mind its reputation, The Sensorites is sometimes as powerful as gamma radiation (inspiration for the incredible Hulke).