The Sensorites: Ranking - 103

                     The Sensorites

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 20/6/1964-1/8/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: Peter R Newman, director: Mervyn Pinfield, Frank Cox)

Rank: 103

  '...I now give you the strongest sentence known to Sensorites. To be locked in a dark room and made to listen to The Sensorite Spice Girls!'

 

 Most DW stories are designed to make you go ‘aaaaaaah!’ and hide behind the sofa. Every so often, though, you get a story that makes you want to go ‘awwwww!’ and move towards your TV so you can pat the cute aliens. ‘The Sensorites’ is one of those stories with a race more ridiculous than The Ood, cuter than Beep The Meep and fluffier than P’ting. The title creatures are only the third alien ‘monsters’ ever seen in DW and couldn’t be less like the first, the Daleks: they’re a sweet, timid, tiny species who are frightened of loud noises and whose biggest fear is being left in the dark. They have big clumsy feet they’re always tripping over, a face that looks like a squashed moomin that hasn’t shaved and far from charging round the universe shuffle like old men on their way to a Bingo hall. And why not? DW is about exploring worlds before its about conquering monsters and they can’t all be bad. Even when one of the Sensorites does, inevitably, turn out to be ‘evil’ he’s evil not in an ‘I want to destroy the universe’ type way so much as ‘a bit naughty’ (and he’s played by that nice comedian Peter Glaze just to rub the point home). How can they possibly fill a six-parter with that you might ask yourself – and you’d be right. Like many a DW story that runs longer than a month its extended not for reasons of plot but for budget, so that costs for mega costumes and sets can be offset by stretching them out across more episodes. A lot of early DW stories can best be described as leisurely, even by fans like me who enjoy the chance to explore worlds and characters without the plot getting in the way. This one though is as slow as they come – The Sensorites even arrive slowly, making their presence felt bit by bit for several episodes before they finally appear. For most fans this story is just too slow for words. Occasionally, though, slow is good, especially if you were watching this story at the time when it makes for a nice pace change between the intensity of ‘The Aztecs’ and the rushing around of ‘The Reign Of Terror’. Not much is known about writer Peter R Newman: he was a radio writer and this was his only TV work, while he was one of the first DW writers to die, as early as 1970 (and no, he isn’t a relative of DW creator and BBC head Sydney Newman). It’s a shame: in these early pioneering ideas he ‘gets’ this series more instinctively than most, inventing a plausible world and then throwing the Dr and co at it to see what happens. Admittedly some of the plot has often come in for mocking from less patient Whovians as so much of it revolves around what seems an unlikely plot development: The Sensorites don’t just look alike to us but can’t tell themselves apart without the sashes they wear around their arms (that’s...ridiculous. Especially given that so much of their society is driven by a class system – you’d think somebody would have bumped off their rivals and pretended to be someone else to get the top job by now). Mostly, though, ‘The Sensorites’ is an important stepping stone for the series that never gets nearly enough credit for how many inventions start here. This is the first time DW looked at Earth’s future (after jaunts on Skaro and Marinus and more journeys to earth’s past than UK Gold) and considering we were still five years away from landing on the moon for real it gets most things spot on: mankind’s desperate need to search the stars is stronger than their fear of being confined in close proximity and these Humans aren’t all that evolved from, say, the cavemen or the Aztecs in recent historicals: they still squabble, they still follow rank and order blindly even from people who never deserved to be given authority and mankind is still at the mercy of outside influences, far easier to break than they realise. Given the 1964 dating, written somewhere around the Cuban Missile Crisis and screened pretty soon after it, the plot also works as an impressive early plea for tolerance at the height of the cold war that not many other series were brave enough to tackle yet. As it turns out The Sensorites cause the humans harm not out of malice so much as by accident; they assume that Humans are every bit as telepathic as they are and don’t understand why they’re clutching their heads in pain and going a bit bonkers. The Humans, in turn, don’t realise that their previous expedition basically did to the Sensorites what the Europeans did to the Aztecs (a nice tie in to the previous story that), even if (spoilers) they ultimately come out the worse for stealing what isn’t strictly theirs. In the end it’s all one big misunderstanding on both sides and this is the first of many many times that the Tardis crew act as intermediaries and put things right through peaceful means: as such its the first real time the Doctor gets involved and makes things better because its the ‘right’ thing to do (as opposed to the only way to get the Tardis back or save his skin), even if it takes Susan’s open heart to make him open his. ‘The Sensorites’ creates a lot of what we now think of as DW (the idea of it as a series promoting peace arguably starts here too, just five stories after the Doctor was urging The Thals to stop being pacifists in their fight against the Daleks, like many a 1950s action serial – from now on this series will get more and more with the 1960s vibe of peace, tolerance and understanding from hereon in; I’d argue it still has a really 1960s vibe even now).This is easily Susan’s best story from her ten story run as it gives her something more to do than sob like a child or pout mysteriously like an alien and she turns out to be more than a little telepathic herself. This leads to all sorts of questions in future stories as the Doctor isn’t (‘much’) and no other timelords we ever meet seem to have that gift, but it was a big part of the original pitch to DW series writers and one of the reasons Carole Ann Ford took the part. She’s brilliant here, no longer the junior member of the Tardis crew falling over and getting into trouble but an actual teenager trying to become an adult, stepping up to do the right thing even if her inexperience still means she makes mistakes and trying to be independent of her, let’s face it, often overbearing grandfather. The Dr-Susan clashes bring out whole new aspects of both their characters and both Carole and William Hartnell excel like never before as their family bond is tested almost to breaking point. For once Ian and Barbara, the strength of so many stories in the first two series, take a back seat – to the point where Barbara disappears for a week on the Sensorite spaceship and isn’t seen at all when Jacqueline Hill goes on holiday (she’s not in the next two episodes much either, as if the writer couldn’t work out a way to get her to fit back in again). If its a bit creaky in places then it still holds up better than practically any other TV on in 1964 and if it lacks the fright factor of all the famous DW stories then, well, this story is so early they hadn’t created that formula yet. DW, in its first year, was all about education and exploration before the success of the Daleks meant that most writers just tried to re-write that. But ‘The Daleks’ was nearly cancelled before a single scene was filmed because the script deviated so far from what this series was originally meant to be – a way of exploring space to find out more about ourselves. Of all the DW stories that went out I suspect this is the one, certainly out of the fuuristic stories, closest to Sydney Newman’s original vision for the series. While I suspect a series that looked like ‘The Sensorites’ every week wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near 60 years, there’s a lot to love about this quieter, calmer approach and of all the wild and weird worlds the Tardis has landed on The Sense-Sphere is one of the most ‘real’, if only because we have the time to properly explore it for once. Throw in a fine cast (Peter Glaze is astonishingly good at being scheming for someone whose most famous role was saying ‘doh!’ decades before Homer Simpson and making small boys and girls hold cabbages without dropping them; seriously you think today’s children’s programmes are nuts but they had nothing on ‘Crackerjack’) and the regular cast on particularly sparkling form and you have another of DW’s most neglected gems. Though even I, as one of its biggest fans, confess it would have been an even better four parter than a six.

+ The first cliffhanger is great. Unseen by The Doctor an unknown hand has taken away the lock from The Tardis, stranding everyone far from home. It must have immense technology to be capable of doing this (indeed, we never see anyone with the same power again) and we know that even The Doctor is going to have trouble getting out of this one. After all, the extra added thrill of series one was about stranding everyone from the Tardis so that they couldn’t ever get home – something that gets quietly abandoned by series two, partly because this one inspired them to re-write the Doctor as being a help to the people he meets rather than a passive observer, but its a key theme of all these early plots. The human space crew we’ve been talking to all go to sleep, as if in a trance. And then a face looks in at the window and it looks unlike anything else you’ve ever seen (and in this first shot you can’t see how small it is or how silly its feet are, so for all we know this alien race are scarier than The Daleks).

- There’s a three episode interlude involving a contaminated water supply which is giving everyone space plague. ‘The Sensorites’ is the 7^th story of DW ever made. This idea already become a tired cliché: everyone nearly died of radiation positing in story 2 in much the same way and nearly died of thirst in story 4. This isn’t the sort of space plague that makes people pulsate green (‘Seeds Of Doom’) or have their blood vessels show up on the outside of their skin either (‘The Moonbase’). Mostly the actors walk around a lot going ‘uggggh’.