The Romans

Chapter the 323rd, which features a bit of a carry on, but no Cleo. 

Plot:

Rome, 64AD. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki have a holiday for a few weeks in somebody else's vacated villa near the city, before the Doctor gets bored and goes off to Rome with Vicki. On route, he finds a dead body by the side of the road, and is mistaken for the dead man, Corinthian lyre player Maximus Pettulian. Ian and Barbara are captured by slave traders. Ian becomes a galley slave on a ship; Barbara is sold at auction in Rome, to work in Nero's court. Ian's ship is destroyed in a storm, and with help from fellow slave Dedos makes his way to dry land; they both journey to Rome. The Doctor and Vicki meet Nero, but manage to miss bumping into Barbara. Nero takes a shine to Barbara, and spends a lot of time chasing after her - literally - much to the displeasure of his wife. Barbara survives her own assassination attempt, as she drinks from the wrong cup, avoiding a poisoned one. The Doctor discovers that Petullian's plan before he was killed was to assassinate Nero. After a rapturous reception for the Doctor's lyre playing, Nero plans to feed the Doctor to the lions in the arena. Nero visits the Gladiator school, taking Barbara with him. Ian and Dedos are forced to fight to the death for Nero's amusement, but instead turn their swords on the guards and escape, Ian telling Barbara that he'll come to find her. The Doctor inadvertently gives Nero the idea to burn Rome to the ground, and is spared death by lions. Nero invites the Roman hoi polloi to his palace and instructs them to set fires in the city; this allows Ian and Dedos to sneak in and rescue Barbara. The Doctor and Vicki also slip out. As Rome burns, all of them travel separately to the villa and meet back there.

Context:

The Romans will probably be the last ever purely historical story I cover, unless there's a surprise change of direction in the new series. The recent post for Day of the Daleks may have been the last Dalek story I ever write about. I've got at least one more story each left for the Sontarans, Master and Cybermen, but nothing more for Skaro's finest. It seems likely that any or all of those could appear versus Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor or a future Doctor (if there is one), though. A 21st century story set in Earth's past with no alien antagonists is much less likely. I enjoyed all the historicals watched for the blog over the years, but must admit that when The Romans came up, as the only Willian Hartnell story remaining to align with the write-up for a Hartnell-related BFI event (see Deeper Thoughts below), I wasn't 100% enthusiastic. It felt like only yesterday that I last watched the story, when the second season came out on Blu-ray. In fact, that was more than two years ago. Rightly or wrongly, I still felt a bit fatigued with it; to get over this, I watched the story one episode a week (on Sundays) during February and March 2025. It was enjoyable when watched in that way. The Better Half joined me at the start, and agreed with me that Ian and Barbara are definitely doing it by now (witnessing their relaxed, and possibly post-coital, scenes alone with each other in that first episode, and at end). This wasn't enough to keep her interested for the remaining three parts, though, and I watched them on my own.

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 completion of yet another Doctor's televisual era; William Hartnell's first Doctor joins the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors, making nine completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season, the 35th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

I didn't start keeping a diary until the first of January the following year, so I can't be 100% sure, but I believe that the purchase of The Romans on VHS (in a double pack with preceding story The Rescue) was the first Doctor Who product I ever bought with money from post-education employment. I'd finished university in the spring of 1994, dossed around for most of the Summer, then got a temp job. I was working at Griffin Factors (now part of HSBC) in Worthing, in an office a little out of town near the hospital. On the 5th September, or thereabouts, I would have walked into the main shopping area in Montague Street after work, and used my hard earned cash at Volume One. This independent book and video shop was my usual supplier of Doctor Who videos for most of the 1990s, and as such looms large in my memory of Doctor Who stories first watched on video. [I was pleased to find when googling about Volume One, curious to know when it ceased trading, that the author of a couple of excellent non-fiction books about Doctor Who that came out in the last few years, Paul Hayes, was bought his first ever Doctor Who book in the store - see here for the full interview.] My memory of the time is more than hazy, but I would likely have then travelled home on the bus and watched both stories straight away in one sitting.

Reaction:

This blog has been a nearly ten year long experiment into the random. I believed it was much more common, for fans or more casual viewers alike, to encounter Doctor Who stories in no particular order: people watch on TV every so often but not regularly, say, or pick up one or two or all of the books, videos, DVDs or Blu-rays (which have always come out in a haphazard non-chronological order). As such, my hypothesis was that watching the entirety of Who in a shuffled way would garner more insight than starting with An Unearthly Child and progressing in a linear fashion. In the main, I think the hypothesis has held, but on occasion one misses out by not seeing a story in the context of those around it. The Romans is such a case. This was the 12th Doctor Who story, and - though there had been the odd bit of humorous business in the first 11 - was the show's first foray into outright comedy. How jarring would it have been to those watching as it first went out? It's hard to say watching it in isolation, but it would probably be hard to say anyway. Humour is notoriously subjective, but tastes in humour also evolve. The story is 60 years old, and different boundaries existed for what was funny back then, particularly the delicately balanced humour seen here which - though much more prevalent than in other Doctor Who stories - still has to hang on the skeleton of an action adventure narrative. It's so hard to know whether writer Dennis Spooner and director Christopher Barry were just intending it to raise a smile, or to be laugh out loud funny. If it was the latter, I think they failed (at least for this viewer many years later). Perhaps the weight of expectation of this being the first 'funny one' only exists because of the history and the looking back; at the time, perhaps there were no expectation, and that helped to make it more easily enjoyable.

Watching in 2025, when The Romans can't help but seem at a distant historical remove, this translates into some disconcertingly jarring tonal swerves. There's a slapstick fight where Barbara accidentally brains Ian smashing a vase on his head when she was trying to immobilise an enemy. Ho ho. That act, though, condemns them to capture to be sold as chattels, which mere minutes later the characters and the script treat sombrely. Ho ho... slavery? Nero chasing Barbara around is treated like a Benny Hill sequence without the Yakety Sax; but, if he catches her it is clear that he is going to force himself on her, with her consent not a consideration. Ho ho... sexual assault? Okay, it may be unfair to blame The Romans for every bedroom farce that looks tasteless in a different light. The trouble is that in the Doctor Who story the light keeps changing, back and forth. A stage farce would be able to fully commit, anyway, whereas Doctor Who can't. There can't be overt references to sex in the programme, and the regulars have to play to their existing characters (or else the whole dramatic edifice collapses, for this and any subsequent stories). One might just think that they shouldn't have tried it, but Doctor Who and the Hartnell period in particular thrives on experimentation. Besides, a lot of the material in The Romans lands, usually when the script is not trying so hard. For the most part it's sprightly and / or charming. The scenes mentioned above (in the Context section) with Ian and Barbara hanging out and goofing around in the villa are lovely. Some of the Doctor's material is fun. The guest characters are nicely played. Excepting Nero, who's written by Spooner and performed by Derek Francis quite broadly, everyone else has some detail and dimensions to their characterisation provided in the script.

All the near misses where the different members of the TARDIS team just manage to avoid bumping into each other are fun (and reminiscent of the beginning of new series story Partners in Crime). There's a few nice dramatic plot beats, including the moment where Dedos and Ian realise they have to fight each other to the death, the reveal at the end that Tavius's actions have been directed by his Christianity (he's an early adopter), and the shocking moment where it looks like Nero has stabbed Barbara to death, but instead has killed the guard behind her. The Doctor managing to get through a public performance despite not being able to play the lyre by using an Emperor's New Clothes gambit (Nero and all his hangers-on pretend they can hear his 'delicate music' - actually miming - because they don't want to appear unsophisticated) is nice. Ian has a great line of dialogue about the Doctor "I've got a friend who specialises in trouble - he dives in and usually finds a way". Everyone's trying to kill everybody else in the story - it's pretty bloodthirsty for a light comedy - but there's a lot of energy in the scenes where the Doctor's trying to work out in what type of conspiracy the person whose place he's taken was involved. The most interesting part for fans is probably the Doctor inadvertently starting a fire, his glasses magnifying the sun's rays onto some parchment, and giving Nero the idea to burn down the city; it's the first time that our heroes are shown to be able to create recorded history by their own actions. All the following sequences regarding the great fire of Rome are played for laughs, of course: ho ho... destruction and death?!

Connectivity:

The Savages (subject of Deeper Thoughts section below, but not the main focus of this blog post) has a great connection to the last story blogged, Death Comes to Time, as both include vampiric characters attempting to extract something from the Doctor and it backfiring on them. The Romans has diddly squat in common with the webcast story, bar the irritating folksy music played in the latter being a little like the lyre music of Maximus Petullian.

Deeper Thoughts:

From the ancient to the elders: BFI screening of The Savages animation + Q&A, 28th February. This was the first Doctor Who BFI event to take place on a Friday evening, a fact that hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy mined for a few jokes. When Johnson made some mistakes on stage (including having the wrong answer to one of the quiz questions, and getting schooled by the expert fan audience), Fiddy said "We won't do this on a Friday again ... it's his drinking day". In honour of the change of slot, the quiz saw the audience shouting "Richard" rather than "Dick" if they wanted to attract Fiddy's roaming mic. "It's the PG Version" said Fiddy; "We've gone woke!" said Johnson. Both were on good form: later on in the quiz, Johnson asked a comic, fake question playing on the tabloid stories about Doctor Who's possible cancellation: "The Savages is from season three of the original series, will there be a season three of the new show?". Fiddy highlighted the contemporary relevance of The Savages, it being a story about "A rich and powerful elite sucking the lifeblood out of the poor". After musing on whether episode hunter Philip Morris might have the film reels of The Savages "up his sleeve", Johnson said he should probably stop making this "12-year old joke" (Morris returned nine episodes to the archives in 2013, but rumours got out of control that there were more found that had not been returned). As usual, Johnson read out some tweets; it was someone's birthday, it was someone's first ever Doctor Who event at the BFI, someone got a plug in for their podcast. One fan tweeted that they were happy with the event being on a Friday as they find "Doctor Who fans more tolerable when I've had a drink". There was also the obligatory cheeky tweet from a gay fan pretending to be trolling at the event, saying that they - like the city dwellers in the story - would like to "drain some fit men of their vitality too".

Johnson (L) and Fiddy (R)

The first person to be invited up on stage was Mark Ayres, who did sound restoration on the audio that is the basis for the animation. The sources he used for this were the late Graham Strong's recordings of parts one to three, and the 'Randolph' tapes for part four. Strong was described by Ayres as "The first person to take the back off his telly and risk death" by soldering in a direct link from the audio output into his recording device. The latter source is a set of tapes found in a skip; it's unknown who made the recordings, but their labels have the name Randolph on them. These tapes have only just started to be used on Doctor Who releases recently after their discovery a few years back. That new source, plus improvements in technology, skill and experience since, mean that Ayres feels better equipped to tackle some of the challenges yet to come. He mentioned that he'd previously dreaded cleaning up The Myth Makers, as well as one Patrick Troughton story that he left unnamed; now, though, he believes that whichever stories are selected they'll be brought up to an acceptable standard. He echoed Fiddy's comments about the contemporary relevance of the storyline, and also championed the incidental score by Raymond Jones (a link to The Romans, the only story other than The Savages for which Jones wrote music). After that, the first two episodes of The Savages were shown. The animation is in the 2D style and made by the same team that previously did The Underwater Menace and The Evil of the Daleks, and other stories before that. It is an efficient but enjoyable way to visualise the story, with good use of colour to mark out the different worlds inhabited by the city dwellers versus the savages. The likenesses of the Doctor and Steven weren't perfect, but Dodo was spot on.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres

As ever when watching with a large group, the humour is more apparent. The Doctor's reference to the machine he uses in the first episode, the Reacting Vibrator, inevitably got a huge laugh from the audience. Beyond that, it was hard to tell as a couple of fellows sitting directly behind us found everything - and I mean everything - side-splittingly hilarious and guffawed all the way through. I suspect some alcoholic lubrication had occurred. Anyway, my original thoughts on the story, written during the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic, are here; one thing that I noticed this time that I didn't in 2020 was the possibly loose way that characters refer to the unnamed planet's inhabitants, savages and city dwellers alike, as human beings. Were they supposed to be colonists, or was this just a shorthand for 'higher sentient beings'? The animation can't do anything about that, but it can erase the possibly dubious use in the original of make-up to darken some characters complexions. According to the panel afterwards, Jano is probably wearing gold face paint, but this doesn't come out very well in the black and white photos from the production. This panel, in a break at the midpoint of the story, focussed on the new pictures and featured animation director and producer AnneMarie Walsh, colourist Vinny Payne, animator Thomas Bland, and executive Paul Hembury. Walsh and Hembury both celebrated the work of the team to achieve what we'd seen on the big screen that day, highlighting the small number of people involved (from six to eight members at different points of an approximately nine month project). Walsh described some of the design choices made: an imaginative jumping off point for the look of the city was a proboscis, to subtly show the blood-sucking nature of those that live there.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Walsh, Payne, Bland, Hembury

Payne presented an interesting clip showing his work in colour grading the episodes, though the loud music on it overpowered most of his commentary (at least from my seat). Bland said that his greatest challenge this time was animating William Hartnell's facial expressions. This is the first Hartnell story that this particular team has worked on. Walsh commended its cerebral script, but added that "Pat Troughton's still my favourite Doctor". Hembury humorously pointed out how much of a Doctor Who expert Walsh had become after starting work on the animations many years ago as a newcomer to the Doctor's world; "I've gone over to the dark side," she quipped back. Hembury went a little into the executive decisions and deals forming the background to the creative work, as he'd done in the panel for the BFI screening of the team's last animation for The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post). Again, he jokingly gave a politician's "I'm glad you asked me that question" reply on one occasion, but again he was forthcoming on some details. He no longer works for the BBC but is continuing in his exec producer role, and is currently in the process of doing a deal to accelerate the rate that this team can produce animations by getting commitments up front for more than one story at a time. When asked if he could imagine a world where all 1960s seasons of Doctor Who had Blu-ray box sets with their archive gaps plugged by animations, he replied "I can definitely imagine that world, I imagine it on a daily basis". He confirmed that is indeed the intention, but again made clear that no deal is finalised as yet.

There was time for a few audience questions; one was about the possibility of crowd-funding (this isn't something that would be explored while BBC Studios still provide budget), and if there were concerns about replicating the original production's make-up (they decided to avoid it altogether). There was also an interesting question about whether there's a risk that anything they animate might impact the age certification of a disc release. Walsh explained that the biggest thing that had come up was not about sex or violence but smoking. In The Evil of the Daleks' animation, the character of Maxtible could hold a cigar, as long as he wasn't seen to light or puff on it. Beyond that, it was more likely to be the special features on a disc that impacted its certification. With audience questions over, the panel members left the stage and the final two episodes were shown. My overall impression is a very positive one, though I should declare that I went in with quite low expectations. Moving visuals make everything in the story so much better: Frederick Jaeger's impression of William Hartnell is more fun, and there are moments of honest to goodness emotion (including Steven's farewell scene, though it's still abrupt). The destruction of the laboratory at the climax probably posed the most challenges to animate, but it works well. After the story was the final onstage interview, this time with Peter Purves who played Steven in the story. Johnson greeted him onstage with "It's nice to see you in 3D", and once sat down Purves said to the audience "You just witnessed the end of my acting career". Very early on in the interview Purves mentioned something that would become a theme for the chat, that his recall of this story and a lot of Doctor Who in general is minimal: "I remember... forgetting all about The Savages".

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Purves

The interview started by focussing on Purves's leaving the show in the story, part of more widespread cast changes by new producer Innes Lloyd that would eventually see the leading man replaced also. Purves described it as "an uneasy time". William Hartnell, who as usual got a warm and positive but not uncritical personality appraisal from Purves, tried to get the producer to change his mind about ending Purves's time on Doctor Who. Back then, though, stars had less power than they would now, and it came to nothing. Once he'd left, Purves didn't think much about Doctor Who ("I've never been a nostalgic person... never looked back... never kept diaries") until joining the convention circuit. His first attendance of an event was in 1996, thirty years after leaving Who. After that, doing work on the narrated audio releases brought back a lot of memories, though he conceded some of those memories might well be wrong: "I enjoy talking about [Doctor Who], and some of it will be true". There was a question about his regular anecdote about making a story revisiting the planet of The Savages only to find that Steven had become an awful despot of a leader. He explained that it was never a pitched idea, but that Simon Guerrier had done a trilogy of plays that covered Steven's later adventures for audio company Big Finish. He delivered another frequently told anecdote about William Emms, writer of the third story Steven appeared in, Galaxy 4; Emms had built the story around Ian and Barbara's presence before they were written out, and did a hasty rewrite job meaning Purves's futuristic space pilot got the dialogue and action of a 1960s schoolmistress, much to the actor's chagrin. When asked if he met any of the show's writers during production, he replied "Unfortunately yeah, I met William Emms".

Purves confirmed in answer to an audience question that he never saw The Savages when it first went out, and - just like most in the audience - was seeing it for the first time with pictures that day. He thought the animation captured Jackie Lane as Dodo particularly well in both look and movement; "I was going to say the voice was good," he added, "But it was her!". Towards the end, he comically admonished the animation team for the spoiler they had shown everyone: the video they'd played after the episode two cliffhanger, where the Doctor is in danger, included a clip from the third episode where he's alive: "Naughty!". And that was that: it was time to go to the bar and have a drink and a nice chat with friends Chris, Dave and Tim, and say hello to a few others. It's uncertain when the next BFI event will take place; it will only be when there is a tie-in product (box set or animation) coming out with which the session can align; another box set is expected this year, and potentially another animation too, but they will likely not be until late in 2025 after the new series has been broadcast. As such, I don't know whether I'll still have any stories left to blog to which I can attach any future write-ups; with the new queuing system on the BFI's website (see Context section of this blog post) I don't know if I'll even get tickets in future. If this is the last event of this type that I cover on the blog, it was definitely an interesting one to go out on.

In Summary:

Ho ho! Carry On Slavery, Sexual Assault, Destruction and Death. Erm...