The Celestial Toymaker: Ranking - 191

 The Celestial Toymaker

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven and Dodo, 2-23/4/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis (and Donald Tosh uncredited), writer: Brian Hayles (and Donald Tosh uncredited), director: Bill Sellars)  

'Yippee! I've waited all my life to travel in the Tardis. And he's  taking me to see a legendary figure from the past! Marco...Polo...Wait this isn't Cathay. What do you mean I'm just playing parlour games in a celestial toyroom for infinity? And why has this playing card come to life and tried to kill me? All I did was poker...'

Ranking: 191

In an emoji: ♢♣♠♥

 

Back when I first became a Dr Who fan and this story was completely missing it was held up as the pinnacle of everything the show could be at its peak by people who only half-remembered it but loved what they did, a creepy story where The Doctor meets his equal, a rogue entity with God-like abilities, who has the power of life and death over everyone who walks into his domain, a spider embedded in the world attracting flies into his parlour to pay deadly parlour games without mercy and a toybox full of deadly weapons he’s itching to use. This is a story where the Doctor loses right up to the bitter end, where our hero who has all the answers is turned mute and ‘dematerialised’ and in the end barely escaped with his life as the Toymaker’s world imploded in a giant cacophony of sound and spectacle. This stark monochromatic world we could only see in a few blurry shots taken of the TV screens by intrepid fans (no official ‘telesnaps’ for this one alas) looked new, scary and dangerous, with over-sized props and elaborate playing card costumes, a world so impossibly in the control of its maker that the Toymaker could appear anywhere in it suddenly at will. There’s even a giant robot with a television in its tummy playing pre-recorded clips at a time when no other show on television was doing this and which, while it doesn’t seem remarkable now, was a technical tour de force for the day and would have been greeted as the biggest proof of magical powers by the audience watching at home. It was, you could say, a story designed to scare the bejesus out of impressionable children and there were a lot watching in 1966 when DW was still seen primarily as a children’s programme. This was Dr Who was prime horror, a psychological thriller of massive forces pitched in a battle of wits that was very nearly deadly. Even back in 1966 Dr Who was famous for having just enough science in it to be plausible, so coming across a God-like being with magical powers for the first time makes the Toymaker in many ways the biggest threat we’ve seen so far – I mean, the Doctor can defeat alien armies, but a man who an magic things in and out of existence? My money’s on the baddy, despite three seasons of William Hartnell defeating all and sundry. Admittedly the novelisation (our only way of really seeing this story in the days before reconstructions and the forthcoming animation, due in 2024) and the much-bootlegged murky soundtrack, passed round by fan with awe and reverence in the days before it was available on shiny CDs, didn’t sound much cop either, but that’s just because this was such a brilliantly visual story. I mean, with all that going for it and so many fans with so many vivid memories of it, this story had to be a masterpiece, right? 

 But for once John Nathan-Turner could be correct; the memory can cheat. When the fourth episode ‘The Final Test’ was returned to the BBC vaults after being discovered in Australia and eventually released as part of the ‘Hartnell Years’ video in 1991 the whole world could see it. And it felt as if The Toymaker had the last laugh after all. I’m not saying it was awful, but it was disappointing: the absence of William Hartnell (ironic, really, that he’s barely in an episode on a video meant to celebrate his time in the Tardis) means that we mostly see Steven and Dodo playing board games on a large set, slowly. The costumes didn’t look as good on characters when they were moving. The sets looked battered and worn in a way they hadn’t from the photographs. That toybox is, well, just an oversized prop with actors sticking out of it. The trick conjuring that had Michael Gough come and go was all too obvious a camera trick to modern eyes. So many stories had built on the inventions of this story in the times since that it was like watching a magic show after joining The magic Circle and finding out that actually magic really didn’t exist after all. Far from being a horror story this seemed like cheap filer Saturday morning kids shows. A lot of people with memories sheepishly admitted to having built the story up in their minds eye and only a few and held out, claiming that the last episode was the weakest and the rest was better, honest. They’re in the minority though: now, all these years later with one episode returned, this story is held up as an example of Who at its silliest, with a borderline racist villain and four episodes that drag, being a series of not terribly fun parlour games. Even Russell T Davies reviving the character for 60th anniversary special ‘The Giggle’ and the promise of an animated version was met with a large ho-hum from the fanbase. All you need to know about this story’s bumpy landing is that all the way through to the 1990s the multiple authors, set designers, producers and directors involved with this story went out of their way to take the credit and ever since have tried to distance themselves and let everyone else take the blame (Nowadays you can imagine the entire collection of fandom collectively going ‘well, that’s alright then!’ sarcastically: if this character has given us nothing else then at least it’s given a new meme to play with). 

 Me, I’ve always felt this story lies somewhere in the middle and all the novels, sequels, TV soundtrack CDs and re-creations haven’t changed my mind since I first came across it. There’s no end of untapped potential in this scenario – potential still untapped even after ‘The Giggle’ I have to say. Though never mentioned on screen the intention was to have The Toymaker be one of the Doctor’s contemporaries from his home planet, though in 1966 nobody knew where that was as yet. Following The Meddling Monk he’s only the second non-Doctor timelord we ever see and suddenly that makes sense: the first Doctor in particular is a stickler for rules and authoritarian in the extreme, always doing the proper moral thing no matter how much it costs him. His contemporaries though are mischief makers who treat the universe as their own play thing. They don’t care about changing history the way the Doctor does – they have no responsibility, no care for anyone else, they knock down the things he puts upright again. The idea of a being with super-powers who has never grown out of the stage of being a sulky egocentric child really is the perfect clash with this Doctor. The idea that this is an anti-Pinocchio universe where real people who lost these games and forfeited their lives and becomes his puppets is genuinely unsettling and the way the same actors keep turning up in different costumes to play slightly different people arguably makes more sense to modern viewers than it would have done people watching in 1966 (they’re avatars, dressed to the Toymaker’s whims). There are multiple creepy and emotional moments that are really quite awful in all the best ways: The Toymaker reaches into Dodo’s mind and pulls out the moment when she was at her most miserable and vulnerable, at her mother’s funeral (we didn’t know before this, but it turns out Dodo is another of Who’s many orphans; Steven, meanwhile, relives the agonies of losing people he loves in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ and ‘The Massacre’), with no regard to the effect it has on our friends. The eerie silence when Clara and Joey stop messing around and being clowns, because they’ve been happily cheating, when Dodo and Steven cotton onto them and they know they’re playing for their lives from now on, is chilling – all the more so for the fact they’re still in their silly costumes. Having tried everything to outwit Steven and Dodo and their own Joker the moment the King and Queen of Hearts vow to either win the game of deadly musical chairs or die together and think they can now have their own lives back, before being suffocated is 18 certificate horror movie stuff. The assembly line of little Tardises, our impossible home from home that’s stood up to everything the universe can throw at it, reduced to a plaything that will see our heroes unable to ever go home and be stuck in this strange world forever. Even the threat to the Doctor, whose been reduced to a single shadowy hand like an extra from The Addams Family, is pretty creepy: we know the Doctor can talk his way out of anything, but we’ve never seen him face a threat like this before and suddenly he can’t talk at all. It’s the bits between – and there are a lot of them – that drag, games that are more fun to play than watch, even when deadly. There’ll come a point in episode three, when you’ve been watching Dodo and Steven rummage through crockery while playing an interminable game of ‘Hunt The Thimble’ – repeated again in episode fur when our intrepid duo play snakes and ladders with an overgrown schoolboy full of yaroos and smokebombs - when you’ll start to wonder if, far from being filed with magic, the magic of Dr Who hasn’t begun to fall apart after all. 

 So why did anyone in their right mind think that an hour and a half of board games was the way to go? Well, the final version of ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ is very different to the one we got but a catalogue of basic errors and pure bad luck meant we never got the story we should have done asit was written and rewritten from top to bottom three times. Brian Hayles, future creator of The Ice Warriors, was hired by producer John Wiles to write a story about a being with impossible powers. Being new to the series, Hayles’ scripts were considered a bit too ambitious for the budget and in 1966 Dr Who was suffering the first of its periods of being frowned on by the BBC bosses, specifically head of drama Gerald Savoy who’d been a successful playwright before getting the job. Script editor Donald Tosh asked Hayles to make the scripts earthier and the writer had a brainwave that would allow him to suck up to his new boss along the way. Savoy’s most famous work was an absurdist play named ‘George and Margaret’ that was one of the big breakout hits of 1937. In this Alan Ayckbourn-like tale a bunch of relatives come together to host a family dinner for their rich patriarchs in the title, squabbling and revealing family secrets along the way. The twist is that George and Margaret never actually appear – though the characters do find ‘themselves’ and find more similarities than differences in their fear and loathing of the title characters. It is, if you will, a funnier version of ‘Waiting For Godot’ or a less postmodern ‘Five Characters In Search Of An Exit’. Being a good BBC lad Hayles had gone out of his way to see the play and suddenly thought that he could explain, in a Dr Whoy sense, why George and Margaret never turned up: because they were the playthings of The Celestial Toymaker at an even more absurdist tea-party, just as their relatives were playthings of theirs. Donald Tosh re-wrote great chunks of the story to make it more in keeping with a BBC budget, taking out a lot of the games (including a section in a maze in episode three) and replacing them with the ‘trilogic game’ parts that the Doctor’s forced to play. Shortly after writing them Tosh left the Dr Who team and passed the scripts over to his replacement Gerry Davis. He hated them: he was concerned that Savory hadn’t been properly asked and set about re-writing them to take George and Margaret out just in case. Producer John Wiles, meanwhile, was getting fed up of Dr Who too. He was forever trying to move the programme to do something new, only to find William Hartnell – the only person still around from its earliest days by now –resistant. The pair had some almighty clashes on set, the worst of which resulted in Wiles making Davis write the Doctor’s part out almost altogether and even hatched plans to have him replaced by another actor in the final episode when the Toymaker makes the Doctor visible again. It also seems like wishful thinking from a production team desperate to be rid of Hartnell, reducing him to a mute hand that can’t argue back! (This wouldn’t be the last time a producer writes himself into a story: ‘The Invasion Of Time’ features similar power-plays against the 4th Doctor when Tom Baker is at his most, shall we say, exuberant). Note too that the Tardis suddenly goes from being a thing of magical to something coming off a conveyor belt at speed; Wiles, a man who resented being reduced to making what he at least considered a ‘children’s show’ really didn’t like this job did he? Wiles then went to Savoy to complain – only to find his more traditional boss preferred Hartnell’s approach and was adamant that he stayed, while being angry that his characters had been removed without his permission (which he really had grated, if not in official writing). Wiles more or less quit on the spot. Incoming producer Innes Lloyd, with practically no time and hardly any scripts on offer, simply got Gerry Davis to change the finale and let everyone get on with it, ending up with a hodgepodge of a script that nobody ever much cared for. In short: the Hayles version has the Toymaker as more of a nuisance, the Tosh version makes him into a super-villain and the Davis version makes the tone of the games darker but the games themselves more frivolous. 

There’s another element that bothers modern viewers which is that this is Dr Who’s most racist episode (give or take ‘The Talons Of Weng-Chiang’). Michael Gough is as Caucasian as they come yet dresses up as if he’s Chinese, while at one stage when debating which way to send the Doctor he uses the full ‘eeny meeny moe’ rhyme complete with ‘n’ word. Many fans have picked up on this as a sign of his true evil status, as a being who likes upsetting people. No less a fan than Russell T Davies has made racism a key part of his character, having the Toymaker adopt a German accent and make racist slurs in 2023 sequel ‘The Giggle’, saying that it’s an intrinsic part of the character that he couldn’t ignore. But is it? For television made in the 1960s Dr Who is amazingly racist-free. Yes there are tales of Hartnell’s, erm shall we say, colour-blindness on set, but that’s behind the scenes not in front of the cameras. In contrast this is a show that was giving key roles to black actors at a time when the only roles they got on British TV was as slaves, cannibals or outright villains. By contrast to series like ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ or ‘The Avengers’ a man dressing up in Chinese robes for appropriation is nothing: notably he makes no digs against anyone Chinese, talks in a posh BBC British accent like 99% of the cast back then and despite what you may have read in guide books most definitely isn’t made up in ‘yellowface’ (for one thing, makeup in different colours would confuse the heck out of cameras in the monochrome days when it all came in carefully built-up shades so as not to flare the cameras). Besides, the dictionary definition of ‘Celestial’, the one that people would have recognised in the 1960s, meant ‘cosmic’ – someone from the costume department picked up on it and treated it as a pun by giving the figure a Chinese style robe he bought in London but for all we know it’s just a dressing gown that happens to look vaguely Eastern. And the rhyme, which Peter Purves’ narration carefully drowns out on the official soundtrack CD, was common enough to be around in my school playground in the 1980s, never mind 1966. Yes, you’d be a bit alarmed if they did that today – and to be honest I’m surprised there wasn’t more fuss about the anti-German-ness in ‘The Giggle’ – but if this and ‘Weng-Chiang’ is the worst Dr Who did in sixty odd years then I’d say it was doing pretty well compared to other period shows. 

 Michael Gough has rightly got a lot of praise for this story, even though he doesn’t really get to do much at all: it’s a real shame that Hartnell is sent packing for two episodes because he comes alive most when he’s clashing with the Doctor, his cool charm bouncing off Hartnell’s emotional outbursts. He could have played the toymaker as being unhinged like the joker or Riddler from Batman (an apt analogy perhaps given his future role as a butler in that franchise) or the way Neal Patrick Harris does in ‘The Giggle’ (i.e. unhinged). But he plays him as stern, unreadable, inscrutable, all the more dangerous because he seems fully in control of all his faculties. You can tell too that Gough is really enjoying himself and the chance to do something beyond his usual proper English butler type roles (so much so that he pushed his wife, Anneke Wills, to try out for the role of assistant a few months later when Dodo left the series: she plays Polly. Oddly enough she never saw this episode despite their marriage: she only saw it following a convention in the 1990s when she said how much she wished she’d seen it when a fan said it was on sale as part of ‘The Hartnell Years’ in the foyer going for a tenner. ‘Oh I didn’t want to see it that much’ she joked ‘We are divorced after all’. In the end an enterprising fan bought it for her as a gift). The moment when the Toymaker becomes the first person to ever treat the Tardis as a phonebox (forty years before Steven Moffat did it, twice, in ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Bells of Saint John’) as evidence of his special powers is really imaginative (and hints at how good the first draft really was). Ditto the moment when clever camera angles obscure Michael Gough so that when Steven addresses the Toymaker on his TV monitor robot at one stage he suddenly appears out of nowhere (actually the camera moves to reveal the actor standing there all along). A character who chooses to spend eternity by never growing up (in contrast to the future eternals of ‘Enlightenment’ who are more like weary OAPs) is a fascinating concept. At the same time, though, the Toymaker is just a little too murky as a character. I mean, who sets these rules of his? How come toymaker loses his domain if he loses a game if these games are his? While the dolls are encouraged to cheat its not as if they’re given super powers: a blindfolded Joey is genuinely panicked for instance. And yet he has the power to mute the Doctor and evaporate him except for his hand. Just what are the limits of his powers then? Ones he sets himself to play fair? But then since when did he play fair the rest of the time? 

 It’s a real shame that we don’t see much of Hartnell beyond the very beginning and ending – especially as this is, so we’re told, a return match unseen on screen and one that seems to have scared the Doctor as much as we ever see him scared in his original incarnation (the prequel ‘Divided Loyalties’, a novel from 1999, tells that story – but, weirdly enough, with the 5th Doctor. So it still doesn’t explain how the Doctor knows him already at this meeting). Hartnell is on fine form, as outraged and angry as we ever see him following an un-screened first encounter. Dodo and Steven hold their own, but it’s only at the very end when the Doctor has been conjured back up to make his final move that you feel that there is any possible way out of this. This final dilemma is particularly good, the Doctor trapped between making a final move that destroys the world and not making it and being trapped and his solution to it (spoilers: mimicking the Toymaker’s voice once he’s safely on The Tardis) is highly satisfying, even if it’s botched on screen (Hartnell sounds like Pinky and Perky) and uses a skill we’ve never seen the Doctor use before or since. Not very convincing maybe, but the Doctor’s sheer delight in having come up with his plan makes you forgive everything). Peter Purves and Jackie lane, both relative newcomers to television, make the most of a rare chance to take centre stage and the pair get more character development here than in almost any other story, especially when set in contrasts against each other. Dodo is still new to time-travel and treats everyone as her friend, seeing through what the Toymaker’s playthings have become to see what they used to be and feeling for them. Usually in Dr Who that sympathy would be rewarded, but here it’s very nearly her downfall quite a few times as she tries to play the Toymaker’s games fairly. Just seeing her in her past, watching on as her mother is buried and maybe the last time she felt the world was unfair, gives this character a real depth she isn’t always lucky enough to get. She is, you suspect, how these poor people were when the Toymaker first challenged them to a game. Steven, by contrast, is used by now to the universe doing him dirty. He immediately suspects everyone of being up to something and is much more like the cards are now. Much of the danger of this story comes from the idea that Steven will be proven ‘right’ by this story and Dodo, too, will end up just as cynical, trapped in this weird surrealist nightmare of a world. Steven was always an under-rated companion and Dodo is less irritating than elsewhere with an actual chance to use her childishness as part of the plot and both actors deliver some of their very best work, though even they struggle to make some of these games exciting. 

 More impressive for me, though, are the other three speaking parts: Camen Silvera, Campbell Singer and Peter Stephens who play all the Toymaker’s playthings and imbue each one with a very different personality despite them still being recognisably the same people underneath all the makeup and costume. Bear in mind that the re-writes were so late in the day that the first two had signed up as George and Margaret, the prim and proper couple attacked by the Toymaker: they hadn’t agreed to play, episode by episode, a pair of clowns (one mute), two playing cards or a bully boy Sergeant and his scullery maid and yet they do them very well. Indeed there’s a real poignancy when the playing cards are facing certain death that, like Dodo, makes you forget that they’re playing cards (for a sign of how Carmen Silvera usually acts she’s Captain Mainwaring’s love interest in the best Dad’s Army episode ‘Brief Encounter’. Telling her to play blind man’s buff in a squeaky voice is a little like hiring Olivia Coleman or Dame Judi Dench today to play a big epic serious role, then dressing them up like the tooth fairy. Which would certainly make for a fun sequel if Russell T ever wants a best of four). Peter Stephens gets the short straw as all three of his characters are much the same: the lazy jester, the surly kitchen boy and the overgrown schoolboy, but even these are a lot better performed than they ought to be, played with just the right balance of youthful innocence and dangerous menace. You get the sense that all these characters would have been really lovely had you met them in their everyday lives but spending so long in the Toymaker’s realm has made them cruel and opportunistic, ready to exploit the slightest weakness. 

 As for those parlour games that drive so much of the fanbase to distraction? Well, they’re not the most riveting moment of television you’ll ever see, but the horror behind them is creepy enough and I can see why they stayed long in the mind back when the effects were new, particularly the way the Toymaker can make dolls come and go as he pleases, each one a real person who ‘lost’ a previous game and paid for it with their lives. Something tells me fans would be a lot more impressed with this story had episode two been the one that was recovered (chairs of execution that can kill in different ways up against killer clowns!) as that one sticks with me even on audio. There are, you see, seven chairs, six of which are deadly and only by finding the right one can Dodo and Steven find the Tardis and leave. This isn’t some copout either as we see everyone kill either the characters or the dolls Dodo finds in a cupboard: one dematerialises (using the same camera switcheroo as the Tardis effect), one spins out of control and pitches its owner off at impossibly high speeds (alas we don’t have any footage or even a photo to see how well this might have worked), one electrocutes its victim (complete with a flash charge), one dissolves (its taken away by the propman during a scene cut and replaced with a pool on he floor), one collapses in on itself and one is sliced in half with an axe, while Dodo is nearly frozen to death. Nasty indeed: it’s a good job Mary Whitehouse wasn’t around yet or this show would have been in trouble a decade earlier. In many ways it’s the ultimate example of Dr Who turning something as ordinary as furniture into something extraordinary and even back in 1966 this series was being followed by the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa;’ so making even the seating deadly feels like the ultimate cruel trick by the production team intent on scaring their audience! By contrast the hunt the thimble game is awful because we can’t fully see/hear what’s going on and all urgency seems to have gone out the window, the dancing dolls who promise to make the regulars dance for all eternity just like ‘The red Shoes’ fairytale (all made up to look the same but visibly different people underneath the giant slabs of makeup) are creepy but not that much of a threat (even for someone with two left feet and dyspraxia who falls over all the time dancing isn’t the scariest thing in the world), while the game of snakes and ladders with Billy Bunter, which sounded terrible as a TV soundtrack even before I got a chance to watch it). One out of four then: as any betting man will tell you, that isn’t great odds. 

 I’m on the fence about the Trilogic game the Doctor plays, also known as ‘The Tower Of Hanoi’ ‘The Tower Of Brahma’ and ‘Lucas’ Tower’ . On paper it’s a terrific idea. This game, which actually only dates back as far as 19th century France, is mystical enough to have had several myths grow up around it: my favourite is that its imbued with the logic that holds the Earth together and that a sect of monks have been playing it at the rate of a piece every day as part of a curse on mankind and then when the game is over the Eafabric of the Earth will tear apart (don’t worry though: at 10,065 moves it means that the world should have ended in 1910, approximately twenty-seven years and dour months after its invention and we still seem to be here. Unless everything that’s happened since then is a Toymaker illusion of course). The writers may well have been inspired by a novel by Hesse named ‘The Glass Bead Game’ which is set in the 25th century when the intellectuals of the day withdraw from the problems of global warming and staying inside their houses to play this game (with rules so complicated they can’t be explained on paper, apparently) instead of using their powers to solve the world’s problems while the poor burn in the real world outside (so, not at all like the covid lockdown, then). In practice? It’s William Hartnell moving some tiles around from one pyramid to another for an hour and a half with what might just be the most static and un-televisual game he could be playing. And if you’ve ever watched anyone play a game of logic without playing it yourself you’ll know how boring that can be. Just because it’s a timelord playing an impossible magician with secret powers doesn’t make it anymore riveting to watch. Plus the Doctor’s meant to be as close to infallible as anyone: if humans regularly beat this game he should have no problem. Just to rub the point in the week episode one was on the Radio Times did a feature on how easy it was to do yourself at home, kids, which took even that little bit of jeopardy out of things. Me, I’d much rather have seen the Doctor play ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos’. 

The result, then, is the epitome of ‘mixed’, a story that gets some inventive creative dangerous and daring things brilliantly right and yet is deeply sloppy for the sort of basics other episodes deliver in their sleep. Never has a Dr Who story had such a sizeable gap between the brilliance of the conceits and the stupidity of how it ended up on screen. At its best, with the Toymaker playing videos to taunt Steven and Dodo from inside a giant robot, putting endless obstacles in their way and pitching the naïve pair who think they’re playing a game up against two people desperate to go back to their real lives and prepared to win at any costs, this is a story every bit as thrilling as people’s memories of it from 1966. And at its worst, with William Hartnell replaced by a ghostly hand so he can go on holiday, Dodo and Steven bickering for several minutes over whose turn it is to throw a dice and an interminable game of hunt the thimble with some ‘comedy relief’ characters sent to distract them, it’s utterly unwatchable, Hartnell era Who at its worst. As a general rule series 3 of Who is the bonkers one, when a new production team can’t decide if they want to make it full on fantasy like ‘The Avengers’ or full on scifi like a new competitor called ‘Star Trek’ so they keep changing their minds and messing around, leaving William Hartnell as the only link between the series as it used to be and what it became (and he’s easily the best thing about all the stories this season). Having The Doctor mute for 3/4s of the story so he can play a game in silence might be nice for the production team but its rubbish for us at home. It could and should have been much better in so many places. But then given the way the original scary idea was messed around with, re-drafted re-budgeted and re-written at the last minute, it’s a wonder it turned out as watchable as it does. Certainly there’s nothing in this story a re-write (or even better an un-write) wouldn’t have improved (Gerry Davis’ novelisation, which adds in a lot of the stuff taken out and altered and is far more political, comparing the Toymaker to puppet masters controlling the world’s nuclear weapons, is so much better and more Dr Who-like, even if that’s not all it could have been either). Everyone is working hard to make this mishmash work and they nearly get away with it, though even a writing production and acting team this talented can’t make up for the weakest bits. Maybe it’s the idea of a benevolent being who could do anything but who only wants to play games that’s flawed, because even Russell T Davies can’t quite make this character work in long-awaited sequel ‘The Giggle’ either (for me the best story with the Celestial Toymaker in it is ‘The Nightmare Fair’, lost when DW was postponed in 1985 and was never made or TV, a story which updates the setting to Blackpool, the board games to arcade computer ones and giving the Doctor gets a proper showdown across a whole story without being muted; check out the Big Finish ‘lost story’ version of it if you can’t find Graham Williams’ novel which has been out of print for some time now). There’s certainly a case for saying this story is cursed, given how many careers it ended and the fact that Peter Purves, who kept the Trilogic game for a year as a souvenir, was out of work until he heard the legend of the game and that it might be cursed and threw it out; his agent was on the phone within hours and he got his Blue Peter gig within the month. The programme was even dealt a blow from the first episode when the timeslot was moved back from its regular 5.15pm slot to 5.50pm losing viewers as a result (typical: just when the show has never been more childish and less suitable for the grown-ups who probably tried it and turned off!) It certainly feels cursed this story: there’s so much untapped potential here, but in practice putting it on screen? The magic simply disappears in a puff of smoke. Oh well. It’s only a game… 

 POSITIVES + The set dressing. The first of an occasional run of Dr Who ‘void’ worlds, what they’ve done very cleverly is pare down the set to its white essentials so that it looks like a plain studio TV set, but then spent all the money filling it with some brilliant props: the televisions inside robots that were so daring for their day, the assembly line of tiny Tardises, the halls of chairs, the deadly dancing floor, the dolls propped up in the corner, the props used in the games themselves, every prop slightly larger than it ought to be so that even an actor as tall as Peter Purves seem dwarfed and like a toy (while Jackie Lane was already tiny)…. This really feels like a world held together with imagination and willpower rather than bits of string as per usual and is exactly what a spoilt petulant toddler turned immortal adult with time hanging heavy on his hands would come up with. No wonder so many people who saw this story the first time had such strong memories of this story, long after they’d forgotten the plot and it’s oh so frustrating those of us who weren’t old enough to get to see it no longer can except in still photographs. 

 NEGATIVES - The production team wrote a part for episode four that was basically Billy Bunter, assuming the stories had been around for so long they were out of copyright, but they weren’t. Officially the schoolboy is named ‘Cyril’ but actor Peter Stephens, picking up on the vibe of the script, ad libbed the line ‘call me Billy!’ and that’s where the lawyers got involved. It turns out that writer Frank Richards wasn’t at all happy with Dr Who making his beloved character a homicidal killer doll so the BBC took the unprecedented step of commenting before episode four went out that any resemblance to him was ‘entirely coincidental’. Even though as far as the production team were concerned it was absolutely deliberate in every detail and the notice fooled no one. Bunter is irritating enough in the originals, a goody two shoes who lives to eat, but he’s far worse as a baddy trying to cheat and trip Steven and Dodo up, often quite literally. Yah boo! Sergeant Rugg, Mrs Wiggs and the kitchen boy are all extremely irritating characters too, like you’ve wondered in to a B movie pantomime, although I have a soft spot for Joey and Clara the Clowns, a unique blend of IT and Ronald McDonald. 

BEST QUOTE: The Toymaker’s riddle: ‘Lady luck will show the way – win the game or here you’ll stay!’ 

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