Planet Of The Giants
(Season 2 Serial 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 31/10/1964-14/11/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Louis Marks, director: Mervyn Pinfield and Douglas Camfield)
Rank: 162
'Well, that wasn't the way I expected to regenerate...reduced to an inch high, licked by a spider and pestered by pesticides before my companion drops fish fingers dipped in custard on my head'
Dr Who had survived an entire year! Thanks mostly to the Daleks it was now a respected established and much-loved giant of British television despite BBC bosses only giving it eight weeks, then thirteen. When the series started nobody had got to planning this far or worked out what would happen, with season-long arcs still science fiction back in 1964 – instead everyone was grabbing every script they could get their hands on in under to keep this behemoth going with everyone worked to the last possible moment of their full-year contract before being allowed to stop for a six week holiday. By then the commissioning of a second series seems inevitable so the bosses decide to keep two stories back, keeping them in the can to launch the new season, only which story do they choose to kick off the new run? I like to see it as a measure of Dr Who’s newfound confidence that they run with a story that had once been planned for the pilot, about the Tardis going wrong and turning the travellers into miniature versions of themselves. Script editor David Whittaker had championed the idea but the storyline had been rejected by the bosses for being too difficult, too strenuous, too expensive, too impossible to make in cramped corner of the BBC’s tiniest studio in Lime Grove. Well, now script editor David Whittaker and producer Verity Lambert had the clout to do anything they liked and decided to revive that story to kick-start the second year instead as a sort of second pilot, only with a few changes to avoid the problems their bosses had foreseen. The biggest change is the surroundings, with Dr Who given the green light to move from their studios at Lime Grove (where Dr Who had been made amongst other small-scale kiddie dramas) to a bigger studio at BBC Television Centre to be made amongst the adult big boys of drama, which will be the show’s main (give or take location filming, industrial strikes, asbestos scares, late bookings, one lone story made at Pebble Mill in Birmingham a story filmed at the TV centre car park) home until the end of the original BBC run twenty-five years later. ‘Planet Of Giants’ might have shrunk our regulars to microscopic size but just look at that title: they’re now giants of the industry and this is their victory lap, made with a confidence and ambition of a secure future and guaranteed wages, albeit coupled with the sheer exhaustion that this is episodes forty-two to forty-four and nobody has been allowed to take a break yet for more than a week at a time yet.
‘Planet Of Giants’ is the second example of what the programme makers considered their ‘sideways’ stories, to be slipped in between the journeys that in this early era alternated between past and future. Just as in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ The Tardis is being treated like any other bit of technology such as a car, as something made up of so many moving parts one of them will go wrong sooner or later, only the repercussions will be a bit different to losing a wheel or a tube (Ian very much compares the scanner to his 1960s telly at home going on the blink): here for instance the Tardis develops a fault that causes its dimensions to go a bit wrong and while the good news is that The Doctor does manage to get his two British companions Ian and Barbara home again the bad news is that they’re an inch high. I love the fact that this story sort-of goes back to where it began – Londonish in but from a different perspective, so that they sort of see it the way The Doctor always did, as a backward world full of people living their lives utterly oblivious to what’s going on around them. The first time Dr Who had dared to go back to the ‘present’ (or something close to it - the semi-official ‘Lethbridge-Stewart’ novels say its 1969), we and they both see it from new eyes, the ordinary world now as extraordinary as any of the places they’ve been too when seen from this new vantage point an inch off the floor, simultaneously cosy and familiar yet scarier than it ever has after all those adventures. Now, the one thing the original Tardis crew couldn’t do, without the series ending, was land back on contemporary Earth or Ian and Barbara, our original eyes and ears, have no reason to stay with The Doctor. And wouldn’t you know it? The one time they arrive back home, within a Dalek’s ray gun of Coal Hill School, the Tardis goes wrong and they’re all turned into midgets. Totally their luck the way first series pans out and would totally be my luck too (why didn’t the Tardis flipping do this on Skaro, when The Daleks wouldn’t have noticed them?!), especially when Ian ends up trapped in a briefcase and taken indoors – which seems a trek worthy of the petrified jungles of Skaro or a trip through revolutionary France given how hazardous the path to get him back across the front porch now seems.
Four years before the
Americans did it worse on a much larger budget, this is ‘Land Of The Giants’
done properly, with giant insects, colossal matchboxes and deadly pussy cats
that doesn’t just keep one peril back for every story but throws the lot at us.
This story would be nothing if the sets and props weren’t up to it and you can
see why the bosses worried about this story so but by now the production team
have absolute trust in the designer who once came up with The Daleks and more
than any story before or after this is made to be a showcase for Ray Cusick’s
talents. As Ian says it’s just like a world’s fair exhibit (a timely comment,
given that the famous New York spectacle was back then at the end of a year’s
tour in London), something which on a BBC budget should be ridiculous, but Cusick is more than up to the challenge: the
giant fly’s maybe a bit too obviously static and the cat menace turns into a
blown-up photograph partway through, but the worms, the cigarette packets, the
paving stones, everything very much including the kitchen sink (actually the
best set of the lot, complete with gigantic plug: the behind-the-scenes
pictures show how truly humungous this set was) are all totally and utterly
believable. As easy as it is to get upset about the missing episodes and wonder
what they’d been like if the BBC hadn’t been so short-sighted as to wipe them,
lets just pause for a moment to enjoy the fact that these three exist. This would
be an impossible story to imagine just on audio but we actually get to see it –
and while the still photographs look good it’s the moving footage that makes
them come alive. Cusick really was the unsung hero of these early years and,
Daleks aside, nowhere more than here, going above and beyond his pay grade
despite being understandably ticked off that he wasn’t getting a single extra
for creating the design of the pepper pots, the biggest success story of the
year. Even more than usual with 1960s Who it feels as if you could reach out
through the screen and touch everything.
Although you’d really
better not. For while the two earlier drafts and ‘Land Of The Giants’ stop
there, the finished product contains a very big message behind the small size,
one that can be considered Dr Who’s first ecology statement nine years before ‘The Green Death’ won all the plaudits.
At this point it’s worth pausing to show how much the series’ ambition has
grown, with the first draft intended as the pilot episode (by C E Webber) and
the finished version (but future Dr Who semi-regular Louis Marks) totally
different in every way but the shrinking. The Doctor isn’t yet a man of mystery
but a grumpy grandfather with more curiosity than sense or manners (more like
the 12th Doctor than the 1st we get) who puts his
companions into danger by accident rather than in an attempt to save people or
planets and its s story clearly made more with a children’s market in mind that
never goes outside the classroom, close to the slapstick of the Peter Cushing
films. The original sees the Doctor visiting his grand-daughter Susan at Coal
Hill School and accidentally shrinking them and her two teachers to microscopic
size during an experiment. The perils in this first adventure were the pupils
themselves, with cliffhangers involving a boy in a maths lesson whose a bit
over-zealous with his compass and a girl who discovers the unusual quartet and
sticks them in a matchbox to study when she gets home (she doesn’t think to
take out the spider she’s already got in there!) The quartet try to grab
people’s attention by climbing over desks to the microscopic slides kept at the
front of the classroom, hoping that someone will use a microscope and see them,
only to be nearly crushed by the weight of the machine. Instead, in the only
part that comes close to the finished TV version, they record their voices onto
a tape-reel (funnily enough just like the ones fans at home are recording the
TV soundtracks on, so useful for the missing episodes nowadays) which are
played back at a slower speed so that their voices stop being high and squeaky.
Now there’s a story to go along with my theory that 1960s Dr Who is a
generational debate between parents and children – the youngsters are scary
without meaning it and everything is solved by them listening to each other!
The idea was dropped due to logistics, a feeling that being constantly in peril
didn’t lead to much character development and the fact that the spider was a
literal version of the ‘bug-eyed monster’ Who creator Sydney Newman so wanted
to avoid! The idea was handed over to writer Robert Gould with the hope of
making it fourth in the run (where ‘Keys Of Marinus’
would have been had the episode numbering and the weirdness of the contracts
not led to the two-episode filler ‘The Edge Of
Destruction’) which was a sort of halfway house between the early and
finished versions, with the classroom setting substituted for ‘The Tardis
landing in a world where a carpet can be a jungle and death can result from
falling cigarette ash!’ The same problems of logistics and props meant that the
idea was shelved again though. Script editor David Whittaker still believed
there was a good story to be told, however and was confident that the
production team were gradually learning all they needed to know in order to
make it. Starting with the writer: Whittaker knew Louis Marks through ‘The
Writer’s Guild’, a trade union that pushed for equal rights for that most
beleaguered and belittled profession who so often got short shrift compared to
producers, actors and directors in the early days of television. The pair had
spoken about science fiction before and Louis was enthusiastic about the sheer
range of ideas in Dr Who and happy to work on the miniature idea, only to get
stuck with the repetitive nature of the regulars always getting into danger
from big objects.
What Marks really needed
was a bigger peril, with more jeopardy than just hungry flying insects and a
storyline that would be more in the traditions of Dr Who’s first year, that
made the viewers at home consider events from someone else’s point of view
they’d never thought about before from the safety of their arm chair. Marks was
a big reader of anything and everything and one book that had really affected
him was ‘Silent Spring’, a 1962 book by Rachel Carson about the history of
pesticides and the way they indiscriminately killed all insect life, even the
good ones. It was a damning history of thirty years of reckless experiments sold
to farmers as a cure for plot blight by particular insects that had caused huge
damage to the world’s eco-systems, especially on American rural land. The book
was especially damning about DDT: originally invented by the military to kill
the lice and fleas that caused typhus, it didn’t know how to target only the
‘dangerous’ insects and instead wiped everything out including the insects
needed to create ‘good’ ecosystems like bees and earthworms. Even so it was a
cheap way of wiping out insects so it was sold to farmers, who used it on the
ground in Illinois to battle Japanese beetle before the scandal that it was
killing off so many of the pet cats in the state too, as they liked to roll in
the sticky substance and then lick their fur. So they used it in trees instead
where cats shouldn’t get to them, in orchards across America throughout the
mid-1950s, until a group of beekeepers clubbed together to take the
manufacturers to court with evidence that it was killing off other wildlife,
because infected leaves from trees fell in Autumn and were then eaten by worms
which were in turn eaten by birds – there was a huge robin cull from the
effects of DDT that decade alone.
Shockingly it took till 1972 until DDT was fully banned, two whole
Doctors away, despite overwhelming evidence that the manufacturers knew about
the dangers but ploughed ahead because desperate farmers were buying the
product in droves and making a mint. No one had ever really seriously stopped
to think about the environment before this (I mean, the extinction of the Dodos
probably raised a few eyebrows but not much) – the slow-moving law courts just
weren’t ready for environmental awareness to be a thing. They’re still not, if
their heavy-handed actions against the extinction rebellion group are anything
to go by. The thing was few people in Britain in 1964 knew this. Some farmers
and activists did sure but it was something that happened ‘over there’ – Marks’
great fear was that people would start using something similar in Britain too.
So he has a scientists invent his own version DD6 (close enough to the ‘real’
name to make the point, not close enough to get sued) and makes that the real
‘enemy’, mankind being reckless and irresponsible again, not realising the
damage they do on a microscopic level until it’s too late. That’d what the
first two drafts of the story were missing: a jeopardy for the people at home
to think about long after the story ended, rather than simply being some
miniature larks that are solved at the end of the episodes. The idea that all
life in Dr Who is sacred, even insect life (Give or take what The Doctor does
to the Zarbi the following yaer!) The fact that Marks thought he could use Dr
Who as his mouthpiece for something few of the audience would ever have thought
about and that the production team let him say it is also proof of just how
ambitious Dr Who had come from; what started as a children’s drama about outer
space is now actively changing how the viewers thought about this one.
By doing so Marks inadvertently created a whole new Dr Who genre: the story that shows that monsters aren’t confined to the past or future but the present day. This is an ecological plot on a grand scale, many decades before other programmes did similar, by reminding us of the ecosystems beneath our feet by putting our friends there. It seems both like a whole new world now everything is so large and is also recognisably - for the first time since the show’s opening episode - our world, full of the same thieves and power-hungry money-grabbing fools we’ve seen across series one in the past and in the future (the cavemen, The Daleks, the Arabs, the Aztecs, the Voord, The Sensorites, the French), the struggle between worried ‘right’ and oblivious ‘wrong’. Only this is the present and instead of wishing you could go back into the past and do something or hoping that the future doesn’t turn out like this, it’s a story that pleads with the audience to do something about it now, before it’s too late! So many future stories owe a great deal to this little tale, including the entire ‘3rd Dr exiled on Earth in the present day’ arc (1970-1974) and the occasional modern series (such as series four in 2008, which also makes disappearing bees into a plot point). We really should have listened and fifty-nine years on you can’t help watching this without wanting to hijack a time machine and go back and put things right. At times the idea of cruel crude businessmen taking profit for a fast buck seems like fortune-telling: it wasn’t really a thing in 1964 but boy will it become one, with the moral people trying to stop it, like Farrow, bumped off in the first episode. This is all a colossally brave move for a TV show still considered as being primarily for children 1964 By putting the Tardis crew in harm’s way it really sells the idea that just because you can’t see the damage done it doesn’t mean it isn’t there and the threat to the regulars is every bit as real as space ray guns or assassins from the middle ages. It’s subtle, too, but this is the point where Dr Who also becomes a story firmly on the side of scientists and people trying to do good, rather than upholding capitalism, that encourages the viewers at home to do the right thing’ because The Doctor is, even if he’s only an inch high! Without that aspect, had Dr Who ended up like most other series and simply ended up maintaining the status quo this series might not have lasted to a third year never mind twenty-six (more or less) unbroken.
What should on paper be
one of the most basic plots of the lot too (get back together again and go find
the Tardis; very similar to the first story again) ends up turning into a big
story thanks to Barbara getting really sick, having touched giant pieces of
wheat that have been sprayed with the formula. Marks had clearly been watching
the series closely and realised that Barbara is the calm level-headed one who
always gets the others out of tricky situations – even The Doctor more often
than not. She’s always trying to be brave, always trying to see the bigger
picture, always trying to do the right thing. Only this time it works against
her: The Doctor is impatient to explore, Susan is desperate to get back to the
Tardis and Ian, usually her confidant in these strange worlds, makes wisecracks
about how he’s glad nobody in their party is stupid enough to touch something
that’s so obviously poisoned. Barbara suddenly doesn’t feel like the
responsible adult in the rom. She feels very small, even on top of being only
an inch high. Why was she so foolish? Has she put the others in jeopardy now?
So she does the very Human thing, the one factor that’s caused the growth of
illegal pesticides more than any other: she hopes it will go away on its own.
Of course it doesn’t. By episode three she’s delirious, collapsing, her tiny
immune system overwhelmed by the strength of the poison. The others are
panicked: the Tardis is such a long way away and they don’t know if they can
revive her and get her back to the right side even if they get her back home
(surely The Tardis would have an antidote for something as simply as a
pesticide somewhere though, whatever The Doctor says to Ian). They’re also a little
guilty: it’s usually Barbara checking the others are alright but they forgot to
check in with her. They didn’t listen. It’s a measure of how far Dr Who has
come in its first year: what started off as a ship full of suspicious strangers
have formed a real bond now, as seen by The Doctor’s sweet apology for shouting
in episode one and their refusal to give up on one another (this is a rare
story that sees him actually be a Doctor too, checking Barbara’s health; till
here his doctorate has seemed to be more ne of those honorary scholarly ones
you get from redbrick universities for being notorious at something). It’s
totally in keeping with Barbara, too, that she keeps quiet to let everyone get
on with warning people about DN6 as their priority, using the phone to make the
post office (ah the days of telephone exchanges!) suspicious enough to send someone
round to see the body (it seems odd in retrospect that nobody thinks of suing
the Tardis as n actual police phone box and ringing from there, the way they do
in the modern series occasionally starting with ‘The Empty Child’; even if The Doctor
never thought it was a real one it’s a surprise Ian say doesn’t ask to try).
Alas that part is where
the story falls down a little. For all that the theme itself is ahead of its
time the way this aspect is handled is very anachronistic You see circumstances
mean that the regulars for once never share any scenes with the full-size cast
who are boring by comparison, with the human characters (well, you know, human
sized characters) not written for as well as the regulars and they quickly fall
into clichés while not being all that well acted either. For an audience who have already come to
expect Aztec warriors or Daleks its static and all a bit talky and the closest
to a monster or alien threat the whole story is a cat. The idea of a
businessman turned gangster shooting to cover up secrets that would get him put
in jail is very much a 1950s B-movie idea that can be seen on the ‘Talking
Pictures’ TV channel at least twice most days, where every other film seemed to
also feature exactly those sorts of fedora hats, scientists with magic formulas
and long confrontation scenes where not much happens and, indeed, William
Hartnell (though more usually as the no-nonsense baddy). The story is even
solved by a policeman about the last
time they were a decent respected good thing to have in Dr Who rather than
something easily possessed or the comedy stooge who don’t quite know what’s
going on (we’re firmly in the 1950s era of ‘Z Cars’ and Dixon Of Dock Green’ –
Fred Ferris, playing policeman Bert, had been in both and was one of the first
big names to appear in Dr Who). The only things missing are the sulky kid on
the motorbike, the song and dance number and Sid James or John Le Mesurier (who
seemed to be in all of these films between them). As much as early Dr Who is
about channel hopping, of our heroes turning up in every sort of genre going,
this one doesn’t quite work – The regulars never get to interact directly and
the ‘full size’ bits feel intrusive, like they’ve wandered in from an entirely
different storyline. They’re also a little bit boring: Forester is one of the
blandest villains the series has ever had and Smithers such an obvious put-upon
weak-kneed toady that you have to wonder if someone from ‘The Simpson’s was
watching when they named Mr Burns’ assistant. Forester is such a hopeless
baddy, barely bothering to disguise his voice and only bringing attention to
himself with his phone call as Farrow, that you hope he’d have been caught
before long anyway; he’s hardly the chief Dalek as baddies go. It doesn’t help
that this is the only Dr Who made by Mervyn Pinfield, the director close to
retirement who was one of the co-creators of the show in its earliest days and
a big name in his day (he’s the inventor of the tele-prompter no less!) but who
nevertheless felt ill at ease on a programme run by so many other ‘young’
things and shot this story the same way he’d been directing everything for the
past thirty odd years, not aware that Dr Who was a different beast. In a sign
of the times he was replaced, in the original episode four, by youngster
Douglas Camfield who’ll be with Who for the next fifteen years off and on; not
because Mervyn was sacked as some guidebooks say but because he had a film pre-booked
and that paid far far better than TV! Not that being retro is necessarily a bad
thing (Dr Who was is and always will be for everybody) but coming to this in
the context of the other stories it feels woefully slow, as if its running on
half speed; as an audience-grabbing season opener it’s something of a
non-starter. In short, no piece of television shows why the 1960s had to come
along and wake television up better than ‘Planet Of Giants’, despite being part
of the programme that shook British telly up more than almost any other. Even
with an episode taken out its a plot so straightforward that it needs something
else to sustain it – after all ‘Land Of The Giants’ found enough twists and
turns in the formula for 51 episodes of insect-dodging, I’m sure writer Louis
Marks could have found room for something else. For all that these people are
the most clearly ‘real life’ that we’ve had in the series since we left Coal
Hill School, Ian and Barbara aside, they don’t feel quite real, more caricatures.
Dr Who co-creator Donald Wilson clearly thought so too: impatient to see the Dalek return that was sure to be a ratings winner he tried to have this story flipped round with ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ and when that wouldn’t work (given that Susan leaves at the end of that story) instead shrunk this story down by an episode, taking the already recorded episodes three and four and having them edited together (it causes a problem with the paperwork that won’t be worked out until ‘Mission To The Unknown’ a year later), creating the then-longest episode of Dr Who so far at 26”43 (a good two minutes more than the ideal you were meant to be aiming for). Honestly a bit more could have been trimmed. Alas, of course, the original edits have been long since junked, no one ever expecting to need them again but that hasn’t stopped people wondering what it would have been like. Watching the reconstruction on the DVD, made using the original scripts, it’s hard to say if it was the right call, or not: the final product feels rushed and imbalanced and lacks the emotional impact of a couple of scenes (the death of the cat, the great threat of the episode one cliffhanger, turned into a victim), the added danger from Ian and Barbara choking through plumes of cigarette ash and Barbara’s further scary deterioration. At the same time, though, the story is clearly falling apart in the second half when the props have grown thin on the ground and people are endlessly talking on the telephone (Bert and Hilda in the post office, meant to be eccentric British lovable types, are irritating in the extreme) and even cut in half the third episode is by far the weakest, with or without its ‘missing’ twin. Much as people laugh at Ian Levine’s ‘reconstruction’ on the DVD, with its repeated shots of the characters doing the same things over and over, its one of my favourite DVD extras, with more little bits of ‘character’, particularly for the Doctor (the death of the cat that had been such a menace, poisoned by the mysterious DN6, is quite something too).Even with all that padding, though, the ending is rushes in either version: we never see Forester get arrested for murder for instance as everyone’s too busy legging it down a drainpipe, which seems weird given that all future Who stories with this template do (the same goes for the intended episode four: the ‘Lethbridge-Stewart’ books claim it’s the Brigadier who sorts it out, after accidentally getting shrunk himself as a by-product of the Tardis’ fault!)
If nothing else its impressively
original for a series that had already got itself into something of a rut, re-hashing Quatermass or making cold war parables, delivering something that nobody
in the audience would have been expecting (although even here there’s a dig at
war and humans killing indiscriminately, as Susan talks about being in an air
raid where innocent people are killed; in 1964 you’re mean to assume it’s WW2
before she reveals it’s WW1 and the first time civilian casualties died in a
war rather than soldiers, at least in the West). I’d love to see Dr Who have another
go at this plot with a bigger budget and see if they could do it half as well
(the model shots for ‘Flatline’ suggests they could): after all, even if DDT is
no more goodness knows there are enough successors to write a story about who
do similar things to our environment, only now they have enough money to factor
any fines into their business plan or send a bit on the side to make the governments
look the other way (Look up what Monsanto got up to at some point: you’ll never
eat anything grown by farmers that isn’t free range or organic ever again). In
other ways, though, it’s the story that absolutely has to come here, a year in,
to show off what the series can do and the confidence everyone has in it (it’s small
point but look at how fire – key to first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ - becomes a plot point again, with The Doctor
trying to make it, albeit by leaving a Bunsen burner on and having Ian and
Susan run at I with an oversized match; funny how both ‘pilots’ are followed by
Dalek stories too). They didn’t’ need to be this ambitious, with a story
everyone said could never be done, but they pull it off – mostly – better than
they should ever have been able to, with Cusick’s designs the biggest star. It’s
not the easiest of rides to watch back today sure: the full scale Humans aren’t
much of a threat, the endless climb down through drainpipes will test your
patience and that’s a very odd looking fly in one scene. It’s not quite as
clever or inventive or imaginative as ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ or ‘The Space
Museum’ which both try a similar trick of doing weird things with the Tardis
that no other series would think of (Instead the shrinking idea has been around
since ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ published in 1726 (see ‘The Mind Robber’ for how much impact Jonathan
Swift’s book has had on the series). For the most part though this is a story
that gets by on pure ambition and the brilliance of its designer. Not everyone
gets this story either: unusually Dudley Simpson, at the start of a 300 episode
run of musical scores, never really ‘gets’ this one and gives it a vaguely
spacey feel despite the Earthbound setting.
While the dialogue isn’t as strong or as quotable as some other era stories though (always Marks’ Achilles heel as a writer) the plot has some really deft touches, such as The Doctor and Susan working out what’s happened separately but edited together, explaining to their shocked human friends, the way the plots occasionally intersect (with Forester going to clean his hands while our heroes are waiting there, panicked) or the way the big box of matches ends up becoming part of the plot. The first episode is still full of wonder that somehow works even after you know what’s happened (amazing really for a series that was designed to go out once and never be repeated or released on home media that was pure science fiction at the time), the second full of doubt and worry for Barbara and that’s enough to get you through the third with its slapstick telephone calls. If nothing else this story is proof that, in its first era under Verity Lambert, Dr Who really was a show that could do anything, going not just back and forward in time but sideways and putting a whole new twist on the way we viewed the then-world and find it lacking, at least in its treatment of wildlife, just the way the series had commented on ancient Aztecs and cavemen and the like or made veiled comments about the cold war in futuristic stories set in space. It’s an epic story however small the main cast are, with Dr Who continuing to be ‘the little show that could’ into its second year as everyone told David Whittaker he could never get away with a story like this and he made it anyway. In time across season two that ambitions’ going to come a cropper (listen out for ian wondering what a planet of giant insects might be like – everyone will be finding out in ‘The Web Planet’ very soon!), but here with the best TV designer of his generation, a cast up for anything and a writer whose thinking bigger than he needed to they come up with another qualitive success story. Far more than being the warm-up before The Daleks return its a much much under-rated tale in its own right, one that’s much ‘bigger’ and more important than it’s ever given credit for.
POSITIVES + The
regulars. I tried Irwin Allen’s ‘Land Of The Giants’ (I’m a fully paid up member
of the ‘Time Tunnel’ fanclub after all, another great 1960s scifi series and
the closest US series to what Dr Who were doing in its early years) and
couldn’t get on with it at all. None of the actors seemed to believe a word
they were saying, struggled to act against empty effects that were added in
afterwards and spent most of it gawping inanely at the clumsy scenery. By
contrast all four of the Tardis completely sell the idea that they’ve shrunk to
a few inches in height and the cast all said at the time how easy this story
was to act because they were genuinely in awe at Ray Cusick’s designs, which
were all there for real in front of them. Though it could have been done for
laughs, the way every future Who story that’s shrunk the regulars aim for (‘Carnival Of Monsters’ ‘The Invisible Enemy’ ‘The Armageddon Factor’ ‘Flatline’) everyone’s terror at what they
face seems as real and dangerous to them (and therefore to us) as any Dalek or
Roman soldier. You totally feel Barbara’s embarrassment at having put herself
in harm’s way and her desperation not to slow the others down, Susan’s
continual fright when she just wants a quiet ordinary life without ordinary
things becoming extraordinarily big, The Doctor’s obvious concern and worry he
tries to keep to himself in order to spare everyone’s feelings and Ian’s
‘science teacher’ mentality piecing together what’s just happened and how much
trouble they’re really in (this is ‘his’ story where he has a headstart the way
‘The Aztecs’ was history teacher Barbara’s)
turned into recklessly putting people in danger when he thinks Barbara is dying
completely ring true and in character too way beyond ‘Doctor I shrunk the kids’
style territory. Their banter with each other is great too, whether
mock-arguing, real-arguing or clambering on each other’s shoulders to climb a
sink and trying not to get the giggles. Even the fact that Poor William Hartnell
seems asleep on his feet at times, with more line fluffs than ever before, can’t
stop the magic and charisma of four actors who know each other inside out by
now and are really enjoying themselves. There’s no cast I’d trust to be lowered
down a kitchen sink on a chain or be chased by a myopic cat more than this one.
Then again, there’s no other cast Dr Who would have asked to try something like
this: the original four were amazing. Best line: The Doctor veering from
indignation to certainty to doubt in the space of a few seconds (Ian: ‘You can
get us back to normal size, can’t you?’ Dr: ‘Oh yes of course I can dear boy,
yes of course I can…I hope!’)
Previous ‘The Reign Of Terror’ next ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’
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