The Abominable Snowmen

Chapter The 240th, the abominable finally became animatable. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in 1930s Tibet, the TARDIS landing on a Himalayan mountainside near the Detsen monastery. The Doctor has been here before many years previously. Four monks have recently been killed, as has the expedition-mate of a Professor Travers, who is trying to discover the elusive yeti creatures believed to live in the area. The yeti are suspected of the killings. The Doctor and his friends, helped by the monks, manage to capture a Yeti and find it is a robot, with a gap in its chest for a control sphere. The spheres can move on their own to fill the gap in the robot Yeti and activate it. The Doctor rigs up a device to track the transmissions controlling the spheres, while Yetis menace people inside and outside the monastery. The master Padmasambhava is behind the Yeti plot; a floating bodiless entity called the Great Intelligence has been communicating mentally with the master for years, keeping him alive; Padmasambhava has built a glass pyramid, which is taken to a cave and starts to change the Intelligence into a physical form there. Travers witnesses all this but goes into shock and can't remember it until it's dramatic to do so later in the story. The master orders that the monks abandon the monastery as the Yeti are too powerful. The Doctor tracks the control signal transmissions to inside the monastery itself. Padmasambhava struggles against the Intelligence's control. The Doctor confronts the Intelligence in a secret room behind the throne in the sanctum, and they battle mentally. During this, Jamie and the others destroy the control equipment including another pyramid. The Yeti are deactivated and the old monk is released from the Intelligence's power and dies. The TARDIS team leave the monastery accompanied by Travers; he spots a real yeti and rushes off to track it.

Context:

Before the BFI screening of the new animation (see Deeper Thoughts section below for full details), I thought about first listening to the audio version, but I decided against. Instead, I watched the surviving episode two on DVD from the Lost In Time box set (on my own one evening, with a glass of wine). The Better Half came in briefly, and watched for a while without making any sarcastic comments (so that's got to be a plus). To me, the episode was as fun and engaging as I found it on first watch (see immediately below). On the day of the 3rd September, I arrived at London Bridge station and then walked along the waterfront to the BFI; the sun was shining, the Southwark Cathedral bells were ringing, people were happy and smiling, buskers were playing nice tunes. I was in a very good mood, and meeting up with friends; what could be better? I met up with David, Trevor and Alan at the BFI. Scott and Chris were intending to attend also, but had to drop out at the last minute. When I enquired at the box office about whether anyone might want these tickets, I was surprised to find that they still had some left themselves. These events are usually sell-outs. That may not have been a reflection on the story. There were two other fan events going on during the weekend (Whooverville and Collectormania) and the panel that accompanied the BFI screening didn't include any stars of the show. Still, the auditorium was pretty full as we all sat down to watch what documentary maker Chris Chapman described in an on-stage interview later as "Doctor Who does Black Narcissus with teddy bears chasing people".

First Time Round:

Only the second of the six episodes of The Abominable Snowmen is present in the archives. The rest are not known to exist, though audio recordings of all the episodes are held because young fans in the 1960s taped them off their tellies. These audio recordings of course allowed for the animation to eventually be made as shown at the BFI, with images matched to those home-made soundtracks. Before animations were feasible, though, releasing these 'orphaned' episodes and mostly pictureless soundtracks presented a challenge. John Nathan-Turner, former producer of the show in the 1980s, worked as a consultant on the BBC Doctor Who ranges in the 1990s, and attempted to tackle these challenges. He was responsible for the first official audio tapes of various story soundtracks with linking narration; from that start a full range on CD (with better source audio and restoration) became a reality later, after his time as a consultant had ended; The Abominable Snowmen came out on CD in 2001. A decade earlier, in June 1991, a time when the Doctor Who VHS range was just getting going, there was a release called The Troughton Years. This was one of an initial brace of 'Years' tapes that provided a way to get the orphaned material released. The presentation style did not catch on as well as narrated audios eventually did. As was probably inevitable based on his style, Nathan-Turner presented the episodes within an inexpensive framing documentary about the lead actor of the show; it was showbiz biography and a little dash of trivia, but little attempt was made to present the wider story either side of the episode shown. With less availability of plot synopses in those days, it was tantalising and somewhat frustrating to get these 25-minute glimpses into stories, but then no more. I defy any Doctor Who fan to watch the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, with its intriguing set-up and fun interactions between the regular cast, and not want to see what happens next. Curiously, when I finally experienced the full story 10 years later as an audio experience, it was not nearly as engaging as a whole.

Reaction:

The Abominable Snowmen doesn't have any music, just special sounds and background atmosphere tracks, which in the exterior scenes is mostly whistling winds and in the interiors, the chanting of monks. This might be why I struggled to engage with the story on audio - deprived as I was of the energy boost of music or much differentiation between the voices - apart from Victoria and the half-ethereal half-raspy performance of Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava, it's just the sound of a lot of earnest blokes. If you're able to know which of the lamas dies midway through when just listening to voices - is it Rinchen? is it Sapan? - then you've got better ears than me. As such, it's negatively impacted more than other stories by the absence of visuals, and so was a good candidate for what was confirmed at the BFI to be the last animation, at least for a while. A few people who were lucky enough to watch the episodes first go out in the 1960s will know how the story worked with visuals, and how closely the cartoon version captures the feel. It must have gone down well at the time, though, as the writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were rapidly commissioned for a sequel that was broadcast after only two stories had gone by in the interim. The Yeti were probably the main reason; they clearly struck a chord with the audience, even though they are cuddly and unthreatening. In that sequel, The Web of Fear, the Yeti design is tweaked to make them more monstrous and less teddy bear, and the animation succeeds with a very slightly tweaked design in that direction too.

Another thing that probably appeals to audiences is all the paraphernalia that comes with the creatures - the mini-Yeti that can be moved around a map to remote control the full-size versions, the control spheres with their distinctive beeping, the mysterious pyramids of power. I suspect that there have been some tweaks to how some of these are depicted in the animation, but I haven't seen any offscreen pictures of the original for a while. Despite any changes, and there a more emphatic changes that I'll cover in a moment, these new visuals still feel pretty faithful. The paraphernalia, effective though it all is, does create some implausibility in the story, though. One poor ageing monk working away over centuries has apparently built all this, and several fur-coated robots, and potentially excavated a cave (it's not 100% clear): no wonder he's secretly wishing for death. It would have been a lot more efficient for the Great Intelligence to commune mentally with someone who owned a factory, Nestene-style. Nevertheless, the Tibetan (well, ish) style is original and engaging. With the new visuals those watching are taken more nimbly through a plot that - if one stops to think about for even a few seconds, or if one is just listening to the sparse audio where it's more obvious  - is slight. There's lot of walking back and forth between places to pad out the running time, and suspicion falls on different people pointlessly as the audience have already been clued in to who's behind the plot. On stage later, animation exec and director Gary Russell was a cheerleader for the original story, saying that nothing repetitious happens in The Abominable Snowmen, and that every moment propels the plot along. His comments were definitely heartfelt, but I can't alas agree with him completely.

The plot works - albeit slowly - but the structure of the plot is just to delay the inevitable confrontation between Doctor and master (with a small 'm'), and it is easy to get frustrated when experiencing the story that the obvious final act is put off so long. Russell and all the talented people involved have succeeded in putting off the point where I got restless and annoyed as late as humanly possible, but it did still occur. Maybe somewhere around the time that the Doctor said he needed another bearing when using his gizmo; if the Doctor thought about it for a second, he'd realise that the only reason that Padmasambhava would want to evacuate the monastery is if the control centre was in there somewhere. Anyway, the audience have known since episode two who the bad guy is, and scenes of him hypnotising people left, right and centre are continually being intercut with the actions of the good guys.The writers tweaked the structure for next Yeti story The Web of Fear and held back from revealing who was under the Great Intellignece's influence until the end, and that worked a lot better. When the confrontation happens, it is greatly enhanced by the new visuals. The Scooby Doo look (in a good way) for Padmasambhava is nice for a start. (This is just one of some great character redesigns including the guest cast's ethnicities being updated to be more in keeping with the Tibetan setting; this story - probably because of the visuals mostly being missing - doesn't come in for as much criticism as The Talons of Weng-Chiang for 'yellowing up' white actors, but it really should do.) In the final scenes, the master of the monastery can levitate and his eyes glow, and it's very impressive. All the sanctum scenes, when Padmasambhava is at first hidden behind a gauze curtain, then gradually revealed, are effective too, but they held back some animated spectacle for this final confrontation.

The sequences of Jamie wrecking the machinery in the background also work, and this is itself a minor triumph; this style (and time and budget) of animation finds scenes with rapid movement a challenge. This has been most often obvious when characters have to run in previous animations, but most of the running scenes in The Abominable Snowmen animation work perfectly well. There was one moment of audience mirth when Jamie shouts "Come on!" at Victoria as they escape a Yeti followed by the animated characters moving very slowly out of frame; but, these moments of pacing (as explained by Gary Russell later) are inherited from the soundtrack source material, and the purists in the target market don't like anything to be cut. Action sequences that go beyond running were mostly successful too, well at least for me. The scene where the Yeti is caught in a rope trap and prodded by various warrior monks' spears worked really well, but got a huge laugh from the assembled fans in the BFI, ungrateful so-and-sos. The intended moments of comedy also went down well for the audience, like Troughton's line "I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour - Jamie has an idea" and many other moments. The background pictures of all the locales are grand and give the story more scale than could be achieved in a television studio. There's also a nice background Easter egg tying this first ever Yeti story to the new series appearances of the Great Intelligence. Most of my quibbles are with the original material rather than the animation. The script seems to contradict itself as to how long it's been since the Doctor and Padmasambhava last saw each other. It should be three hundred years, but it's sometimes stated to be two hundred. There's a few too many instances where the Yeti just stand in place not doing anything; for instance, the Doctor is allowed to go up to one and remove its control sphere. As they already look cuddly, having them be static does remove any last vestiges of threat. Overall, though, the plusses of the original outweigh the minusses, and this new version makes it even better. 

Connectivity: 

The Doctor finds himself in a place surrounded by mostly men in silly robes in both The Abominable Snowmen and Hell Bent. In both stories, someone gets their memory selectively wiped too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Professor Travers's 1935 Expedition Journal: BFI screening of The Abominable Snowmen, 3rd September 2022. The structure of the day was similar to previous BFI screenings. Our hosts were as ever Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, Johnson joked early on that Dick had come as the aged Professor Travers from The Web of Fear and that he himself had come as a Yeti. The session kicked off with a quiz and a cheeky round-up of the social media comments of people attending, there followed the first three episodes, then an onstage interview, the final three episodes, another onstage interview and a sneak peak at some of the Value Added Material from the disc release of the animation, then the final panel. Before all that, as has become a tradition, Fiddy paid tribute to one of the Doctor Who family who had sadly left us all recently - Bernard Cribbins. Johnson knew Cribbins from a Bafta committee, and told an anecdote about Elaine Page unexpectedly calling him (she was wanting to sort out BFI membership for a relative), and Cribbins being in the room with her. They were at the time both working on Russell T Davies's BBC version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Tell Justin I'm in my pants!" Cribbins shouted in the background. Another scoop (which someone tweeted during the showing of the first episode, which Johnson comically upbraided them for at the intermission) was the reveal that the next BFI screening would be The Time Meddler on the 29th October 2022 as a tie-in for the next Blu-ray boxset release of season two (William Hartnell's second year). The prizes for the quiz were all general - rather than Doctor Who specific - Abominable Snowman tat, so I didn't 'shout for Dick' (Johnson: "Some of you are more used to shouting that than others") despite knowing most of the answers. One social media comment Johnson read out was someone asking if any gay people would be attending - huge laugh from the crowd - Johnson: "Statistically speaking, maybe one or two"; another tweeter didn't know what the BFI was and speculated that it stood for "Best Friends' Institute".

Fiddy (L), Johnson (R)

Throughout the opening, Johnson kept referring to the story as The Abominable Snowman, effectively reducing the threat level by three quarters, and I just thought he was having an off day; but, Alan, who was sitting next to me pointed out to me that it was a typo on the screen-saver behind him, so maybe Johnson was persuaded by this mistake that it was the correct name for the story. In the break between the two halves of the story, the interviewee was Jess Jurkovic. He is a New York based fan and pianist who has an interesting youtube account where he works out, transcribes and then performs Dudley Simpson incidental music from Doctor Who. Simpson was the most prolific composer for the classic years of Doctor Who, but very little of his music survives as isolated tracks or sheet music. Jurkovic looked ecstatic just to be in London, let alone on stage; he talked about how he became a fan in 1982 watching stories on PBS, jokingly teased the Brits in the audience saying that he got The Five Doctors a few days before them across the pond (it's true!), and talked warmly about how the videos he's made have reconnected him to the fan community; he'd attended the Gallifrey One convention in the US recently, thirty years after attending his first convention as a youngster. A grand piano was set up in one corner of NFT1, and we were treated to a brief tinkle of the ivories. This started with a rather funny tribute to the music of The Abominable Snowmen (a story famous for having no music). The "first movement" of this was a snatch of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the Doctor plays on his recorder when imprisoned in the monastery in episode two). The second movement was just two notes played over and over, to replicate the sound effect of the control sphere. This was followed by Jurkovic playing a memorable cue from later Troughton story The Seeds of Death. Support his Patreon, people.

Jurkovic at the piano

After the second half of the story had finished, Chris Chapman was welcomed onto the stage. He has been responsible for many documentaries on Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, and has made one called Troughton in Tibet (the title inspired by a Hergé Tintin book) for the disc release of The Abominable Snowmen. This involved taking presenter Toby Hadoke and Jamie actor Frazer Hines to the area of Snowdonia used for the original filming. He did a recce with Doctor Who locations expert and researcher Richard Bignell, and his first impression was that this should be a site of pilgrimage for Doctor Who fans. A shot of the same place is also coincidentally a backdrop used behind the logo on every episode of Countryfile (a series that Chapman works on). This was obvious when the opening shots of the documentary were shown after Chapman left the stage. Fiddy mused that it will probably surprise the Countryfile producers when next week's episode gets a spike in viewers. Chapman detailed that despite there being not many people still alive from the original cast or production, they managed to get eight new interviews and also used five archive interviews from people no longer with us. One of the new interviews was with last surviving Yeti actor from the story John Hogan, who has sadly died since the filming was done last year. Chapman paid him a brief tribute from the stage. The first six minutes of the documentary were then shown, and it looks amazing: some stunning drone shots of the vistas of the mountain and valleys. As in another of Chapman's Who documentaries, they took a TARDIS prop to the location to recreate an image from the original story, and Hines's reaction when first seeing it is lovely to witness.

Fiddy (L), Chapman (R)

The final panel featured three people involved in the animation: Gary Russell (executive producer and director), Rob Ritchie (3D animator) and Ioan Morris (Concept Designer). It's fair to say that it was the first of these three that did most of the talking. The animation has been in production for sixteen months, and Morris's work is all up front doing the first drafts of character designs. He said that when watching the screening his was a surprised reaction of "Oh yeah, I worked on this". Ritchie modestly said that his contribution was merely to send over to Russell "Four renders of a TARDIS". Russell explained that Ritchie works for "the other team". Gary Russell's animated productions are Fury from the Deep, the Web of Fear episode 3, Galaxy 4 and The Abominable Snowmen; the other team led by AnneMarie Walsh created The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks. The two teams do occasionally collaborate; Russell thought it was important for the range as a whole to have consistent elements and not reinvent the wheel, so Ritchie's season five TARDIS and his beginning credits sequence was shared. The decision to change the ethnicities of the monastery inhabitants was a deliberate one, which Russell and Morris worked on early on in the process. Russell talked passionately about this, disagreeing with the usual line that there weren't sufficient actors of the correct ethnicities to play the roles back then, and saying it was his one big bugbear with original director Gerald Blake's work; "We were going to rectify that decision from 1967 because frankly it's bloody insulting".

(L to R) Johnson, Russell, Ritchie, Morris

For the warrior monk costumes, even though no monk in history has ever worn such a design or colour combination, the designs used in the animation stayed faithful. For the lamas' robes, which were a bit dull in the original, they took inspiration from another Doctor Who story featuring Buddhism, Jon Pertwee's swansong Planet of the Spiders: the colour scheme is based on the costume worn by the character Cho-Je in that later story. Script and designs are sent to Digitoonz Media & Entertainment, the animators based in India, and they create the finished product in small chunks (you might get 15 seconds a day if you're lucky according to Russell, although the longest sequence was the 1.5 minute section where Victoria feigns being poisoned to escape from a locked room, and that took ages to download, the file size was phenomenal). There was a brief to everyone working on the animation not to view the surviving episode two for reference. The six episodes of the animation had to all be of a piece and work as a coherent whole; anyway, the approach and techniques of animation are very different to live action. Part of the reason why it took so long to get The Abominable Snowmen finished was that the same team were asked to do Galaxy 4 simultaneously, to which they couldn't really say no. Russell said that it was accomplished at the cost of only one nervous breakdown, which he counted as a win. He was generally quite dismissive of  Galaxy 4 as a choice for an animation because of the quality of the story ("Who would want to make that? Who would want to watch it?!"), but Russell and his team created something more than adequate (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this post for more details).

Note the typo

There was time for only a couple of audience questions. Doctor Who historian Jeremy Bentham asked a question about the new look for Padmasambhava. Russell said his inspiration was EC Comics character the Crypt Keeper, rather than from Scooby Doo as I'd thought. He believed that the actor Wolfe Morris's build wasn't right for the script's description of the desiccated guru, so they diverged from faithfulness at this point. They may also have embellished with the scene towards the end when the artificially long-lived Padmasambhava, freed from the Great Intelligence, disintegrates. The surviving off screen photos don't confirm either way, and memories differ as to whether the scene was excised from the final version in 1967 or not. Russell's memory from originally watching the story is that the disintegration moment was in there, and Bentham, also of an age to have seen it first time round, agreed with his recall. The final audience question was niche, but to be fair the questioner prefaced his question with a disclaimer about its potential to invoke a rolling of the eyes. Why do Gary Russell's team's animations show Patrick Troughton with green eyes when he had blue eyes in real life? Russell explained that he'd asked all of Troughton's co-stars what their Doctor's eye colour was, and was told by all of them that they were blue-green. This was research long before the animations for his novel Invasion of the Cat People ("It's terrible" its author added as an aside, sotto voce), where the eye colour was a plot point. He chose the green rather than the blue end of the range in the animations because it would make the Doctor seem more alien and would stand out from the rest of the cast that would be mainly blue and brown-eyed. Earlier in the panel discussion, Russell confirmed that this is their last animation for now, and they're not working on any more. This was expected, but still a shame. He did add, though, that the animated releases to date have come in waves with gaps in between: "These things are cyclical". On the evidence of The Abominable Snowmen, and all the wonderful animations of recent years, I hope the next wave isn't too long.

In Summary:

It's not abominable. It's mostly pretty bominable, actually, particularly now one can see it move. 

The Five Doctors

Chapter The 148th, where Tom Baker is missing but probably still in the pub.

Plot:

Every Doctor to date, and whichever companions were available, work-permitting, are gathered up by a Time Scoop operated by a mysterious person unknown on Gallifrey. The fourth Doctor (scarf, bohemian, curly hair) and Romana are caught in the time vortex, but everyone else is brought, along with Cybermen and a Dalek and some other baddies, to the death zone, an arena used for gladiatorial-style games in Gallifrey's less enlightened past. The use of the scoop causes an energy drain, so the high council of Time Lords send for the Doctor; but, finding that his time traces converge in the zone, they send the Master in to save him. The fifth Doctor (cricket, celery, blonde hair) escapes the zone and investigates who the traitor on Gallifrey might be, and finds out that it is President Borusa. The three remaining Doctors (grumpy one, flautist, dandy) separately battle against all the obstacles, and converge on the Dark Tower at the centre of the zone, where Time Lord legend Rassilon is rumoured to still be alive and handing out immortality as a prize for passing the tests. Borusa arrives with the fifth Doctor, and - against the protestations of his other selves - the first Doctor tells Rassilon to give Borusa the immortality he seeks. But it's a trap, and Borusa lives forever turned into a statue. The Time Lords want the Doctor to take over as president but he instead chooses to go on the run from his own people, in a rackety old TARDIS; that's how it all started, don't you know.

Context:

Accompanied by all the family (Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7), I watched this one Sunday evening, from the DVD. We watched the original version as transmitted in November 1983, Doctor Who's 20th anniversary. I kept the title a secret before I pressed play, and was greeted by a chorus of jeers that we were watching "an old black-and-white one", this being in reaction to the William Hartnell clip used as a pre-credits sequence. I'd love to say that the jeers turned to happy astonishment as soon as the 1980s Peter Davison titles sequence kicked in, but they were in a rowdy and mischievous mood throughout.

First time round:

This was a big, big deal at the time - an absolute event - and was trailed long before it aired in various ways. I must have known it was coming from Doctor Who Magazine, I suppose, and I remember that was months and months before it aired. It's certainly the first and so far only Doctor Who story where I saw the sets before I saw the programme. This was at the Longleat Twentieth Anniversary celebration, Classic Who's equivalent of Woodstock. I was there with my whole family, and saw - if I remember rightly - the High Council's meeting room, the UNIT HQ interior, and Borusa's secret control room on display in a marquee. I remember mentally creating my own stories as I walked round the exhibit based on this furniture alone (none were even close to being on the money, by the by).  Next, probably only a few days before transmission, I remember seeing a copy of the tie-in novelisation in WHSmiths (it was mistakenly available in some shops before the TV story had aired, which had never happened before and probably never happened after). I remember lovingly caressing the foil embossed cover, but I did not sneak a peek at the contents. Looking back, I can't believe I was so restrained and am really proud of my young self.

Next comes the bit where I'm less than proud of myself, alas. On the evening of Friday 25th November 1983, the plan was that I would not watch Doctor Who. My sister had a big role in a local am-dram production, and the whole family was going to be in the audience to support her. I was not happy about this, as I did not want to miss the biggest Doctor Who story ever. Friends of the family had promised to tape the show on their new-fangled Betamax top-loader video recorder, and we were visiting them the next day. But I didn't want to wait a whole day to see it, so - amidst shouting and recriminations from all around me - I feigned illness and refused to budge when everyone else left. I watched on my ownsome, sitting through a lot of tedious preamble from Terry Wogan, as Doctor Who was shown as part of Children in Need. Looking back, I feel bad, but at the time I was perfectly happy with my decision - I estimated that The Five Doctors must be considerably better than whatever lame old play my sis was in. I apologise for the crassness of young me. Watching it on Friday did not then stop me from wholeheartedly embracing the viewing on Saturday too. The chance to see something I'd watched the previous night again was something akin to the finest magic. If it hadn't been early 1980s UK, with only one TV per household on average, and certainly only one VCR, I might have asked to watch it all again for a third time; but, the adults wanted to generally be dull and talk or whatever in the living room, so my sister (who was still talking to me, just about) and I retreated to the kid's bedroom - his name was Michael, if memory serves - and talked about our favourite bits. 

I've seen this story a lot in different forms. I watched the repeat the following Summer, which split the story into four twenty-five minute chunks with the worst cliffhangers ever. I bought the VHS when it came out in the early 1990s. Then, in late 1995, a special edition version of The Five Doctors - with a small amount of additional material, improved sound and new effects - was made for release on that magic home format: video tape. By this time, I was very familiar with the technology. It came in a set with preceding story The King's Demons, plus two postcards of each story's cover art (as they had been giving away with all the releases that year), and an album to collect up said postcards, which was smart, and which I still have somewhere. This was special as it is one of one two Doctor Who videos I ever got as a Christmas present. In general, I always snapped them up as they were released, never leaving anyone the opportunity to get them as a gift. I can't remember what happened that year to make me hold off, but it was very nice to unwrap and watch on Christmas day. As I was watching the scene of the Raston warrior robot battling with Cybermen soundtracked in gorgeous beefy stereo, my sister wandered in and listened to the Cyber voices giving it their best take at anguish and devastation, and said "Blobby blobby blobby" then walked away. Fair enough, I suppose. 

Reaction:

Robert Holmes, one of the best regarded of twentieth century Doctor who writers, tried to plot a version of The Five Doctors and couldn't manage it: all the disparate elements, all the many leading men to cater for, all the chops and changes of actors' availability - it was too much. He stepped aside, and Terrance Dicks picked up the baton. They are both fine writers, and there was nobody else around then (and few have come along since) who knew more about writing Doctor Who than the two of them. So, why did Uncle Terrance succeed where Holmes failed? My guess is that Holmes was overthinking it. One thing every fan knows from Holmes's aborted storyline attempt is that at the end the first Doctor (played here by Richard Hurndall, standing in as original actor William Hartnell had passed away) is revealed to be an Auton, explaining why he doesn't look quite right. Dicks just ignores the re-casting and gets on with a straight-ahead action story. Dicks's ability to produce such a simple and effective narrative, given the egregious length of the shopping list of elements he had to include, should not be overlooked: what he overcame had defeated Robert Bloody Holmes, for goodness sake! As such, The Five Doctors is bulletproof when it comes to critiques. It was built to showcase twenty years of Doctor Who, and that it does - anything more than that is a bonus.

So, it's pointless to criticise the structure for being basic and linear: that's a necessity, but also a strength. There's an intro to each Doctor, as they are zapped out of existence by a black triangle. Then there's a bit of each walking around the death zone, before having a couple of exterior set pieces each. Then, they enter the tower, each coincidentally with their own entrance. Then an interior set piece each, then all together for the confrontation with the main villain at the end. Then goodbyes and off they go. There's a subplot about the conspiracy on Gallifrey, but that's as complex as it gets, and even that's only added to give one Doctor something to do, who otherwise would be stuck in the TARDIS (a fate that, as good as he is, Dicks can't help but deliver to two of the many companions involved). Of course it is structured like this: who has time to do fiddly intriguing subplots and reversals when you have to give sufficient action to four leading men (if Tom Baker had agreed to take part, my guess is Richard Hurndall would have stayed in the TARDIS with Susan and Turlough). This is probably why no reunion story of this scale has ever been attempted in Doctor Who since (with the exceptions of two skits of varying degrees of success - more on those below).

What can I say about any of those scenes that hasn't been said a thousand times before (and that goes for positives and negatives)? The use of footage from the unfinished, and at that point widely unseen, Shada to give Tom Baker's Doctor something of a presence in the proceedings is inspired, and the scene of the Doctor and Romana punting on the Cam contains some of Douglas Adams most charming and witty dialogue: "Oh I do love the autumn, all the leaves, colours" is such an unassuming punchline, and delivered with such panache by Lalla Ward, it makes one glad this footage got a BBC1 airing. Until the Special edition in 1995 "fixed" things, it had never occurred to me as odd that the picture used to represent the two Time Lords stuck in the vortex didn't match what they'd been wearing in the punt. It also never bothered me that the Doctor is returned to his timestream stuck halfway under a wire fence - it just seemed like a bit of a laugh. 
  
The scenes of the Raston warrior robot - the one original element included here - slaughtering a platoon of Cybermen is magnificent. One of the Cybers vomits - it's amazing! It's very satisfying for the obsessive statto nerds like me that Jon Pertwee finally got to encounter the Cybermen (which he never did during his original tenure). Troughton gets all the best lines, which is the sensible choice as he is the best at delivering them; partnering him with Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier is successful too - they make a great double act. Hurndall is enjoying getting to be a hero (just for one day), and holds his own. The scene with him, Susan and the Dalek is nice, and it's great to see the shell exploded and the grisly, squiddly Kaled mutant inside for the first time in the series (that was an effect that they demonstrated at the Longleat celebration too, now I think of it).There's a cameo from K9, and another from Jamie and Zoe, and Liz Shaw screaming "Stop Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim!" What more could you want?

One bit that most fascinates me is the chequered floor sequence featuring the Master, Cybermen, and the first Doctor and Tegan (Dicks's drafts are showing here - why on Earth would those two be paired unless it was a remnant of a version where Tom Baker was the one investigating the conspiracy on Gallifrey, and Davison was allowed to adventure in the zone with his longest-running companion?!). The director Peter Moffat was well known for bringing productions in on budget in as unfussy a manner as possible, to the point where his work can look terribly pedestrian. That isn't so much of a problem here, likely helped by a more generous budget than usual, and a lot of his work looks excellent - particularly the location footage in the Welsh hills, and the beautifully lit sequence with Troughton attacked in a cave by a Yeti. He couldn't make much visual excitement out of a tiled floor, though, but who could? It's a floor. What's annoying though is that Moffat doesn't seem to have thought it necessary to help the actors to work out what is the logic of this floor trigger puzzle, and move accordingly to sell it to the watching audience.

Anthony Ainley's Master walks inconsistently over it multiple times, with differing levels of care about exactly where he's treading.  On at least one occasion, his foot falls at a point where four different squares intersect. They paper over this by adding a line on how the safe path changes every time, but it's hardly satisfactory. Every time I've watched this - and that is more times than is healthy, believe me - I've scoured for any discernible rules to how the chessboard of death operates, and there are none. The scene still, though, intrigues me more and more - it just gives and won't stop giving. The Master tells the Doctor it's as "easy as pi" and somehow the Doctor hears this homophonic clue, even though it's far from obvious. Tegan is chided about her grasp of mathematics and says, haltingly "the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is represented by the Greek letter pi, right?" which is a 1980s companion language translation of the human English which would run something like "pi is that thing to do with circles, right?". But then, Tegan, on being presented with a keypad to open a door earlier, exclaims with astonished joy "An entry coder!" which is not an actual phrase that's ever been used by anyone ever. I was an entry-level coder once upon a long time ago in my day job, but it's not the same thing. Why aren't 1980s companions allowed to speak human? I suspect script editor Eric Saward of being behind this guff, as Terrance Dicks can usually craft rounded human characters who speak naturally.

Anyway, back to the killer floor covering, the laser lino: the Doctor muses on the application of pi to work out the safe route, pauses for a moment, then walks across successfully. But how? What has pi got to do with it? Is it each digit of pi in turn refers to the safe column to walk down? Or the unsafe one? How can the Doctor possibly work out the safe route just from that? Also, how did the Master know in the first place? He gets to that part of the tower after the Doctor and Tegan, and is never seen experimenting. How did he work it out? Also, once the Master has tricked the Cybermen into getting themselves killed crossing the floor, why can't the Doctor and Tegan just step on them to get to the other side? As I said, I may have watched this story more times than is healthy...

Connectivity: 

It's not very hard to link The Five Doctors to any other story as it contains such a broad coverage of elements from throughout Doctor Who history. Like The Android Invasion, it features appearances by Tom Baker as the Doctor and Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, members of UNIT, blank faced robotic killers with their armaments built in, and creatures created by Terry Nation. In both stories, Sarah Jane is rescued from a pathetically un-steep cliff edge.

Deeper Thoughts:

First as tragedy, second as farce, third as farce again (but better). In the 30+ years since The Five Doctors, the series proper has never again tried to bring together such a crazy big set of Doctors and companions as the 20th anniversary story managed. It's done two Doctors working together with returning companions (The Two Doctors) and without (Twice Upon a Time), and two Doctors plus a new Doctor, and a brief cameo scene for all the Doctors using clips (The Day of the Doctor). It's brought back loads of old enemies but no old Doctors a few times (The Pandorica Opens, The Time of the Doctor), and that's about it. Someone must have worked out that it's damn near impossible to pull off a passable story again unless one keeps things more restricted, even if you have the talent of Terrance Dicks to write it. Lightning cannot strike twice. If one wants evidence of this, one only has to look at the time they did try such a feat again outside of the series proper: Dimensions in Time.

For the 30th anniversary in 1993, Doctor Who had been off air for a while, but was doing healthy business on sell-through VHS. There had been an idea to create a one-off feature length story specifically to be sold on tape, called The Dark Dimension. They would have worked out the 'too many Doctors for one plot' problem by giving the lion's share of the action to Tom Baker, and had the others pop-up for cameos here and there. The other Doctors, perhaps understandably, did not like this idea, and anyway the whole thing fell through. A consolation prize was that a short skit was going to be shot and shown - like The Five Doctors - as part of Children in Need. It was only about 15 minutes long, and split into two episodes, with a phone vote in between (nothing says early to mid 1990s like a pointless phone vote) to decide whether Mandy or Big Ron would appear in part 2. For you see, Dimensions in Time was a Doctor Who / Eastenders cross-over. Oh yes! It was rubbish of course, and watching it in my third year at university, old enough to know better, I clenched in embarrassment at Noel Edmonds taking the piss when introducing it.

The piece was shot in a 3D format that required objects to be placed unnecessarily in the foreground, and for the camera to keep circling all the time. As such, it is not recommended if you have a hangover. Tom Baker has his hair cut disappointingly short, and doesn't interact with anyone else, just appearing on his own in a prologue. Louise Jameson as Leela is dressed as Pocahontas for some reason, many companions don't look anything like they did when they were first in the show. There are no Daleks, so presumably Terry Nation had got in a strop and taken his ball away. Most of the interaction with the Eastenders characters is woeful. Frank and the Mitchell brothers handle it okay. And there's a great moment when Mike Yates arrives in Bessie, and he and the Pertwee Doctor drive off, meeting the Brigadier who arrives by helicopter. Then Pertwee turns into Colin Baker (did I mention that the Doctor and companions turn into one another rather than all appearing together? Oh yes!). This gives good fan service, just as putting Jon Pertwee with Cybermen in The Five Doctors did, as Colin and the Brig never got a story together on TV during his tenure. Kate o' Mara reprising her role as the Rani is great despite her over-ripe dialogue, and a young Sam West gets to act as her companion, and he comes out the other side with his dignity more or less intact. All the many villains are played by fans wearing old costumes, but en masse they acquire a sort of tatty majesty. 

The one thing that's missing is a joke, any joke. It is curiously humour-free for a skit, but this is not unusual in my experience of Children in Need or Comic Relief segments such as this. For a funny Doctor Who short one would have had to wait another 20 years for the marvellous Five-ish Doctors Reboot that was shown on the night of Doctor Who's 50th anniversary, which - in its own way - managed to reunite multiple Doctors and still have a sensible plot through-line. Anyway, Dimensions in Time was the only scrap of new Doctor Who shown on BBC1 between the end of Sylvester McCoy's run in 1989 and Paul McGann's one night stand in 1996, so it has a misplaced home in the affections of fans of a certain age (mine!). Because of the conditions of its making, with the performers working for charity, it can never be released on any home format or shown on TV again, but it can be found on the internet, if you've never seen it. Brace yourself! 

In Summary:

Five times the fun, just don't overthink it.

The Web of Fear

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

Plot:

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

Context:

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

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

First time round:

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

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

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity: 

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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