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...'
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 DW 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 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 it deserves it: not every scene is gold but, minute for minute, this might well be the finniest DW of them all. Even more than ‘I Claudius’ (or this show's liekly inspiration 'A Funny Thing Happened To me On My way To The Forum'). For me at least ‘The Romans’ gets the balance of drama, brutal realism and sly humour spot on, though more than almost any other DW story you have to think back to the mindset of someone first watching it in 1965 when they didn’t expect any of this. It’s all part of one of the most significant behind-the-scenes changes in DW that never really gets talked about: the first change of script editor from the intellectual literary of David Whittaker to the more TV-,literate Dennis Spooner, a writer whose every bit as clever but whose driving force is‘what great TV!’ rather than ‘what a great story’. ‘The Romans’ takes a typical Whittaker plotline as used throughout all the previous DW 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. Before the opening titles role you assume you’re going to be in for the same as usual but even more brutal, more desperate and dark. However ‘The Romans’ turns all that on its head. We start with 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 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. Even when the Doctor gets grumpy after an argument and takes Vicki sightseeing with him it’s all a very Doctory ruse to see the sights while leaving them to their romancing, with William Hartnell sparring off Maureen O’Brien like never before. When Emperor Nero turns up we’ve been taught by the past year and a bit of historicals that he’s going to be just like the history books: regal, noble, ruthless. It’s a shock 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. 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. But even then this period is never quite what it seems from the history books: Barbara easily outwits Nero, who turns out to be lecherous as well as stupid, while far from being a dog-eat-dog world Ian makes friends easily even for him and creates a revolution almost without trying. 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).Seen back to back with, say, ‘The Reign Of Terror’ (the last historical) or ‘The Crusades’ (the next one) ‘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 DW 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 – and its even more misunderstood and disliked than this one). It would indeed be awful were it not genuinely funny, but it is. We think of him as grumpy but William Hartnell was a really funny actor (he was picked for the first ‘Carry On’ film for a reason after all) and revels in the chance to do some comedy after 18 months of being serious and intense and indeed gets more tough and tumble action than most Doctors ever get to do, dispatching of 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. Hartnell is never less than brilliant, even when he’s forgotten his lines and desperately reaching for the next word, but he’s never better than here where he gets to show a new side to this character he inhabits so well. 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 and thinks of the past as something to enjoy rather than run from, which is such a refreshing change. As for Russell and Hill, their opening scenes playing practical jokes on each other are some of the funniest DW scenes of them all. By contrast all the guest parts play it straight – even Derek Francis as Nero 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 he 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. 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 DW stories – its 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 its a drama and its not just the present day or the future that are there to be laughed at; mankind was ridiculous in all eras including ourts 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) – but in a more tongue-in-cheek TV savvy type way. 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 and a bit of mood lighting. By contrast with how amazing Marco Polo’s China and Revolutionary Paris looked the Roman sets aren’t quite as convincing either (though still impressive). By the time the last part comes around you still don’t feel as if you know Ancient Rome as well as other places we’ve been to – honestly its a period long overdue for a sequel (and no blowing upPompeii and Arthur Darvill in a toga don’t count). These are small destarii though compared to the price of one of DW’s funniest stories and one of the bravest too in just how many formulas are turned on their head, pretty much for the first time. 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 – but on its own merits ‘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. There really is no place like Rome and no DW story like The Romans.
+ We should have had more opening scenes like the one in the Roman
villa, where apparently the Tardis crew have spent days. So many DW
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. 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 (and this scene follows on from the
usual ‘Tardis in jeopardy!’ sequence as it falls down a ravine;
we even crossfade to an apparently unconscious Ian, but it turns out
he’s dozing on a Roman lounger – another joke played on the
viewer). By a combination of how well the characters were written,
how well they’re acted and how much time the early DW 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
and its good to see them having fun. O tempora o Mores indeed.
- There’s more ‘stock footage’ in this story than probably any
other DW four-parter. You can see why – I mean, its not as if they
were going to build a slave-ship and a gladiator arena in a studio
this size and then bring out some lions (though ‘The Ark’ will
manage an elephant that said) – but its not terribly well placed
this time around and it still jars you whenever you see it and
reminds you that that this is a ‘TV’ programme. Not least because
The Rome’ shown here is decidedly small scale compared to the sets
for, say, Dido and Vortis either side of this story.
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