The Reign Of Terror
(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 8/8/1964-12/9/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Dennis Spooner, director: Henric Hirsch with Tim Coombe and John Gorrie uncredited)
Rank: 150
'Remember, it's only 186 chopping days till Christmas...if you watch this story over and over again!'
Reign of terror? Aren’t we living through one of those? No its not Britain now – its revolutionary France of course! Of all the many Dr Who genres that made up the early days, when the show was so full of formula viewers got whiplash regularly, the early historicals are probably the one I adore the most. The trips forward in time are (usually) imaginative, creative, exciting and brilliant sure but there’s something about the past being brought back to life and knowing that it really happened (if not always quite the way it happens on screen) that just gets to me. It’s fair to say that I became a history major at least in part because of falling in love with the Who historicals and seeing the past come to life. Who creator Sydney Newman was always adamant that historical stories should be part of the remit, so that the nations’ children could see where they came from as well as where we were going in the futuristic stories. Though later script editors didn’t always understand the brief, under the original (and in many ways best) David Whittaker they became part and parcel of what Dr Who was for, with warnings of where we were headed from our past as well as our future. Because it’s a sad truth that mankind is always repeating itself, just in differently dressed clothes. A lot of newer fans miss it now that the 1960s themselves seem like ancient history, but the past doesn’t sit in a separate box to the present in these stories, it’s a reflection of what’s happening ‘now’. And could there ever have been a story that screamed ‘1964’, with The Beatles spearheading a youth movement of kids who refused to fight in their parents’ wars and celebrated character over income, more than a story set in revolutionary France? This is a time of sudden quick changes, of revolts and power struggles, and we’re back to Terry Nation’s earliest Dalek stories, of adults fearing what might happen when their increasingly hippie-ish children take over the keys to the capitalist castle. For once again ‘The Reign Of Terror’ is a debate between adults and children on how best to rule the world and once again the author, Dennis Spooner, is right in the middle with this story one long impassioned argument on both sides about whether a revolution is worthy when good people get hurt along with the rush, or whether stopping a revolution and keeping people safe but corrupted is the better way to go. We know now, of course, that there was no revolution in Britain, that in the words of the youth movement’s scariest figureheads The Rolling Stones that ‘sleepy London town’s no place for a street fighting man’ (it’s a more English thing to tut despairingly than fight in the streets like our French cousins), but this was the real fear of everyone past a certain age watching this series, that one day the children would be grown up enough to fight back.
After all, by his own
admission, future Who script editor Dennis Spooner knew little to nothing about
the French Revolution when he started work on this story. He got the job for
lots of reasons but most of them were through his connections with the Doctor
Who office: he was a good friend of their big discovery Terry Nation, having
shared experience of struggling to write for comedian Tony Hancock at the end
of his British career and working together on various Gerry Anderson series (9
‘Fireball XL5’s, 12 Stingrays and 6 Thunderbirds, including many of the best
ones). Spooner was also a keen bridge player he was in the same club as a lot
of his colleagues and a better player than all of them (Spooner even wrote
books on the subject for beginners and liked slipping the names of his club
friends into his stories). He liked the futuristic tales best, but Terry had
nabbed most of those already while a lot of the historicals had fallen through
at short notice, so Whittaker went round the Who regulars getting them to write
down their suggestions that he handed over to Spooner to choose from. Dennis
went to the local library found they had a pretty decent reference section on
the French Revolution and picked that one (William Russell’s suggestion, which
William Hartnell eagerly supported; sadly we don’t know what the other’s
chose). However Spooner is a very different writer to Whittaker or his good
friend John Lucarotti. Rather than pinpoint accuracy Spooner’s interest is in
telling a tale, with characters that the audience will easily recognise from
everyday life. So, ironically enough, the first Who historical set on an actual
date (July 1794, roughly 160 years to the day of this story being written)
becomes the first historical with events
squished together, its sprawling cast of thousands reduced to a few main
players doing things that in reality their followers did and a lot of fudging
of events. This resulted in the first time Dr Who ever received a letter
complaining about factual inaccuracy (and note that it’s in a history serial,
not s science future one): MMG Oborski,
secretary of the Napoleon I Society, sent in a note complaining that ‘The BBC
has a certain duty to educate or at least not misinform children’ and ‘that
which children see on television will stick in their minds for many years,
despite the lectures of their teachers and the lessons learnt from books’ (His
complaint? That Napoleon is basically supporting the ‘wrong’ side: he was
widely seen as Robespierre’s protégé and at one stage under arrest for his
connections to the revolutionary, so would have been about as likely to plot to
overthrow him as a Thal would be to work with The Daleks). This changes the
whole ‘feel’ of the story too: the previous historicals came from pre-history
when not much was written down so the audience don’t know for sure what will
happen or which way society will go, but here for the first time it’s the known
history that’s a threat, because we know that people arrested for being spies
in this era lost their heads and especially English ones. There are a few other
teething issues too that make ‘The Reign Of Terror’ a lesser historical
compared to its predecessors, Lucarotti’s labour of love ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Aztecs’, which absolutely could have
happened that way, with characters who couldn’t exist talking to characters who
wouldn’t have been there, often with very different personalities to other history
books and occasionally very different outcomes (particularly poor Robespierre,
who goes from a crusading zealous hero attempting to die by his own hand rather
than admit defeat to a paranoid thug who gets shot running away from arrest:
try to imagine ‘Blake’ from ‘Blake’s 7’ being portrayed as Villa from the same
series and you’re halfway there); by contrast we know that ‘The Reign Of
Terror’ is ‘just a story’.
But what a story!
Espionage, treachery, undercover agents, shootings, romance, last minute escapes
from the guillotine… For the children watching this who only knew their history
from drab and dreary textbooks (like the rather wordy tome Susan herself is
handed by Barbara in the very first episode ‘An
Unearthly Child’, in what looks today like a ‘series arc’ but given how
hand-to-mouth this series was planned was really just plain luck) ‘The Reign Of
Terror’ is a revelation. While ancient China and an only vaguely known Aztec
civilisation and especially cavemen of 100,000 BC are official ancient history,
this was almost modern: the children of
the 1960s watching this could have had great-grandparents in this war or maybe
their elderly relatives had met someone who’d been a child back then. Plus,
while ‘Terror’ might not be the most accurate story there’s ever been Spooner
really gets the feel right here. It’s a time of turbulence and change, of
suddenly switching sides, when most people are trying to stay neutral to keep
their head attached to their shoulders because the regimes that take over keep
killing those who came before it. This is a time when no one and nothing is
safe, from the richest elite who would normally be able to buy their way out of
trouble to the youngest most innocent child, with the guillotine a matter of
awe, created with deliberate ruthless logic to dispatch as many people as
possible with such a long waiting list of prisoners (the creator for the
guillotine himself, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, campaigned against its use after
reading of people who survived the chopping in hideous conditions and died of
natural causes while awaiting execution on his own invention as a sign of how
quickly things change). Who is it particularly unsafe for? The English, assumed
to be trouble-stirrers from overseas, as a man named James Stirling finds out
when he’s thrown into prison (and kickstarts the main plot by passing on a
message to cellmate Ian with his dying breath) and as our Tardis travellers
discovers too (even Susan, interestingly, is assumed to be English rather than
Gallifreyan; The Doctor – separated from everyone in a first episode
cliffhanger – is never challenged on his speech interestingly). For the past three Who historicals the danger
to our heroes is that they will be separated from the Tardis and never see home
again and while that fear is in this story too there’s another one: that
everyone is automatically suspicious of them and that they simply don’t know
who to trust, not even history teacher Barbara.
While they might not be
the people from real life, Spooner’s strongest suit in ‘Terror’ by far are his
characters. Each ones seem ‘real’, however inaccurate thy might be, and they
all get to explain themselves in turn. There’s Robespierre, a man who’s
dedicated his life to doing the right thing and is heartbroken to think he
might have been wrong or that his zeal wasn’t enough to get his beloved France
to the ‘promised land’. There’s Colbert the romantic and the one person Barbara
has a consensual fling with out of all the lechers trying to woo her across her
two years in Who, whose words of support for the revolution sound genuine until
(spoilers) that sudden shock of betrayal near the end. There’s Rouvray and
D’argenson, largely innocents caught up in something bigger than they are and
terrified. There’s Webster, the most patriotic of the bunch, even if he comes
from another country, refusing to give in right to the bitter end. There’s
Jules, an idealist committed to the cause. There’s Napoleon, showing leadership
qualities even as a relative unknown youth of twenty-five. There’s the shady
Lemaitre, the prison governor, seemingly above all the noise and fuss and never
quite showing his cards until the end. All of them have good reasons to do what
they do and they speak eloquently about it, with our heroes are shaped by who
they meet and in what order. This is no ‘black and white world’ like Marco Polo
(an English gentleman, whatever his nationality) or ‘The Aztecs’ (with a
Tloxtoxl hell bent on human sacrifice) but a world without any easy answers.
You agree with Colbert when he talks about ‘leeches draining the country’ . But
you also agree with Jules who makes an impassioned speech about why he has no
interest in seeing people guillotined, however much he believes in a
revolutionary cause (‘I hate to see order thrown out the window, like so much
dust’). We also see firsthand the way that innocent people suffer, simply by
being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does the end ever justify the
means? Is the bloodshed of a few better than the suffering of the masses? For
once even our heroes don’t agree, shaped as they are by whoever they’ve spent
most of the story with. The best scene in the story by far comes in episode
five when Ian and Barbara have their own spat, Ian appalled by the bloodlust
and the way civilised men have become thugs and savages, even while Barbara
knows that ‘some good comes out of this’. Barbara still sees what could be; Ian
is too disgusted by what is, in another Dr Who story about whether ‘the end
justifies the means’. The closest we ever see the two teachers come to blows is
in their meet up in episode five after she’s been saved by the revolutionaries
while he’s spent all day trying to escape them trying to execute him, until
both agree that the French Revolution led to good and bad.
That’s quite a compelling
argument now in 2023, but imagine what it must have been like sitting down to
watch this in 1964. Your parents are tutting at the news, with rock and roll
inspired revolts with teenagers dressed up in long hair (not that far removed
from French revolutionary fashions), asking what the country is coming to even
while you know it’s unfair and unequal. You’ve both seen the civil riot
movement on the news (Martin Luther King’s peaceful and eye-open ing march on
Washington takes place the day before episode four of this story)and to quote
one of the song played on the march you know a change is a gonna come (and fear
it’s going to come with bloodshed), but you feel you’re on different sides of
an argument and the other side isn’t listening. This is also the era of spy
films and James Bond, when the newspapers are full of ‘sleeping agents’ or
people who have infiltrated subversive groups so well that they’ve had entire
families undercover. You spent your life slightly paranoid, not sure who to
trust because with the back drop of the cold war everyone could be a spy. It
feels like the world has gone mad. Then you see this on television and realise
that you’ve lived through it all before, seeing mirrors of this story’s careful
plotting in your own time. You’re also sat at home, a year after the 1963 Cuban
missile crisis, wondering what Russia are up to and watching their own falling
succession of new world leaders stabbing all the previous leaders in the back
and wiping out all mention of the old regime, under pain of imprisonment or
death (Khruschev resigns in October, two months after this story airs). You’re
living in a time of great change and looking for answers in a story about great
change. Only you get a story that takes the middle fairest ground, one that
satisfies both you and your parents who are desperate to hold up the old guard.
History has never felt so contemporary. Future Who stories tend to pick a side
(‘Abominable Snowmen’ and ‘The Dominators’ are about this
awful hippie scum everywhere selling out what their parents fought for grumble
moan wheeze shuffle puff, while ‘The Space
Museum’ and ‘The War Games’, to nominate
just two, are firmly on the side of the kiddywinkles) but I rather admire the
way ‘The Reign Of Terror’ manages to be all things to all people. Especially
given that Spooner learnt everything he could find for this story within a week
from a handful of textbooks (which are notoriously un-neutral as sources, even
compared to TV adaptations).
Of course, this story
doesn’t have quite the same impact on contemporary viewers (while you could
argue the current move towards right-wing politics is another example of people
overthrowing an old regime, in reality rather than offer something new they’re
taking society back to around 100,000BC). Especially as this is only the second
Dr Who story with episodes missing if you come to them chronologically. No
wonder this story has been a bit forgotten, left to be the last ever VHS
release (as late as 2003, when about a quarter of the stories were out on DVD
already, with Carole Ann Ford reading a two minute recap of the missing
episodes) and one of the last to be put out in the newer formats too (with the
missing episodes fully animated). A bit of a mystery that actually: Dr Who’s
first series was so popular and caused such a stir that more countries bought
it than any other in the 1960s and while episode six was returned from a
private collection the first three were returned from Cyprus in 1984 (which
seems odd, given that they’d been hanging on to just half a story and giving
over precious space to a serial they could never have shown complete. In theory
this and ‘Marco Polo’ should be the two easiest stories left to find, as the
ones sold to the most countries and the last to be junked by the BBC, this
story as late as 1969). Unfortunately for us they’re the meatiest, when all the
pieces have been moved into place and the repetitive escaping and capturing has
turned into philosophy and a more subtle danger. While I suspect some missing
stories are actually better to listen to, rather than look at (‘The Celestial
Toymaker’ works so much better as a surrealist radio drama rather than watching
people play hopscotch endlessly) ‘The Reign Of Terror’ isn’t one of them. You
need to see the white’s of people’s eyes and the subtle changes of their
expression (there are more close-ups than usual in this story, a result perhaps
of having a director who was mostly used to dramas) and even though the ‘Reign’
missing animation is one of the better ones (at least I can tell who the
characters are meant to be this time) it’s not the same. For modern audiences
used to stories with more zip and action and an allergy to lengthy scenes of
dialogue ‘Reign’ often comes across as slow, while like all these early stories
it was designed to be digested (and ruminated on) a week at a time, not stuffed
into an afternoon’s DVD/i-player watching, which shows up all its flaws in
pacing and the amount of padding going on.
Somewhere along the way
something gets lost in this story too compared to the other historicals – it’s
a little too clumsy, a tad too serious and way too sombre and macabre, without
the deftness of touch of so many of the others. Despite having six episodes to
play with Spooner often feels in a rush, having characters hand out exposition
about their motives and the plot and even the date like sweets, without even
being asked (how many people do you know that give out the date I every day
conversation the way Robespierre does here? He also uses a lot of statistics
for every day speech but then, hey, there is a revolution on and maybe he really
did speak like this?) It’s a real shame the story splits our four friends up so
early (partly, admittedly, so that William Russell can take a holiday – irony of
ironies he spent his two weeks off with his family in his pre-booked destination:
France) as the four regulars and the way they bounce off each other are always
the best thing about these early stories. Throughout this story the characters
on both sides are cold and calculating, not just unlike the people in the
history books but unlike the French in general, with even the most ‘romantic’ one
turning out to be an insurgent traitor (by and large they’re more British than
the hot-blooded English in ‘The Crusade’
or ‘The Smugglers’ for instance).
While the Dr Who depictions of Ancient Greece, Aztec temples and ancient Rome
are superb, down to the last details and feel as true to life as any series on
a budget in a tiny London TV studio can, 19th century France never quite comes
alive in the same way, with just the market square set capturing the eyes
whereas most of this story takes place in gloomy backwater pubs and prison
cells. Stretched out to six parts this story really dips in the middle, with
all the capturing and escaping, even though adding little plot details to such
an exciting and ever-changing time should have been easy (there’s no sense of
an unruly mob for instance, or any fighting beyond Barbara and Susan being
rescued from a guillotine). My one issue, too, with Spooner’s balance of
characters in this story is how a piece about revolutionary France, which is
all about class and equality, makes all it’s working class figures into
absolute dolts and how even the young revolutionaries out for change in this story
are all uber posh. Dr Who was remarkably free of being the fusty dusty public
school nepo meeting place of white middle class people who only spoke the
Queen’s English by and large, but sometimes in these early days you’re reminded
of how old school the BBC still was in 1964 and how much we really did need a
(mercifully less bloody) Beatle-led revolution to break things up. There are
even a few plotholes that Spooner or Whittaker should really have picked up on,
the most blatant of which is Webster’s dying message to Ian, which contains far
more clues by the time he recites it to his friends (usually in Who I’d assume
the characters have another chat of screen but we see their meeting all the way
from Ian being placed in the same cell to Webster’s death so this time that
excuse won’t cut it. Though see ‘The
Smugglers’ for another even more blatant time it happens, which makes me
wonder if it’s a Tardis translation fault or something). The gloriously
metaphorical allegorical clue about the ‘sinking ship’, which could mean all
sorts of things, ends up just being the name of a pub too. What a swizz!
Most of all ‘Reign’ is
arguably the bleakest of the series’ very serious first run, even compared to
atomic exterminating Daleks and cavemen fights. Take the first episode finale:
The Doctor has been knocked unconscious and is a house fire. The others can’t
get to him and think he’s dead – leaving them stranded to boot. Yes we’ve had
this sort of thing before but only for a scene or two. Our friends spent the
vast majority of the story thinking The Doctor’s dead and Susan, especially,
goes to pieces at the thought she’s lost her Grandfather, giving up all fight
and falling into a depressive haze. They don’t know he’s been rescued by a
young French boy Jean Pierre (and its really weird the way The Doctor basically
pats him on the head then abandons him – if this was even a season later the
lad would be rewarded by ‘karma’ and we’d have one of his descendents joining
the Tardis by accident in the 1960s; he doesn’t even know if the boy has family
or is an orphan and he’s simply there as a rather clumsy plot device). Even
then the trio are split up early on, sent to cells infested with rats whilst
Ian is forced to watch helplessly as Barbara and Susan are sent to the
guillotine (and even by Doctor Who standards their last minute rescue is cutting
it fine). In short, in this story people really do suffer constantly, even the
ones we’ve grown to love and care for (while Robespierre’s capture is
heartbreaking, for all his faults as a character). There are times when this
story isn’t entertaining so much as grim viewing. Then there’s all the talking:
most scenes in this story are lengthy ones of somebody arguing with someone
else: necessary in 1964 when most dramas were like this (Dr Who was the
exception to the rule of period television by and large) but a drag for modern
audiences. There’s only brief moment of action the whole story, in episode
three’s big set-piece when our heroines
are rescued last minute ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ style. It is indeed a great scene
(there’s even a horse on set – the first animal on Dr Who not to be taken from
stock footage) but it doesn’t last long enough to make up for the ninety
minutes that stretch out either side of it. Spooner will become famous in his
later stories (such as ‘The Romans’) for his comedy moments but they’re rather
clumsily inserted here and all given over to The Doctor.
That said, if you’ve been
keeping up you’ll know that Dr Who is usually different than that, even from
the first. Dr Who’s first producer was both young and female, with Verity
Lambert the only woman producer then working in television in Britain. The
first story was directed by the only Indian director on the staff. Well here’s
another: Henric Hirsche was a Hungarian who’d moved to Britain for safety after
the second world war who still has a rather delicate understanding of the
English language. He had, though, delivered many excellent drama productions
that everyone in the Dr Who office admired, so Verity sought him out about making
a story. Given the subject matter (a European country in the throws of change)
‘The Reign Of Terror’ seemed a good fit. The problem was Hirsche had never done
science-fiction. For that matter he’d only ever recorded static drama, the way
it would be filmed on stage. He found Dr Who a terrifying experience - he’d
never had to do ‘camera scripts’ before working out which camera would shoot
which scene back in the days when there were only four-six and episodes ran
continuously, give or take a single break somewhere in the middle). Even if by
contemporary standards ‘Reign Of Terror’ is a tad slow and static by the
standards of what he was used to it was an action movie. Hartnell, who loved
having strong directors to shout at and lean against, found his confusion and
inexperience wearing, while the rest of the cast longed for extra direction, to
be guided in rehearsals more and told how to play scenes (Hirsche would ask for
a scene to be less one way but mostly let his actors do their own thing). Dramas
may have been longer but they came with much longer rehearsal time than a week.
By the time of the guillotine escape (complete with horse) it got too much for
poor Hirsche who collapsed on the walkway between the studio and the gallery,
discovered by assistant director Timothy Coombe, who took over the rest of the
episode (with help from Verity and possibly John Gorrie, listed on the
paperwork at least, though this might have been a ‘you can’t promote people
willy nilly’ BBC bureaucracy thing as
Gorrie himself could never remember doing it) and who did all the camera scripts
for the last three episodes to help ease the strain (Combe will in time become
one of Who’s best directors, his promotion speeded up in part thanks to keeping
such a cool head during the making of this
story where he acted as a middle ground, sympathising with Hartnell in one BBC
bar before heading over to help out a despondent Hirsche at another). This
might explain another problem with ‘terror’ that all the regulars – so good and
relaxed at their jobs by now - all seem
to be in a slight state of terror themselves, less sure-footed than usual (only
Jacqueline Hill is her usual unruffled self). For those counting all the times
the scenery wobbles in Dr Who (not that often actually) then keep an eye out in
episode one when the camera visibly crashes into the set but time is too tight
for a retake.
I have mixed feelings
about the comedy scenes. In time Spooner will become one of Who’s funniest
writers, when under his own steam rather than Whittaker’s watchful eye he’ll
turn even history figures into typical clumsy humans stumbling round not really
knowing what they’re doing, but this story is s tricky hybrid and the comedy
doesn’t so much take away from the drama as bash it’s head against it, as if
you’re watching two different stories laid over the top of each other. William
Hartnell’s background was in comedy and the actor who made him take up his
career was his idol Charlie Chaplin, despite his breakthrough roles all being
tough serious authority figures, and he has great fun knocking out supervisors
and jailors left right and centre, with a slapstick violence to rival the much
criticised 6th Doctor’s. The Doctor’s takedown of the overseer bully pretending
to offer advice before ticking him off for breaking his prisoner’s morale, is
one of the series’ earliest moral Doctor moments and you really cheer him on
(he becomes the hero of every bullied school-kid here. Especially if it’s an
authority figure doing the bullying). One of the great things too about Hartnell
is how much his Doctor adjusts to the time-period he’s in, be it future or past
– he’s believably of the times he visits as much as, say Coal Hill school in
1963 and particularly here where he really rocks the French gendarme outfits.
Even so, the scenes of him chuckling while knocking out a sadistic overseer, or
pinching clothes from a tailor he’s fooled into thinking of him as a noble
(rather than being effectively a penniless tramp at this point) or fighting a
drunk jailor (all three of whom will lose their welfare, their jobs or maybe
their lives or his actions) is somewhat difficult to watch. Not least because
they’re not actually that funny (well maybe the scene with the tailor. A bit).
Talking of not being funny this is the only incidental music score by composer Stanley
Myers who takes a, shall we say, interesting take on this story, treating it as
a farce and inserting variations of the French National anthem ‘Le Marsailles’
like a knowing wink to camera every so often. This would matter less if we a) hadn’t
got to know a third of this story mostly from the soundtrack b) had this been a
jokier story rather than accompanying scenes of beheadings and terror and c) If
the French anthem actually existed at the time this story was set (it was
written a year later). Worryingly, of all the ‘classic’ era composers, Myers is
the one the show’s most prolific modern composer Murray Gold’s work seems to
resemble most…
Nevertheless, I’m oh so
pleased they did it: I’ve never seen a Dr Who trip into history I hated and
this series makes the past come alive better than a lot of them, with a love
and respect I wish more costume dramas would follow and while the characters
themselves are…variable every event in the story (bar the time-travel and the
ending) is utterly plausible and meticulously researched (give or take
Napoleon’s cameo perhaps but, well, why not? It’s not impossible he was around
as a young man and nobody bothered to record it in the history books, although unforgivably
he’s way too tall –perhaps the tallest Napoleon on television). They really
worked hard to make the depictions of Paris accurate: the costumes are all researched
to the tiniest detail (and Hartnell looks so good in a hat!) while designer
Roderick Laing went to great lengths to create Paris as a model so he knew
where all the streets corresponded to each other (Carole Ann Ford admired it so
much she was handed it a s a present when the story was over and kept it on top
of her wardrobe for years, until her cleaner accidentally broke it). The cast
are mostly strong (watch out for future star Ronald Pickup in his first –
admittedly tiny - TV role as ‘The
Physician’, no not The ‘Doctor’ as some books have it) with special credit to Edward
Brayshaw as Colbert who could have been played smarmy given what happens but is
genuinely charming here, believable enough for Barbara to fall for him but also
believable enough as the scoundrel who sells everyone out. Full credit to
Jacqueline Hill, too, who continues to find new aspects to Barbara that really
aren’t there on the page, falling for someone quite innocently and romantically
and questioning what she thinks about Ian when they argue. The cast almost all
give their all anyway: time for another pf those funny production stories as
actor Jeffrey Wickham, given the small part of the dying Englishman Webster,
found that he’d been killed off by the mid-day break so went off to meet a
friend for a ‘liquid lunch’. Tracked down by some hasty production staff to the
nearby pub, he was called back to play Webster’s corpse. Only to fall asleep in
his drunken stupor and wake up to find the TV studio empty. Such was the professionalism of TV and call
sheets back in those days!
There’s even – yahoo! –
Dr Who’s first ever location filming Admittedly it’s actor Brian Proudfoot with
his back to the camera pretending to be Hartnell walking down a French-looking
road in Denham, Buckinghamshire but hey, baby steps (the intention was to do
more of this but Proudfoot turning up to set and ‘practicing mimicking Hartnell
was said to annoy the elder actor tremendously; if you want to know what the
actor looks like he’ll later play Tigellinus in ‘The Romans’). The cliffhangers are
almost all superb, each one a real how-are-they-going-to-get-out-of-that?
moment that seem to offer no chance of escape, whether it be the first Doctor
unconscious in a burning building, Ian languishing in a prison cell watching
the guillotine being built outside, Barbara and Susan being transported with no
hope of reprieve (till it comes anyway, last minute despite the odds) and the
Doctor apparently betraying them all (though – spoilers – it’s in disguise to
get them out of jail). There’s a real sense of building tension as ten or so
spies and counter-spies and counter-counter-spies get involved in an
increasingly elaborate plot that really comes down to the age old debate of
good versus evil and whether people good at heart have the right to commit evil
for the greater cause. The story could have gone for the obvious clashes in the
street but these fights are mostly behind closed doors, which means more
talking and exposition but also means more debate and nuances. The end result
is a historical that looks amazing, often sounds amazing (Dennis Spooner was
always so good with characterisation and dialogue) and is acted with all the
love care and devotion that makes the first year of Dr Who so special. But it
also lacks just a little bit of that magic, that made it feel like a show that
could do the impossible and has either a few too many twists and turns or not
enough to keep the viewer’s interest across three hours. So, in the end, it’s
not quite ‘viva le revolution!’ but at the same time it’s a measure of just how
brilliant the other Hartnell historicals are that a story still this good and
this detailed and this vivid can end up being amongst the least of them. Of all
the decisions the production team made down the years phasing the historicals
out from 1966 onwards was the biggest mistake of the lot for me – there were so
many more strong stories to tell – and while I can (and in this thread have)
chuntered about how history has sometimes been treated since the show’s
comeback, bringing it back at all as a regular permanent part of the show and
reflecting our times in stories from the past just like the olden days was one
of the best things Russell T ever did. For the events that chopped and changed
us (if you excuse the pun) never really leave us and ‘The Reign Of Terror’
teaches you a great deal about what was in the air not only in 1794 but 1964 to
boot, a time capsule lovingly made and well worth diving into.
POSITIVES + The
guillotine set is a marvel. A huge amount of extras (well by 1960s Dr Who
standards) mingle around (including an elderly lady knitting as if it’s just
another day out, which it was back then) and there’s even an actual horse
pulling Barbara and Susan across the studio (just look at how Susan lights up
here: as a colossal equine lover Carole Ann spent more time with the horse in
rehearsals than the actors). After several episodes trapped in tiny
claustrophobic cells this set feels huge and open-air and is one of the most
impressive of many a long list of candidates from Who’s first year. I still
can’t quite believe they did it in such a tiny space with such primitive
(relatively speaking) equipment. No wonder the director collapsed: they’d
struggle to do this now (though for the record the horse was better behaved
than most of the Humans and only defecated on the studio floor once!)
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: You know how
The Doctor and Susan spoke of landing here in this country and period before
and how The Doctor called Revolutionary France his ‘favourite period’? (while
also explaining why Susan chose that of all textbooks to take home in the very
first story). I always assumed there would be a story somewhere to fill the gap
of how they landed there – but surprisingly Big Finish’s ‘Companion Chronicles’
story ‘Fields Of Terror’ (2017) isn’t that story. Instead it’s a sequel, The 1st
Doctor landing in revolutionary France all over again (and randomly too – no
fast return switches involved), this time an older and wiser Doctor alongside
companions Vicki and Steven. Maureen O’Brien reads John Prictchard’s story with
her usual care but it’s not one of the better ones in the range. They’re on the
outskirts of France this time, in Vendee on the Western coast and hiding from
revolutionary soldiers and a mysterious ‘hooded figure’ you’re meant to assume
is going to turn out to be an alien or maybe even The Meddling Monk (though
he’s really part of a shady local organisation looking at turning the rich over
to the mob). A rather dull story that makes even ‘Reign Of Terror’ seem
fast-paced, although there are some strong character moments (Vicki doesn’t
understand why the two sides of France are fighting each other when they’re so
similar – until she remembers The Daleks and Mechonoids in ‘The Chase’).
Previous ‘The Sensorites’ next ‘Planet
Of Giants’
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