The Romans
(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, 16/1/1965-6/2/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, writer: Dennis Spooner, director: Christopher Barry)
Rank: 97
'A funny thing happened to me on my way to the Tardis...'
There was a joke going round the other year about ‘how often do you think about the Roman empire?’ The answer for me is quite a lot actually – but only because I’m thinking of this story. And chuckling. Rome wasn’t built in a day but it feels as if ‘The Romans’ was written in one – so goes the general view of fans then and now who, coming to this first all-out Dr Who comedy, wonder why its painted in such broad strokes following such complex realistic portrayals of other historical characters in stories past. It’s an episode that was far ahead of its time but its mixture of satire wrapped in a farce wrapped in an intelligent thinking drama wrapped in a toga suddenly made a lot more sense after ‘I Claudius’ tried the same thing of making horrific and tragedy circumstances funny on a much bigger budget starring Derek ‘The Master’ Jacobi and John ‘The War Doctor’ Hurt (not to mention support stars Patrick ‘Picard’ Stewart, Brian ‘King Ycarnos’ Blessed. Kevin ‘Tobais Vaughan/Mavic Chen’ Stoney and Stratford ‘Giant Urbankan Alien Frog’ Johns) in 1976. One can only hope the repeat of I Claudius on BBC4 this week does the same and make this story popular all over again because ‘The Romans’ deserves it: not every scene is worth a million sestertius but, minute for minute, this might well be the finniest Dr Who of them all. Even more than ‘I Claudius’ (or this show's likely inspiration 'A Funny Thing Happened To Me On My Way To The Forum'). For me at least ‘The Romans’ gets the period balance of drama, brutal realism and sly dark humour spot on. Despite the enslavements and the gladiator combats and the assassination attempts, it’s all brilliant fun.
However watching it means
that, more than almost any other Dr Who story, you have to think back to the
mindset of someone first watching it in 1965 who wouldn’t have been expecting
any of this. Historicals were serious, there was nothing funny about them. It’s
all part of one of the most significant behind-the-scenes ‘regenerations’ in Dr
Who that never really gets talked about: the first change of script editor from
the more abstractedly literate David Whittaker to the more TV-literate Dennis
Spooner, a writer who’s every bit as clever but whose driving force is ‘what
great TV!’ rather than ‘what a great story’ or ‘what a great chance for
knowledge’. This is the first Dr Who story that Whittaker hasn’t either written
or script-edited and it feels like Spooner stretching his writing muscles and
putting his owen stamp on the series. You see, while both men believe greatly
that historical times were full of people ‘just like us’ only in fancy dress,
after that they have very different ideas. Whittaker is respectful of history,
sees it as a complex time when choices weren’t clearcut and when being heroic
meant doing your best in difficult circumstances while communities were a
mixture of the good and bad in humanity always. Above all, history was
complicated. Though Whittaker never wrote a historical story himself he was
very close to the writers who did, John Lucarotti (who manages to make Marco
Polo a respectable scholar and even turns Kubla Khan into a nice old man, while
The Aztecs are a society of arts and intellect as well as human sacrifice) and
Anthony Coburn (whose cavemen are as much of a mixture of conflicting and
contrasting views as any 1960s society). Even Spooner’s own ‘Reign Of Terror’
has been edited into shape to reflect the other stories, where the focus was
moved from the bright colourful caricatures to the debate about whether the
French revolutionaries were any better than the people they were replacing,
with even Barbara and Ian debating both sides. Everyone in the past feels
three-dimensional and relatable because Whittaker has thought his work through
and is keen to show how history has shaped people who think and feel and love
and hate just like we do, even though they’re living in very different
circumstances. You can tell that Whittaker was proud of his knowledge and his
education and was a great teacher, loving the chance to pass that on to a new
generation of children. Spooner, though every bit as intelligent, had a very
different drive to doing Dr Who. He’d left school at eleven after being
evacuated in WWII and never went back again. He didn’t let that lack hold him
back though; he’s learned to cover up for it the way clever but uneducated
people do with lots of humour and charm. He’s not going to carry on doing
things the Whittaker way because he doesn’t know how to do that – his is a more
‘Asterix’ or ‘Flintstones’ view of history, where people are exactly the people
you see in everyday 1960s life just back in the past, so slave dealers are
dodgy second hand car salesmen, court poisoners are like tabloid journalists
waiting on their leaders’ downfall and our leaders are overgrown nepo babies
that no one has ever been brave enough to say ‘no’ to. The difference between
the two writers is that Whittaker shows how the different time periods you grow
up in shape you, while Spooner is all about how people never really change at
all. It’s to producer Verity Lambert’s credit that, rather than make him fit a
template he can’t write for, she even encourages him to lean into his writing
style, pushing for ‘The Romans’ to be Dr Who’s first all-out comedy – something
she’d always wanted to do but knew wouldn’t have gone down well with
Whittaker.
Of course, unless you
were one of the handful of people connected to the Dr Who production office,
you wouldn’t have known any of that. When you sat down to watch ‘The Romans’
you’d have been expecting another historical epic like we’d had in Dr Who’s
first year when things have already set into something of a pattern, only given
the subject matter even more brutal, more desperate and dark and Spooner
subverts our expectations brilliantly. ‘The Romans’ starts with a typical
Whittaker plotline as used throughout all the previous historicals – the Tardis
crew try to keep out of trouble, but are split up, put through enormous
jeopardy, meet the local figure from history by accident and then somehow have
to escape death – and ups the ante by setting it at a time we know to be
vicious, full of soldiers and conquest and gladiators. Of all the periods of
history this is the one I least fancy living in: unless you were one of the few
people lucky to be rich you really had no rights at all and little hope of
escaping the life of drudgery you were born into. If you were an outsider,
especially from a colony of Gauls like Britain, then you had no hope of
survival at all. In the 1960s every school child would have studied Roman
history at least once so knew before this story started that it was going to be
a collection of hungry lions, angry gladiators and blood and gore. However ‘The
Romans’ turns all those expectations on its head. The Tardis has gone wrong
again (and I’ve said before how I’m convinced the ship was Whittaker’s
favourite character) – it’s fallen off a cliff, the sort of thing viewers at
home laugh ought to happen and it actually does! We cut to Ian, apparently
knocked unconscious the way he traditionally is multiple times a story and…he’s
merely having forty winks in luxury in a villa. Wait, what? The regulars are
enjoying themselves on holiday? We didn’t see that coming! The Doctor and Vicki
end up going to explore – so far so normal, but wait what’s this? The Doctor’s
taking the role of a dead musician so he can meet Emperor Nero? And only
pretending to play while sucking up to his vanity? We’ve never had that before!
And wait what’s this: the expected fight scene (because every Dr Who story had
one back then) takes place not with Ian but with The Doctor, an apparently
frail old man (back before we knew about regenerations and how young he really
is at this point), engaging in fisticuffs and sending a man to his death out
the window? What?! It’s even more of a surprise when we meet Nero properly,
this episode’s historical character, and find that he’s treated very
differently to Marco Polo or Napoleon. He’s a lecherous spoilt brat, someone
who’s never been told ‘no’ in his life and the last person who should be put in
charge of the Roman Empire. Though later writers (including Whittaker himself)
will write similar scenes later, the scenes of him chasing our Barbara – a
respectable teacher more often than not dressed in a cardigan and ‘old’ to any
schoolchild watching – round his room trying to kiss her is a real surprise
when it first happens. You weren’t meant to see adults being naughty, not on a
Saturday teatime when kids were present anyway and certainly not respectable
people from history! And then there’s the crowning glory: Whittaker has spent
every one of his historical stories (most notably ‘The Aztecs’) having The
Doctor explain to Barbara that history is sacred and can’t be altered ‘not one
line’. It’s all part of the respect
Whittaker has for the past and how he wants this show to treat it. But Spooner,
with Lambert egging him on, has no such qualms: here The Doctor gives Nero the
idea to burn Rome, changing the course of history for no other reason than a
giggle.
It’s all, I’m convinced,
a great joke. Spooner was old friends with Whittaker – their paths had crossed
a lot long before Dr Who and they liked and respected each other a lot and got
on well, for all their differences. Spooner has had to watch his at times very
funny script for ‘The Reign Of Terror’ be turned into a serious work of art
(his heart is much more in the comedy gaoler or the duped tailor than the
revolutionaries), so now with the stabilisers off he can write exactly what he
want, even if it means ‘playing’ with the template his friend came up with.
Every time you assume something is going to happen the opposite happens. It’s
hard not to imagine Spooner chortling with glee every time he thinks of
Whittaker’s face watching all this happening to his precious characters, like
he’s playing the best schoolboy prank ever. I tend to think of most script
editors/show runners, after a certain time in the job, mould the Doctor to
their own ‘voice’ and what they’d most like to do if they had those special
powers of intelligence and a space-time machine: think of Barry Letts/Terrance
Dicks making the 3rd Doctor a lefty moral crusader, Russell T Davies
making Dr 10 a chatterbox or Moffat making Dr 12 grumpy, funny and Scottish.
The 1st Doctor is very much David Whittaker’s ‘voice’ once he gets
going: he’s an intellectual, a natural authority figure even without trying to
be and maybe just a little bit snobbish, a curmudgeon with a kindly twinkle in
his eye. Spooner’s character is more like The Meddling Monk (a character he’ll
invent in ‘The Time Meddler’),
laughing at authority and doing things out of pure mischief. Spooner isn’t done
there either: he deliberately wrote in the scene where Derek Francis (as Nero)
chases Jacqueline Hill (Barbara) as they were great friends (Jackie’s husband,
the director Alvin Rakoff, cast Francis a lot and they had lots of dinners as a
family) and wanted to cause a bit of ‘mischief’ based on his theory that ‘every
man secretly fancies his best friend’s wife’.
In short he’s turned Ancient Rome into a 1960s romcom, the last thing
anyone sitting down to watch this in 1965 would have expected . IT might also
help explain the way this story turned out the way it did because Spooner’s
next door neighbour happened to be Jim Dale and the Carry On star was, at the
time, rehearsing his lines for ‘Carry On Cleo, a Roman spoof. Spooner was such
a good friend he even turned up to the filming. No way was he going to be all
serious and pompous after seeing what fun they were having! (By a quirk of
fate, without knowing it Dr Who happened to hire the exact same Roman
researcher, fresh from his job on the film). It’s worth remembering that
Hartnell, too, had once been a comedy actor who’d starred in the first film
‘Carry On Sergeant’, a fact Spooner would have known only too well – both
stories are closely modelled on the rather pompous 1951 film ‘Quo Vadis’ where
a Roman nobleman (Robert Taylor) falls for a Christian slave girl (Deborah
Kerr) and both are sentenced to death by his jealous ex, a film that most
children in 1965 had both seen and been largely bored by (it’s one of those
epics with more budget than story, seemingly designed to win Oscars and be
shown in Sunday schools to bore the pants off little kids, the sort of film that
likes showing off its historical research and the piety of the characters in excruciating
detail). It’s the sort of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ – no one wants to admit to
being bored by something that’s so obviously meant to be ‘good for them’ so
everyone pretends to like it. Even the establishing ‘Rome’ caption is ‘borrowed’
directly, using the exact same font. Everyone except someone like Dennis Spooner
who hates that sort of fakeness and behaviour for behaviour’s sake. So no
wonder ‘The Romans’ turned out the way it did in reaction, as if it was written
by the schoolboy who’s taken his teacher’s class and is having the most fun
ever!
So are we if you watch
‘The Romans’ in that context. It’s great fun in almost any context
(unfortunately one exception was when episode three – the funniest – was
broadcast, a few minutes late, straight after Winston Churchill’s funeral when
it didn’t go down at all well with the casual viewers. They should have held it
back a week – and given the show some breathing room to catch up to boot). It’s
worth remembering that this story was planned to go out, at the tail end of
1964, exactly 1900 years after it was set, with lots of comments on the things
that hadn’t changed: it pokes fun at the civil rights movement by having posh
white people sold at slaves at auction, laughs at the idea of cross-continent
holidays by having Ian trapped in a galley, has a court much like a British
government full of people who are nice to everyone’s faces but secretly hate
each other’s guts and more puns than you can shake a toga at (especially the
endless puns about ‘liars playing lyres’. The Doctor spends the whole story
seeing how often he can make new companion Vicki laugh). There’s no room in Spooner’s
scripts for the sort of angst and suspicion Whittaker was so good at writing
and all four regulars are great friends, riffing off each other like never
before. Episode one has a scene that’s as cosy as any we ever see, where our
favourite foursome aren’t just escaping death but enjoying themselves. They’re
no longer the strangers wary of trusting each other but a family (Spooner doesn’t
have time or patience for the complex relationships of Whittaker, the residue
resentment of being kidnapped or the paranoia of different species rubbing
shoulders together and getting in each other’s way) and the Tardis will never
have such warm vibes again, William Russell and Jacqueline Hill making the most
of a script that pretty much accepts teachers Ian and Barbara as a couple by
this point after all they’ve been through. The joke when Barbara sends Ian to
the fridge and he temporarily forgets he’s in AD 64 is priceless. Even when the
Doctor gets grumpy after a (fake?) argument and takes Vicki sightseeing with
him it’s all a very Doctory ruse to see the sights while leaving them to their
romancing.
It would be awful were it
not genuinely funny (and some fans don’t ‘get’ it, it’s true), but ‘The Romans’
is hysterically funny. We think of him as grumpy because that’s what sort of
parts he mostly played, but William Hartnell was a really funny actor who took
to it at first not because of the ‘heavy guys’ he always used to play but
through his idol Charlie Chaplin. Spooner didn’t know him that well but talked
to him at rehearsals for ‘Terror’ and discovered his love for slapstick comedy
and decided to write some in for him (something Whittaker would never have
done). Hartnell is, well, regenerated, looking happier than we’ve seen him in
the series so far, enjoying the chance to be more rough and tumble than most
Doctors ever get to be, dispatching would-be assassins in a marvellous comic
fight before chortling with glee. Basically, in this story he gets to pay Ian’s
role, but does it without breaking character as the doddery Doctor. It’s not
just the physical comedy either – the very in-character line about being taught
to wrestle by ‘The Mountain Mauler of Montana’ (an early Doctor namecheck!) is
a Hartnell ad lib from rehearsals everyone liked enough to leave in. The actor
is really enjoying having Maureen O’Brien alongside him for most of the story:
theirs was a special bond (not least because she backed him up when he wanted
changes made to the script) and Hartnell is never less than brilliant, even
when he’s forgotten his lines and desperately reaching for the next word, showing
a whole new lighter side to this character he inhabits so well. Odd, by the way
that this Doctor should have trouble playing the lyre (a fairly easy instrument
to learn) yet plays the recorder and harp in his 2nd and 5th regenerations
no problem (if my theory is correct that each regeneration gains something his
predecessor most wanted then it would make some kind of sense the Troughton
Doctor is music mad; it’s about the only thing the 1st can’t do automatically).
It’s a great story for
the new character too. I always saw Vicki as the series’ most ‘child of the
60s’ character despite actually coming from the late 25th century and despite
being in Rome this is a very 1960s story about the righteous and the fair
overthrowing the pompous and outdated. In this story, only her second, she
delights in taking down the pointless authoritarian rules of the Roman Empire.
Where Susan would cry she’s openly sarcastic to people here. Even the fact that
the teenage companion wants to go exploring, running towards danger gleefully
rather than away from it, is such a refreshing change after ten stories of
Susan being such a wet blanket. As for Russell and Hill, their opening scenes
playing practical jokes on each other are some of the funniest Dr Who scenes of
them all and their laughter seems quite genuine. Making Dr Who in those early
days was such hard work, with so many lines to learn and such a short
turnaround before the next script came along and the sheer slog of it shows in
their faces sometimes (as it did in all long-running TV back then) but this
looks like a break everyone is enjoying and the glee is infectious. Barbara,
incidentally, is worth 50,000 sestertia - £5000, which was a lot in 1965 never
mind AD 64. No wonder she’s got a smile on her face for most of the story.
The plotlines where
Barbara is sold into slavery and Ian is sold as a gladiator seem like more
familiar territory and there is genuine fear there, that both are being taken
further and further away from the Tardis and might well become stranded
forevermore in a time that’s every bit as alien and hostile as Vortis or Skaro.
These scenes add a nice emotional edge to the story that stops Spooner throwing
out all of Whittaker’s good work just for a giggle. You feel it when Barbara is
alone, tired and grumpy, accidentally annoying the one person who can help her
in slave buyer Tigellinus (the one kind person they meet, ably played by one
time Hartnell double Brian Proudfoot: the ‘joke’ might be that he’s very like
the 1st Doctor, fair and moral, out of synch with his times, only in
a toga). You feel it when Ian is exhausted and collapsing on the Roman galley,
or about to be thrown to the lions. You even feel it when the Christian is
sentenced to death by lion but faces it heroically, a reminder to modern-day
viewers of a time when the religion was in the minority (even if the Christians
only started wearing crucifixes after the Roman Empire ended and would have
worn the ‘Pisces’ two fish symbol; as the ‘About Time’ series puts it, that
would have been like walking round with a necklace featuring the electric chair
today). The comedy isn’t there instead of the tragedy, it’s black comedy that
makes the dark bits all the darker. People are actually sarcastic in these
scripts (especially Vicki), something new we’ve never had before. Put people in
difficult situations in any time zone, says Spooner, and they’ll laugh their
way to the gallows – in that respect they’re exactly the same as ‘us’ watching
in 1965. Yet even then these Dr Who ‘traditions’ are turned on their heads.
Barbara easily outwits Nero, who turns out to be lecherous as well as stupid. Far
from being a dog-eat-dog world Ian makes friends easily even for him and
creates a revolution almost without trying. Till now all Dr Who stories,
historical or future, have been about the regulars trying to rescue each other
and return to the Tardis, their only chance of getting home. Yet ‘The Romans’
is a farce, with the four of them having their adventures in parallel,
convinced the others are having a lazy time back home at the villa while
walking past and missing each other by seconds. Mostly though these three
sub-plots are played as a farce, the characters just missing each other and
walking into scenes when the others have left, while even after they all meet
up at the end the characters all think the others have been having a lazy time
and never stop to talk about what they’ve been through (I like to think Rory’s
lonely Roman Centurion just misses all of them and is just out of shot
throughout too; it would be fitting).
It could still have gone
wrong had the casting gone badly but by contrast all the guest parts play it
straight – even Derek Francis as Nero. Francis was, at the time, the biggest
name Dr Who had ever had and he was the first actor to plead for a part on the
show rather than doing it because their agent told them to or because they’d
fallen on hard times. It was Verity who decided he ought to have this role
despite being fourteen years too old and very much against type. It is, if you
will, Dr Who’s first bit of ‘celebrity stunt casting’ (something John
Nathan-Turner will turn into a tradition in the 1980s) but in many ways the
best: he steals every scene he’s in and is a forerunner of ‘The Meddling Monk’,
seeing how much he can get away with before someone stops him, knowing full
well everyone is too afraid to. He is a larger than life character who thinks
he’s clever yet everyone else thinks is an idiot, who’s got where he has out of
riches and family ties not through sense or being the right person for the job.
However Derek doesn’t simply do the comedy: there’s still just enough steel
there behind the eyes to make him believable as a ruthless statesman, happy to
see his rivals killed. The actor cleverly plays him as a man petrified of being
found out as a dim-witted un-musical charlatan rather than the outright fool he
could have been and his sudden switches back into cunning mode as he tries to
hide this are all the more terrifying for it. Nero is really uncomfortably like
Boris Johnson when you watch this story back: fat, blonde, chasing lots of
women, a big child with childish relationships that nobody’s ever said no to
pretending to be a learned sophisticated adult. Even the ending, where Nero
burns Rome (after a hint from the Doctor, whose suddenly back to causing
history again after a year and a half of telling his companions not to) so that
he can rebuild it again and make money from it is chillingly plausible in our
post-Brexit world. There are a number of Roman historians who hated Nero’s guts
(Suetonius, specially) but – especially in this period – most people agree that
Nero was young (27), handsome, regal. So it’s a shock to the audience when he
turns out to be a vain idiot that’s easily fooled by the Doctor (via a musical
version of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’) and that everyone in his court is
secretly thinking the same thing but are too afraid to say it. In actual fact
this violent part of Nero’s nature at least is ‘wrong’: he preferred the arts
to fighting and spent less time in the gladiator arena than any of his
predecessors, while for the record we know 100% that he was Antrium when the
fires of Rome broke out, so the entire fourth episode couldn’t have happened.
And yet his characterisation here works, as a sort of exaggeration of what was
true (and which many stuffy books are too afraid to say). This is history not
for the student but for the masses and Spooner is never funnier. The slave
buyer, incidentally, is played by Edward Kelsey better known as Joe Grundy from
The Archers, who confesses to not remembering doing this story at all (as a big
friend of director Christopher Barry he may have filled in at the last minute
when someone dropped out).
The real joke, though, is
on the viewer whose tuned into this story expecting to see the darker side of
history - again - and finds themselves laughing rather than crying, despite the
many horrendous events on screen (I mean, this story features gladiatorial
combat, slaves and a large fire: this sure isn’t a comedy for the people who
had to live through all this when the Tardis took off again and yet comedy is
never that far away from tragedy, as we’ve seen in other Dr Who stories – it’s
just that in this one the comedy plays the bigger role than the tragedy). And
why not? The past is a comedy as often as it’s a drama and it’s not just the
present day or the future that are there to be laughed at; mankind was
ridiculous in all eras including our own, be it 1965 or 2023 – which feels like
the main point Dennis Spooner was making here. Which, as it happens, is much
the same point Whittaker was always making too (and why I don’t find the switch
as jarring as some fans seem to). Seen back to back with, say, ‘The Reign Of Terror’ (Whittaker script-editing
Spooner, remember) or ‘The Crusade’
(the next historical, with Spooner script-editing Whittaker for a change) ‘The
Romans’ is often silly, indulgent and drawn in bright bold crayon where the
others are in fine pencil. Most fans who’ve come to this story since never
quite know what to make of it (and it doesn’t help that of the other Dr Who
historicals that try this sort of thing 3 of them are wiped completely and ‘The Gunfighters’ was one of the
last stories released on video/DVD so few fans know it– and it’s even more
misunderstood and disliked than this one. It makes perfect sense that that
story’s writer Donald Cotton chose this story to adapt for the Traget
novelisation and has every bit as much fun turning it on its head, adding in
ancient documents and letters plus the Doctor’s diary, Ian’s journal, the poisoner
Lucretia’s autobiography and letters by Nero and Ascaris, which was a challenge
for the audiobook edition! You do wonder how some Who writers would have
reacted to the changes made in the novels had they been alive, but Spooner –
who died young aged only fifty-three in 1986 - would surely have approved of
someone ‘messing around’ with this story). However in its early days
especially, Dr Who was meant to be a bit of everything, the first truly
un-categorisable series and on that sense ‘The Romans’ scores highly, both
through laughing at human history and through laughing at the show itself.
Not everything works of
course: there are way too many coincidences in the plot, of the Tardis crew
bumping into just the right people at the right time: I mean what are the odds
that the Doctor should stumble across a murdered lyre player meant to play in
front of Nero, hours before Barbara is picked to be a slave at Nero’s court and
close enough to the shore where Ian’s slave ship is blown ashore for him to end
up there too? Some of the scenarios come and go too quickly and you long for
the hand of a David Whittaker to make more out of them: Ian’s time in the slave
ship that’s run aground, for instance, is the most action we’ve had since the
Daleks invaded Earth but its covered in two scenes, a bit of mood lighting and
a bucket of water. The whole point of doing Rome on screen usually is to show of
what scale you have – doing that on a Dr Who budget is hopeless before it even
begins, another reason Spooner’s script has so many laughs in it. Sadly though
it’s a problem they don’t quite overcome. By contrast with how amazing Marco
Polo’s China and Revolutionary Paris looked Dalek designer Ray Cusick’s Roman
sets aren’t quite as convincing either (though still impressive for the budget
and given how much Ray preferred the imagination of futuristic stories to the
research of historicals, asking never to be placed on one again). This is
surely the smallest gladiatorial auditorium seen on television, a little too
obviously a cramped set in the corner of the BBC’s tiniest studio. No way would
a mere slave/gladiator like Ian be allowed purple, at a time when the dyes were
so expensive and rare only the rich ever wore them. By the time the last
episode comes around you still don’t feel as if you know Ancient Rome as well
as other places the Tardis has been to – honestly it’s a period long overdue
for a sequel, especially as it’s one of the few timezones still locked into the
syllabus in the 2020s as much as it was in the 1960s (and no, blowing up Pompeii
and Arthur Darvill in a toga don’t count).
These are small destarii
though compared to the price of one of Dr Who’s funniest and bravest stories. If
nothing else it reversed Dr Who’s slight fall in ratings as word got round,
with the 13 million tuning in for episode one, the highest the series had ever
got (and the highest it will ever get in the black-and-white era): it was the 7th
highest watched programme of the week. Even Dalekmania didn’t reach those
heights! Of course fans get their sonic screwdrivers into a twist about it both
then and now, but there’s always been a healthy strain in Dr Who of the show
laughing at itself and not taking the things it says too seriously. Without it
the series wouldn’t have lasted five years never mind sixty. You wouldn’t want
every story to be like this one – and frankly this mixture of comedy in
horrific situations will get annoying by the time ‘The Highlanders’ comes along a
couple of years later– but as a standalone story ‘The Romans’ is a delight, a
story that takes a then-modern twist on an ancient age that’s arguably still
more than a little ahead of its time. Humour is an objective thing, different
to everyone and some later Who scripts are just stupid (‘The Voyage Of The
Damned’ tried a similar wink to camera that didn’t come off at all) but for me ‘The
Romans’ does just enough research to pay respect to the real history (Flavius
Guiscard, villa owner, is named for the Norman explorer Robert Giscuard, who’s
book on Italy and Sicily Spooner used for details, while Raymond Jones’ first
score for the series is easily his best ‘The
Savages’ is a bit weird - made up of horns, flutes, harps and clarinet –
all instruments that existed in Ancient Roman times if not necessary played
there) and just enough respect to the regulars to work. Plus it was Christmas –
not at the time of broadcast maybe but recording (the holidays fell between episodes
one and two, while if Hartnell seems a little ‘merry on the sherry’ in episode
three it was recorded on his 57th birthday, January 8th). There
really is no place like Rome and no Dr Who story like The Romans.
POSITIVES + We should
have had more opening scenes like the one in the Roman villa, where apparently
the Tardis crew have spent an entire month (by far the longest break between
stories so far). So many Dr Who stories follow on breathlessly from the last
one as if the viewers will only watch when there’s drama on the screen, but
that’s just not practical – especially given that Ian’s been knocked out cold a
dozen times by now with not much chance to recover. Odd that a story that’s an
outright farce and takes such license with Roman history should make our
time-travelling heroes seem more ‘real’ at the start than any other story but
that’s all part of the fun. By a combination of how well the characters were
written, how well they’re acted and how much time the early Who stories had for
scenes that weren’t just about the plot we feel as if we’ve lived and breathed
alongside these four more than probably any other team in the show’s history and
it’s good to see them having fun before trouble catches up with them. O tempora
o Mores indeed.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Remember
that rather odd beginning when the Tardis falls down a cliff and we’re teased
with a moment of pure horror before sharply cutting to scenes of the Tardis
crew lounging in a Roman villa? Ever wondered how they ended up there? Well, so
did David McIntee in the short story ‘Roman Cutaway’, the highlight of the
rollercoaster ride of a book that is ‘More Short Trips’ (1999). Ian manages to
clamber out with great difficulty, annoying the Doctor by felling a tree that
falls inside the Tardis and nearly onto the controls. After clambering out, Ian
and Barbara stay behind to try and lever the Tardis upright (it doesn’t work)
whilst the Doctor and Vicki go for a walk. They come across the villa they’ll
call their own just in time for the dying words of a slave called Lucius who
has been badly clawed by a lion escaped from the arena and begs them to look
after his master’s property for him. The lion, meanwhile, is still on the loose
and heading straight for Ian and Barbara – cue an epic game of hide and seek
that results in the lion being squashed by a combination of Ian’s ingenuity and
a falling boulder whereby they all go back to the Villa. Just in time for a few
minutes into episode one. That’s the
plot, but where McIntee excels is in getting inside the minds of the regulars
and exploring their deeper feelings at being in Rome: Vicki is impatient to
explore her first alien planet and still a little wary of her new friends,
while the Doctor veers between sombre and mischievous, outwardly brusque but
inwardly deeply concerned by the companions in his care and ready to do battle against
a lion with his walking stick even though he has no doubts he’ll come off worst.
It’s the burgeoning romance between Ian and Barbara you take away with you most
though – the story starts with an uncomfortable dream Ian has about Barbara
nearly dying in a car crash and being unable to save her (a dream that’s almost
exactly like the tacked-on beginning of the first Dr Who book ‘In An Exciting
Adventure With The Daleks’), the sight of her blood-stained body filling him
with horror as dream-Ian realises he
never got to tell Barbara that he loves her. He remembers his dream again when
the lion is on the prowl. Of all the many dangerous things Ian has ever faced
up to finally admitting to Barbara how he feels is the hardest one of all,
though luckily for him he thinks she’s asleep at the time he finally plucks up
the courage to confess it in the villa (she isn’t – Barbara is just plucking up
the courage to tell him how much she loves him back and stalling for time, by
which point Ian’s asleep himself). One of the all time great Who short stories
that could totally be a lost first episode of the story proper.
Previous ‘The
Rescue’ next ‘The Web Planet’
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