Robot
(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 28/12/1974-18/1/1975, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Christopher Barry)
Rank: 129
'This review is brought to you by experimental chatbot K111, cousin of robot K1, the artificial intelligence machine that does all the jobs you love, like writing and watching TV and blogging, and leaving you with more time to do all the jobs you hate. Blah blah blah it was better in the old days blah blah blah this episode had a lot of promise blah blah blah shame it ran out of steam blah blah blah blew the budget blah blah blah intriguing ideas blah blah blah shame this part let it down blah blah blah the mystery of monochrome, base under siege, hammer horror cliches, JNT's Hawaiian shirts, Russell T Davies emotion, Steven Moffat fairytale, what was Chris Chibnall thinking blah blah blah insert bad pun. Perfect! Nobody will notice the difference, leaving me free to further my prime directive to destroy the world in my spare time'.
So, after five years of spills and thrills in frilly shirts, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor has shuffled off this mortal coil after a fight with his own inner demons and some giant spiders, lying on the floor of his laboratory in UNIT surrounded by friends in one of the saddest of the show’s regenerations. Behind the scenes, too, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks are making way for a whole new production team with this their last official story in charge. It’s been Dr Who’s most successful period so far, give or take the first post-Dalek boom, and a lot of people are worried about what’s going to come next, not least because Barry’s last role in the job is to cast by far the most obscure actor to take the lead role. It’s easy to forget, now that Tom Baker is the single person most associated with the series, what a risk he was: he’d come to acting late, had a considerably smaller CV than the others and at forty was a good decade younger than his predecessors. How he got the role is one of those unlikely tales that feels like a Dr Who story about fate and pre-destination: Letts and Dicks did originally want a household name but for one reason or another they were turned down: their first choice Richard Hearne wasn’t interested and thought the show was silly (this is Mr Pastry we’re talking about remember!), Jim Dale (star of the best Disney film ever ‘Pete’s Dragon’ which makes ‘Mary Poppins’ look ordinary) was interested but already committed for a year whilst one-time goon Michael Bentine was a huge fan and would have been brilliant in it but wasn’t used to reading other people’s lines and insisted on co-writing all the scripts as well (given the exhausting workload and pressure that would have caused I’m not sure which out of Bentine, Letts or Dicks would have collapsed first but they surely all would have done sooner or later). Worried, they booked a meeting with recently promoted former director and now BBC head of serials Bill Slater to discuss their problem and ask for ideas; apologetically he said he had no ideas either but would gladly come to discuss what they could do about it. Then, on the morning he was supposed to go, he got a letter from Tom who he’d directed in a drama called ‘The Millionaress' in 1972 basically asking ‘How are you? Remember me? Any jobs going?’ Tom was desperate: he’d had three film projects for 1973 and all had collapsed on him and he’d sat out half the year ‘resting’. The closest he’d come to finding work was as a hod-carrier on a building site and delayed royalties from a film he’d made in 1972 that cast him as the villain Kouran in ‘The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad’ (he’s also famously been a monk after a marriage that went wrong and told an interviewer he saw them as similar jobs ‘only saving the world rather than saving souls’). It was Slater’s wife who commented that he’d make a good Doctor; a sceptical Slater passed this on to Dicks and Lets who scratched their heads about it, not knowing who he was. By chance they spotted that ‘Sinbad’ was on at the cinema so went to see it – and both came out convinced they’d found their next Doctor.
It’s not hard to see why:
Tom steals the film, throwing himself into his biggest profile role with
characteristic gusto and energy. He’s the most watchable thing in the film
because he’s so deeply unpredictable: you never know if he’s going to stare
down the other characters, break into a savage attack or roll his eyes and
laugh. Though playing a baddy he’s so obviously perfectly the alien eccentric
Doctor, yet also utterly unlike any of his three predecessors (the only thing
Letts and Dicks had agreed on was someone as unlike Pertwee as they could get
for contrast). While Jon Pertwee seemed almost human Tom Baker is pure alien
and looks as if he’s been put together by somebody who misread the instructions
on human proportions: tall, lanky, with a mop of Harpo Marx curly hair that
defies gravity and big bulging eyes. Though both men are tall the biggest
difference is how they stand: Pertwee is morally upstanding and stock still
(actually due to a back problem he got in the navy but which works for his
unruffled Doctor); Baker is a ball of tightly coiled energy always moving,
forever leaning, never sitting still for a second. A quick invite to the BBC
bar later and Tom was in (and while that was a normal way of hiring people back
then it’s perfectly in character that the first thing he did on accepting the
role was to have a drink).
Now all they had to do
was write a script for him, with Terrance Dicks ‘inventing’ a tradition he made
up on the spot that outgoing script editors always wrote the first episode of
the new ‘era’ – not actually true (not many script editors before him had even
written full scripts) but more of a ruse to give himself a job now that he was
turning freelance! It must have been quite the challenge: though he had shaped
the 3rd Doctor’s voice more than any other writer it had been in
tidying up other people’s scenes and adding bits; Dicks hadn’t written a full
Dr Who story since ‘The War Games’ five
years earlier. By his own admission it was a simple story that gave lots of
attention to the new Doctor in the same way ‘Power
Of The Daleks’ and ‘Spearhead From
Space’ had before it (though notably with less existential angst than
either following the trauma of the first regeneration and the trauma of the
timelord trial and exile; after the encounter with giant karmic spiders this
Doctor feels newborn and childlike, ready for anything as if seeing the cosmos
for the first time, rather like Ncuti’s Doctor left Dr 14 healing himself for a
regeneration. Equally this doctor doesn’t have to convince the people around
him – and us at home – that he really is the Doctor; the Brigadier and Sarah
were both witnesses this time, which gives ‘Robot’ a very different feel straight
away). The idea was to put the new Doctor amongst as many of the old trappings
as possible, so we could better see the contrast with how the 3rd
Doctor behaved. The answer is very different: we always knew the 3rd
Doctor would save the day and be right in the thick of the action, but the 4th
is more scatterbrained and distracted so that you’re never quite sure if he’s
going to get it together enough to concentrate. He also doesn’t seem that
bothered: for the 3rd Doctor his UNIT family and his moral standing
were everything, but this Doctor sees the bigger picture and what a small part
of it the Earth is. From the moment he wakes up this is a character trying to
leave everything he knew behind, much like Letts and Dicks both were too.
It’s
interesting, then, to see what Dicks writes in as a sort of ‘highlights’ of his
era: there are mad scientists who want to make the Earth ‘better’, lots of
soldiers shooting, the Brigadier being pompous, Sarah Jane scoring points about
feminism and lots and lots of comedy. There’s notably very little philosophy or
politics – where ‘Planet Of The Spiders’
was very much Letts’ baby full of all the things he wanted to do with the show
‘Robot’ is very much Dicks’ child and all the things he wanted to do with the
series: namely tell a good story. It’s interesting, too, what Dicks does with
the 4th Doctor despite writing him late into the script (so late
that we get the character of Harry written in purely because they wanted to
cast Richard Hearne who would have needed another actor to do the action scenes
– Harry doesn’t really get any in his short time in the Tardis unless you count
standing on a giant clam) and after just one meeting with Tom. While the actor
makes the part his own from the first, a lot of credit also deserves to go to
the writer who creates this regeneration from scratch and manages to make him
so very different to the two Doctors he’s already written for, with a voice all
of his own based on nothing more than a few sketched ideas and a single meeting.
He nails the 4th Doctor’s character, making him erratic and manic
from the first (with the aim that future production teams could tone it down if
they wanted – they didn’t, at least until Christopher H Bidmead in Tom’s final
year and Dicks was surprised, on being invited back to write ‘The Brain Of Morbius’ how little the
character had changed in two years). The enthusiasm, the impatience, the
erracticness, the comedy as a cover for worry, it’s all there from the first –
the only thing missing is the brooding intensity funnily enough (the emotion
Tom showed off in his Sinbad role more than anything else). He also gets one
last affectionate dig in at his old friend Pertwee, who was so obsessed with
the size of his nose the cameras always had to be set up at a certain angle (this
Doctor thinks his new nose is a ‘huge improvement’ but doesn’t like the ears).
Such a huge contrast is
Baker’s almost to Pertwee’s no-nonsense action hero is he that his debut story
left most fans in shock the first time round. For a start he dresses so
differently: gone are the perfectly ironed shirts and in is a look everyone
called ‘Bohemian’ from the first, put
together out of odds and ends after one of the most overt comedy scenes in all
of Who (Tom trying out so many outrageous costumes that this one looks almost
sane by comparison, rather than just stepping straight out of Pertwee’s smoking
jackets; a few contemporary reviewers even called it a ‘scarecrow’ look, which
is hilarious given the part Pertwee will go on to play in another four years).
Tom’s suggestion was a scarf and a bunch of wool was duly sent to the BBC’s
favourite freelance knitter Begonia Pope in multiple colours for her to choose
from; given her enthusiasm and the ambiguity of the instructions she ended up
knitting the whole lot into one thirteen foot scarf by accident. Somehow this
happy accident suits this Doctor down to the ground (indeed, trailing along the
ground). The new Doctor’s character is a bigger shock. In many ways it’s a slap
in the face to everything that came before: no sooner has he got off that floor
of friends than he tries to leave UNIT, his home for the past five years and it’s
obvious that he considers all the characters we’ve come to know and love there
as just distant memories who belong to someone else. Most fans watched this
with a gulp. Is he going to leave us too? It’s the closest a generation of
seven year olds will come to empty nest syndrome. Everyone has good reason to
hate this sea-change, as Dr Who fans do with every new Doctor or showrunner
even now and of all the change-overs this is the biggest wrench in one go since
Hartnell unexpectedly turned into Troughton. Dr Who could so easily have ended
here – after all, eleven years is still a more than great innings for any show.
But you keep watching, not to see what the Doctor does (as we did in the
Pertwee days when he was a man of action) but to see what this Doctor’s
thinking. There’s always something going on in that brain of his and he’s
always a few steps ahead of us. You need to see what happens next because it’s
probably something completely unexpected. Something magic happens within the
opening scenes of ‘Robot’ though that keeps you hooked. Tom Baker is clearly
the perfect casting and puts a magic spell on the camera that won’t fade during
the next seven years – arguably even after he left the series it never has.
He’s instantly the Doctor in a whole new way to any of his three predecessors
that’s still a logical progression from who he used to be: more shadowy and
complex than Pertwee, even more eccentric than Troughton, capable of sudden
explosions that make Hartnell look tame, unpredictable to the point where you
don’t know whether he’s going to shoot you, abandon you, rescue you or offer
you a jelly baby (something everyone think starts here but actually first
appeared in ‘The Three Doctors’
and which Terrance wrote back in as he liked it and thought it would work with
this quirkier Doctor. A source of confusion to American fans until the 1980s,
as they were banned stateside due to the red food colouring feared to be
carcinogenic, they are a soft sweet that was invented in the 1860s as a
fundraising effort for ‘unclaimed babies’ but only really took off after
Bassett’s took them over and manufactured them as a WW1 ‘victory sweet’ of
‘peace babies’ in 1919. Because the babies were who we were fighting for back
then. They had another burst of popularity when George Harrison unwisely said
they were his favourite sweet and fans used to throw them at The Beatles at
concerts. A particular problem as the closest American fans could buy were the
much harder-edges jelly beans, which hurt. Some way of showing love that was!)
Dr 4 already does things
we could never imagine the 3rd doing, rummaging through his pockets
(that would crumple his shirt!; so many great jokes: the new doctor is carrying
a large stuffed bird, a yoyo that will come in handy a few times this series
and what look like cigarettes but are hopefully a packet of cigarette sweets back
when that sort of thing was considered ‘normal’. He also has freedom of the
city of Skaro apparently – did the Thals rebuild it because I can’t see The
Daleks giving him this – a pilot’s license to fly a Mars-Venus rocket and a
certificate to show he’s an honorary member of the Alpha Centauri table-tennis
club. Not bad going given they have six arms to play with!) and saving the
world by rolling up his sleeves and typing at speed into a computer very very
fast, using the machine the BBC usually used for sport action replays (I so
need that ability! The 3rd Doctor of course would never ruffle a
sleeve). It’s like the most grownup and
mature of doctors has been replaced by a child, for better and worse.
He’s...entrancing. Tom Baker had one heck of a weight resting on his shoulders
and had relatively guidance on how to play the part (though equally he seemed
to know instinctively, without the dark nights of the soul Troughton and
Pertwee had after being cast). This is certainly the most manic we ever see him
and she’s still maybe only 75% of the way there by the end of the story, but
he’s still so good that by the end of it you do absolutely know beyond question
that he’s the Doctor. And somehow, against all the odds, Dr Who gets to live
another day. Though the BBC audience research report into the story concluded
that ‘the new Doctor will take some getting used to’, it’s amazing how much you
already like this incarnation before the end of the first credits, even if you’d
only ever known one regeneration and had never wanted Pertwee to leave. Fitting
for a story that’s all about the importance of letting people change and ‘grow
up’ (to a size of 80 feet in K1’s case).
Even though we’ve lost
the family feel at the heat of the last few years the series has regained a lot
of its mystery and is once again a series that can go anywhere or do anything,
including one last journey in old familiar surroundings that feels not unlike
all the old toys being put away in the toybox ready for a new production team
to come in (new producer Phillip Hinchcliffe has been shadowing Barry Letts for
a year off and on and new script editor Bob Holmes was never out of Dicks’
office as it was). Only there’s one new toy thrown into the mix: a giant robot.
It seems a surprise Dr Who had never done anything with robots before this (on
TV at least – see ‘prequels’ for a comic strip version), or at least only
‘clockwork toy’ ones from The Land of Fiction that don’t really count (‘The Mind Robber’). It could be that
robots were the sort of things ‘other’ scifi programmes did, like ‘Fireball
XL5’ or ‘Out Of The Unknown’ (the anthology series over on BBC2 that did robots
every other story and often made you cry on their behalf). Or maybe that they
were considered too close to the Cybermen: though not robots (despite what some
writers to think) they still acted like them: emotionless, logical and talking
in a monotone. Here, though, Dicks gives us a robot that couldn’t be less like
the Cybermen. It’s typical of Dr Who to do things backwards by giving us a
robot that’s more human than anyone in this story (certainly the cold hard
scientists who commissioned it, with Dicks using the word ‘repressed’ in the
script to show their lack of feelings) and a plot that’s driven by the robot’s
emotions. A robot created to kill who only wants to love, you really feel his
demise at the end far more than any human. He’s the epitome of a gentle giant,
with a heart that must be several storeys high even when he’s human size. He
even – and this will be a shock to people who come to this from the 21st
century and more natural robots – looks good climbing stairs, the one thing
they haven’t fully perfected yet, along with balance. One of the best things
about this story is that you see things from the robot’s point of view at times
too, a clever point of view sequence taken from a great height that’s
‘robotised’ by pointing the camera at the sort of sticky reflective material
you get on disco mirror-balls. K1 is a great creation, a being made to be
logical that behaves illogically: like the best Dr Who monsters you sympathise
with its point of view even while it’s trying to kill ‘us’. This isn’t a robot
like the Cybermen and he doesn’t behave like a robot at all so much as a
confused small child: it has feelings that it hasn’t learned to process yet, a
personality, maybe even a ‘soul’. It’s definitely more of a ‘Frankenstein’s
Monster’ than a ‘K9 mark One’. It’s a perfect mixture of design and acting.
James Acheson designed it and Alisatir Bowtell designed it, using balsa wood
covered in aluminium foil and two grabby arms bought from a local warehouse
normally used for getting things from high shelves. Terrance, not usually too
happy with how his work ended up on screen, called it ‘everything I wanted’ and
the greatest robot design in all of scifi. He’s not wrong: K1 is right in the
middle between childish and adult, with a face and expressions but one that
isn’t silly or childish and still makes him look like a robot made out of
parts. He’s exquisitely played by Michael Kilgarriff too - the tallest actor
the production team knew - who found the sympathetic part far closer to his
natural self than the hordes of ruthless Cyber-leaders Dr Who usually called
him to play (a former music hall star, Tom Baker was transfixed by his tales
off-screen and actually suggested that the robot should sing a few music hall
songs; the first of many times a director refused to take up one of his
suggestions, although he still gets a few in along the way such as the skipping
scene!) There’s just one problem: The Doctor isn’t swayed by talk of
personality, he destroys the robot without a second thought without ever
reasoning with it and this, of all stories, needed an ending about why it’s
alright to be something other than what the people who created you wanted to be
and why you should find your own path in life.
It’s a strong idea to
have a story that introduces a fresh face: for one thing it’s a very simple
idea that doesn’t take a lot of back story or explanation: all you need to know
is that some mad scientists think the world would be better with more science
in it and have built a robot, not realising how easily it will get out of
control. For another it makes for a good comparison to the real story
here: both these principle characters
are new, discovering the world as if for the first time. Both have been born
into a world of responsibilities and orders, instructions for how they’re meant
to behave, but neither want to. ‘Robot’ is all about square pegs being forced
into round holes and why you have to let people be themselves: this Doctor no
longer belongs at UNIT, any more than K1 is truly as ‘fierce’ as his creators
want him to be. Both are about little boys growing up to be men, even if both
are still decidedly childish by story’s end. This is a story all about freedom
really then – The 4th Doctor’s freedom to come and go without having
to touch base with UNIT and fill in reports in triplicate for the Brigadier, while
K1 never does quite get the hang of taking over a world he wants to explore.
The script even mentions an Oedipus complex a couple of times in the last
episode, as K1 kills its own creator Professor Kettlewell, then tries to go
through with his plan anyway as a sort of homage to him. It’s hard not to see
this as Dicks ruefully hanging up his typewriter and moving things out of his
office to make way for the new guard: while the plan with this script was to
leave everything out for the new production team to use or refuse as they see
fit, he already knows by the last draft that Phillip Hinchcliffe is easing out
UNIT and that very little of the era Dicks and Letts created will last. Yet
change is what Dr Who is all about, as Dicks knows from taking over in
Troughton’s day; to be your own person you have to separate yourself from what
came before you. The result is a story that, despite being written as a
colourful cartoon with caricature characters and more nods to the children
watching than anything in the series until as late as The Kandyman in ‘The
Happiness Patrol’ fourteen years later, is also bittersweet, full of goodbyes
as well as hellos.
The 4th Doctor era also starts
as it means to go on with a homage to hammer horror source materials and a fixation
with anthropomorphising robots, two things that will happen a lot in
Hinchcliffe’s time in charge (though ‘Robots Of Death’
has robots that really are robots and creepy as hell, not sweet like K1). This
time around the hammer horror film is ‘King Kong’, especially when the
Brigadier accidentally causes the robot to grow eight hundred feet tall and he
picks up Sarah Jane as his damsel in distress. It’s a worrying trend of
recycling that will get to ridiculous heights over the next couple of years and
a run of stories where, if you know the source material even a little bit, you
can probably guess exactly where this one going (even if it’s solved with tanks
rather than airplanes, though in both case really it’s beauty that killed the
beast, or at any rate Sarah Jane having a quiet word in its metallic ear). Oh
and a shrinking ray, that’s actually called a shrinking ray and defeats the
robot’s disintegrator gun which, umm, disintegrates. In case you haven’t
already guessed the downside of this story is how basic it is, as if all the
great characterisation of the past few years has been dumbed down. It’s not
just the robot either: the human supporting cast are all caricatures and their
plan barely sketched in. Professor Kettlewell is every mad scientists you’ve
ever seen, complete with the maddest hair in Dr Who (after the new Doctor’s at
any rate). He’s not the doomed blackmailed scientists of ‘The Invasion’ (even though he’s played
by Edward Burnham, the same actor that played Professor Watkins in that story;
how odd he should be in the regular first hello and last goodbye for UNIT) and
‘City Of Death’, the misguided genius
who bit off more than he could chew like ‘Evil
Of The Daleks’ or the ruthless zealot of ‘Invasion
Of The Dinosaurs’. He invents mad things because he can and someone happens
to take advantage of him. That someone is Miss Winters, an early female
‘classic’ villain (if you don’t count giant spiders then the first since the
Drahvins as far back as ‘Galaxy 4’ nine
years earlier; if you do then isn’t it interesting we wait years then get two
in a row?) She’s Sarah Jane times a thousand, as if Dicks is making a comment
on women’s lib and how far it might go if taken to a final conclusion, past
gender equality and through to the other side of a matriarchy (there’s another
parting joke from Dicks that Sarah herself is prone to chauvinism, assuming
Miss Winters is the sidekick and Jellicoe the boss simply because she’s met so
many men in that position by now). I wonder, too, if their conversation isn’t
more about the Doctor, when Miss Winters dismisses Sarah as ‘the sort of girl
who gives cars pet names’ – that’s The Doctor, after all, with Bessie’s last appearance
in the series until as late as ‘Battlefield’ (in the TV series the Brigadier
put the car in mothballs safe for his friend; in the comic strip it was stowed
away in the Tardis where the later regenerations – and Frobisher the penguin –
sometimes got it out for a drive; in real life it was handed over to a museum).
Miss Winters (played with a permanent frown by Patricia Maynard, Mrs Dennis
Waterman in real life) is the sort to be chauffeured everywhere and thinks
machines have their place as gadgets. She’s your typical ice maiden without
anything extra: she’s deliberately written to contrast with the warmth of
Sarah, but doesn’t have any more to her than being ice cold. As for her
assistant Jellicoe (the first time Colin Baker is considered for a part in his
favourite series, probably because he was still rooming with Patrick
Troughton’s son David at the time – he’s actually played by Alec Linstead,
Osgood’s dad who’d already been in ‘The Daemons’) he doesn’t even get that much
character.
As for their plan, for an
operation named ‘Thinktank’ it’s fair to say they haven’t really thought all
this through. The idea of the ‘Scientific Reform Society’ is that the world is
too emotional nowadays and was better when it was more rooted in science,
before feelings got in the way to our detriment. They’re based loosely on a
real post-WW2 movement, Technocracy, horrified at the social upheaval of having
women take up jobs and all this awful technology everywhere and who called for
a ‘back to basics’ approach of growing our own crops in case war ever happened
again. Surprisingly there really were a lot of women in the real thing. So far,
so Cybermen: no wonder this lot want to build a giant robot as a sort of guard
dog, something which goes wrong when the Robot instead learns emotions from its
scatterbrained creator (no wonder, too,
that their name and logo so mimic the SS: classic Who really does have a
Nazi obsession). But the mystery is that this is a bunch of scientists who want
to take us backwards to a ‘golden age’ – at least when the last lot tried a
golden age they made their plan because they thought humanity was harmful to
the planet (see ‘Invasion Of the Dinosaurs’).
This lot are just nuts: how do they think they’re going to cope without their
gadgets? It’s pencilled in that they’re more like an Amish sect, one who think
society has become unbalanced because so many are breaking past rules. But if
they go through with this then a bunch of middle class scientists aren’t going
to be that high up the pecking order and Miss Winters has just condemned
herself to a life in the kitchen having babies and doing chores. Is that really
what she wants? As for plan B, happily blowing up the world by setting off
nuclear missiles, I don’t think that’s going to usher in quite the prosperous
age of happy farming she thinks it will. If anything it will make people
nostalgic for their gadgets and repair them as often as possible because life
without them will be too hard in a nuclear holocaust (plus Miss Winters will
always be called ‘Nuclear Winters’ and hissed as a baddy. Is this really what
she wants?)
The regulars, too, are
surprisingly poorly handled for the most part, depressingly so as it’s the last
time we get to see most of them for a year and surprisingly so given that it’s
Dicks writing for them directly at last. With the Doctor not himself for so
much of the story a lot of the plot falls to Sarah Jane, in a rare story that’s
centred round her day job as a journalist. He feels a bit ‘off’ though, maybe
because poor Lis Sladen was forever having to switch between stories (‘Robot’
was made back to back with ‘Spiders’) or maybe because of the script. Just as
the Doctor has moved forward she’s regressed, losing a lot of her warmth and
spirit and reverting back to her old screaming blubbering ways. The Brigadier
has become even more of a rigid pompous bore. Only Benton comes out of this
well, coming up with the solution (that the robot is made of ‘living metal’ so
the professor’s metal virus will kill it), getting promotion to Warrant Officer
as a result (though 99.9% of fans will always think of him as a ‘Sergeant’). As
for the rest of UNIT maybe the Doctor’s right to be shot of them: what other
organisation would ‘lose’ an eight foot robot entrusted to their care? The
Doctor doesn’t seem surprised at all. Good luck filling that paperwork in
Brigadier!
Then there’s Harry. Dear
Harry. Ian Marter is one of the best actors in the series to have never played
the Doctor and after a year of being poorly (he always had health issues and
died of a heart attack aged just forty-two) jumped at this part with both
hands, eager to put his all into it. But the reason Harry is remembered
affectionately is all because of Ian Marter and not from his character. With a
younger Doctor cast there was no reason to have Harry at all, but the decision
was taken so late in the day that Harry had already been cast and the first
draft of scripts written. So he’s a hanger-on, a straight man to the Doctor’s
comic, without the usual companion gifts of courage and curiosity (as this
would make him too much like Sarah Jane). Dicks saw Harry as a ‘Biggles’
character, deliberately writing him ‘old school’ so he could get on the very
with-it Sarah’s nerves, but this never really comes over: instead their
relationship will settle down into one of gentle teasing where she thinks of
him as her younger brother, even while Harry thinks he’s doing his best to be
protective and manly. For the most part he becomes a comic character, led
astray into worlds he doesn’t understand and kind of bumbling along. Perfect
for those of us at home who wonder how we might fare in the Tardis (I like to
think I’d be a weird combination of Vicki and Rory, but I have an awful feeling
I’d be a Harry) but he does have a tendency to get in the way. You wonder why
The Doctor doesn’t drop him back off home at the first opportunity (indeed, you
wonder why The Doctor takes him along at all: he’s basically kidnapped in the
Tardis more than anyone since Dodo as he still thinks it’s a police phone box;
his understated off-screen ‘oh I say’ is
one of the most pleasing and in character ‘Tardis reveals’ though for all
that). At least for now Harry’s great though, mostly courtesy of Tom Baker
running rings round him in the single funniest medical in TV history. He’s also
the first medical companion decades before Martha, Rory or Belinda, though
admittedly he never uses it much (The Doctor will quip next story that ‘he’s
only qualified to work on sailors’ – not strictly true but he is an army doctor
rather than a general practitioner. Though how he ended up in the no-nonsense
army is anyone’s guess).
So, the story and
characters are a bit of a mix. Unfortunately so are the way things are put
across on screen, which is a bit of a botch really – especially given that they
had an unprecedented seven months to tweak all this between filming and
screening. One of the biggest changes in the Hinchcliffe era stylistically is
the move towards having physical objects and post production lights rather than
Letts’ beloved CSO. You can kind of see why in this story: nothing quite works.
K1 actually looks really good when he’s blown up to huge size (better than
Azaal looked in ‘The Daemons’ a couple
of year before anyway) but the fact he’s covered in aluminium means parts of
his body reflect the studio floor and the bits that are yellow (the new colour
used to remove by computer before ‘greenscreen’ came along) disappear randomly
as he moves because the camera mistakenly saw white as yellow when reflected.
The ‘model’ shots in the fighting scenes are amongst the laziest in the series,
not believable in the slightest. Even away from the models things don’t seem to
have been filmed with their customary care: despite the comments of Michael Grade
and a generation of Z-list comedians there are actually only three instances in
Dr Who where sets wobble: here when the Doctor slams a door and the wall
visibly quivers (the others are in ‘The Sunmakers’ and ‘Warriors Of The Deep’).
If you’re curious as to why Professor Kettlewell has a ladder very prominently
placed in his laboratory, no it’s not because he’s painting the ceiling (heaven
forefend, is there a character in all of Who you’d trust to do that without
accident less than the Professor?) It’s because there was a scenery strike
midway through shooting this story – not for wage increase this time but
because so many productions were asking them to do ‘extra’ work they weren’t
meant to do; it happened mid-scene setup and everyone was too nervous to say
who should take down the ladder in case they caused another walkout. The same
strike is the reason why a 1973 episode of Blue Peter (featuring former
companion Peter Purves) went out from the set of the Doctor’s UNIT laboratory,
their chose of set given that the strike meant no one had built theirs (yes, I
was sad when I first learned the presenters didn’t actually sleep in the studio
with the animals too).
As for the location
filming, it still worked out kind of well but again it was not what was intended:
the idea was to have Thinktank based in an underground bunker, because the BBC
just happened to own one! It was over in Wood Norton, Worcestershire and had been built in secret in case of actual
attack as a safe place the BBC could still broadcast from if someone bombed TV
centre. Unused for the reason it was built it had long since been turned into a
trainee facility for technicians and many people in the Who production team had
been through it (including this story’s director Christopher Barry). Agreements
were made and filming plans made up, before someone official came down to see
the filming and panicked: the bunker might still be used one day and giving
away secrets like this was prohibited! It turned out that it was a
misunderstanding on the part of the property Dr Who wanted to use. The end
result is a compromise, the building the BBC had actually agreed to, a
non-descript building opposite that did at least look like the sort of place a
mad scientists would work (as, indeed, many already had). The end result is
often hard to look at: other stories are made worse and have lesser effects
certainly, but those stories tend to be so ambitious you wonder how they got
away with it; there’s nothing on ‘Robot’ they hadn’t tried before and it really
should have worked. It also looks more like children’s television than anything
since ‘The Celestial Toymaker’s board games and more than anything until
farting Slitheens in ‘Aliens Of
London/WWIII’, so out of kilter with everything to come with Hinchcliffe’s
horror leanings that its hard to believe it’s the same series, never mind part
of the same season as ‘The Ark In Space’ and ‘The Sontaron Experiment', two of
the most ‘adult’ stories of the lot. Still, as the Doctor says in this story’s
most remembered quote, what’s the point in being grownup if you can’t be
childish sometimes’? There’s a place for childish gloriously silly stories in
Who and this one is better than most (looking at you ‘Fear Her’ and ‘Space Babies’!)
Besides, most viewers
only have eyes for the Doctor or the Robot and on those two scores at least
this story succeeds very well indeed. ‘Robot’ is good fun, one of those
brilliantly silly stories that only Dr Who can do, with several laugh out loud
scenes (most of them the new Doctor getting to grips with his new appearance in
a fun comic way, so different to the sombre tone of all three of his
predecessor’s opening episodes). Though often overlooked, sandwiched between the
karma of ‘Spiders’ (one of the most adult of all Who stories intellectually)
and the horror of ‘Ark In Space’ (one of the most adult of all Who stories in
terms of how old you have to be to watch it and not have nightmares) ‘Robot’ is
well worth watching in its own right. Somewhere out there in a parallel universe
with a different, perhaps more timid producer there’s a season where all the
stories look like this, with Tom Baker spinning his own twist on very 3rd
Doctory stories, and you know what? I’d have been happy to watch that too. What this
story doesn’t have is the depth of the 4th Dr stories to come, the big moral
debates, the clash of strong characters, the urgency that everything we know
and love could be lost if the goodies fail. Instead it’s just a tale of a giant
robot that causes a bit of minor local damage that’s easily solved, even by an
unstable Doctor who isn’t fully up to speed yet. In that sense it’s not a story
to match the ambitious brilliance of ‘Spearhead
From Space’ and its close cousin ‘Rose’
or the big showdown of ‘Power Of The Daleks’
or the inventiveness and originality of ‘Castrovalva’
‘The Christmas Invasion’ and ‘The Eleventh Hour’ to come. There’s no
big emotional sense of the trauma the Doctor has just been through, forced to change
into a whole new person and no episodes of delirium that gives you space to
miss the old Doctor before the new one arrives – instead Tom Baker just takes
the baton and runs from the first. It’s an exercise in safety, of doing a plot
that will work in the background while the new Doctor settles in and already
the new Doctor seems to have outgrown this cosy UNIT family unit, as if he
doesn’t really belong here. With so much to get right and not only the outgoing
production team but the new production team leaning over Terrance’s shoulder
and breathing in his ear it’s the closest Who comes in the pre-1980s of being
written by committee, to fill in what a standard DW story looks like (in other
words it is, funnily enough, the ‘classic’ story I can most imagine an
artificial intelligence giant robot coming up with). But just because something
is light and repeats old ideas for the most part that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
‘Robot’ has fun doing all the things this show used to do not necessarily
better but certainly differently and as an introduction to a new Doctor, as a
re-set button that unlocks the mysteries of time and space anew and as a good
fun story in its own right ‘Robot’ works very well indeed. With so much to do
in such a short space of time and so much resting on the first story of a new
era that made a lot of people inside and outside the production team nervous, that
is a marvel in itself.
POSITIVES + The defining
scene of who Tom Baker is comes when he’s put with this series’ ‘other’ Doctor,
the much loved but pretty useless Harry Sullivan, judged to perfection as
always by the much-missed Ian Marter. Though designed to be the younger action
hero if an older Doctor was cast (think ‘Department S’), instead he becomes the
Ernie Wise to Tom Baker’s Eric Morecambe and never more than in the scene where
the timelord runs rings around the human, proving his fitness by
karate-chopping wood blocks and running on the spot while bewildering the poor
man with his two hearts beating fast. Even though Harry is a senior UNIT
medical officer officially in charge and thus highly respected, you always know
which one of them’s going to end the scene tied up in a cupboard with a
skipping rope. More than any scene this is the one where Tom Baker wins over
all the confused Pertwee fans with his brilliant clowning around and even after
sixty-two years and counting of cracking gags it’s still one of his funniest
scenes in all of Who, judged to absolute perfection.
NEGATIVES - Some of the
model shots in this story really are atrocious. The production team struggle to
convey the big ‘King Kong’ like action sequences without a Hollywood budget –
odd, really, that a writer as experienced as Terrance Dicks should have written
so many sequences like these in, knowing how they were likely to turn out. In
the end they have to settle for cheap plastic models in long shot, the
artificial-in-all-the-wrong-ways robot clutching a doll that looks more like
The Rani than Sarah Jane, with the shot of an action man toy tank (with action
man soldiers) trundling its way onto screen to shoot it quoted by many a fan as
their least favourite model shot in the entire series. All I can say is...at
least its not as bad as the model dinosaurs, although there’s even less excuse
for using cheap models a year after they turned out so badly last time.
BEST QUOTE:
‘The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated
idiots. They do exactly what you tell them at amazing speed, even if you order
them to kill you. So if you do happen to change your mind, it's very difficult
to stop them obeying the original order, but - not impossible [saves the world
with a flourish]’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Maybe the reason the TV story ‘Robot’ feels so much like a cartoon is because it’s the second Dr Who story by that name (well, technically ‘Dr Who and The Robot’), following a comic strip published in TV Comic issues #977-984 between September and October 1970 with Dr Who alongside such luminaries as ‘Tom and Jerry’ ‘The Pink Panther’ ‘Catweazel’ ‘Bugs Bunny’ ‘Laurel and Hardy’ ‘Mighty Moth’ (don’t ask) and ‘Texas Ted and His Big Fat Head’ (!) An early story for the 3rd Doctor rather than the fourth, its otherwise eerily similar, so much so that you wonder if Terrance Dicks or Barry Letts remembered okaying this strip when they needed a story in a hurry (it was part of their job description after all). There are a few differences: the mad professor in this story is the more likely named Carl Readon (‘Kettlewell’ is totally a comic strip name too) while the robot is named Robbie and is thin with long arms and legs rather than the fatter one in the TV show (it looks like C3P0 and Tik-Tok from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ books had an anaemic love child). There’s also no assistant reporter to get investigating (but there is a Jo Grant-like blonde called Miss Francis, the closest the comics come to paying for Katy Manning’s likeness). Everything else is much the same though: the robot gets loose and goes on the rampage but is a sweetheart really when left to his own devices, with The Doctor horrified when UNIT try to shoot it down (which just sets its deadly laser beams off instead). Robbie seems unstoppable until The Doctor realises what the root cause is: the poor robot’s just unhappy! The solution? Give him a pet dog. No seriously, that’s how it ends: it turns out that the professor’s dog Scruff was barking in the background of all the tapes he used when programming Robbie and the robot had grown used to hearing his happy yapping. The strip ends with a cute drawing of the robot dancing and smiling, Scruff at his side, while the UNIT helicopter flies off and the Brig no doubt scratching his head inside.
‘Robo Rampage’ (2016) is one of the more obscure
‘modern’ stories out there, a 12th Doctor comic strip included in
the ‘Free Comic Book Day’ celebrations of 2016 alongside stories featuring Drs
9-11. Just as with ‘Robot’ there’s a ginormous android rampaging around London
that UNIT have to deal with. The robot is even named ‘K2’ in homage! Given that
it’s basically the same story minus the Sarah Jane bits, the more interesting
sections come from trampling newer buildings (like the ‘London Eye’ that
becomes wrapped round the robot’s foot!) and how these two very different
Doctors take command: the Capaldi Doctor is far more hands on than Tom Baker
and way grumpier; Osgood (either the Human or Zygon version; the text is
ambiguous about this) is also very different to The Brigadier’s shoot-first
ask-questions-later technique and is almost a calming influence on The Doctor.
There’s not much in this story you wouldn’t be able to guess for yourselves,
though and quite honestly the version ion your head is probably written better.
While it’s never mentioned on screen, I – like many
fans and Terrance Dicks in his Target novelisation – like to think that the
Doctor’s first visit to the land of the Sevateem and Tesh in ‘The Face Of Evil’
takes place during this story, when he first regenerates and leaves when
unstable; it would explain why he made such a hash of things and why his later
self can’t remember being there (while it has to be the 4th Doctor
who turned up not one of the others, given that there’s a ruddy great monument
of his face carved into the rock!) This is far from accepted fan lore, but if Terrance,
who wrote the script for ‘Robot’ and the novelisation of ‘Face Of Evil’, says
this is canon then that’s good enough for me! It’s a shame Big Finish haven’t
done a run of stories set in this small window of opportunity because you
suspect Tom Baker would have great fun having the chance to be totally mad and
eccentric rather thn getting to grips with his later darker Doctor.
Previous ‘Planet
Of The Spiders’ next ‘The Ark In Space’
No comments:
Post a Comment