The Web Of Fear: Ranking - 109

                                      The Web Of Fear

(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 3/2/1968-9/3/1968, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Derrick Sherwin, writers: Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, director: Douglas Camfield)

Rank: 109

  'Underground overground wobbling free

The abominable snowmen otherwise known as yeti

Making the most of the web guns they fire

The Great Intelligence's furry army for hire'

 

 Why are the yeti, a big splash during their debut in the hills of Tibet just a few weeks ago in DW, hiding out in London’s Underground? Nobody knows. Why do they have web guns now? Nobody knows that either. Why have they regenerated and become less cuddly? Nobody even seems to notice. What we do know is that for 45 years this story was accepted as one of those top tier DW classics that we would never get to see again – and then it was returned (or 4/6ths of it were anyway) in time for the series’ 50^th anniversary. That web of intrigue behind their recovery is complicated enough to make its own action packed six part film one day: suffice to say this is one of those stories that has grown quite a cult following down the years and still feels rather magical and mystical, despite the fact that we can now own it as a physical object and file it away amongst our other DVDs. As a result this story holds a special place in many a fans’ heart, although getting to the bottom of why it does is a bit trickier than it is with other, more obvious recovered classics like ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ or indeed what we have left of ‘The Abominable Snowman’. Mostly this is six episodes of running around in the dark, like a giant game of hide and seek, while trying to work out which of the UNIT soldiers is a spy, with barely a break away from that main plot: hardly the most taxing DW affair. Mostly its an exercise in atmosphere and tension that doesn’t make much sense written down (indeed the novelisation is one of the weakest I always thought). What an atmosphere though: you’ll never go on the tube again without wondering what might be lurking just out of sight. This is a properly scary DW story, one where the tension is high at the start (in the one episode we always had) and only gets greater and greater after that. This story is set forty odd years after the first Yeti tale, though screened all of twelve weeks after it, when the originals would have still been fresh in everybody’s minds. It’s a nice play on the Tardis’ time-travelling abilities that sometimes gets lost in the 2^nd Dr era (when the Tardis starts becoming transport rather than the magic box and home away from home of the Hartnell era) and its fun to see Jack Watling (one of DW’s most famous guest stars, who just happens to be the dad of the actress playing companion Victoria) dressed up to look decades older and going from a middle aged action hero to a senile old man with a middle aged daughter of his own, while the Tardis crew haven’t aged a day (well, three months or so – its really interesting that they were so sure the first story was going to be a hit that they commissioned a sequel before it had even gone out). There’s the much-lauded entrance of the Brigadier whose going to hang around for the next seven years and the first shots of UNIT, although neither are quite how we imagine them just yet – full praise to Nicholas Courtney for making so much of what’s not such a great part yet (the Brig is so shifty he appears to be the human collaborator for a good half of the story and the first time we see more of him than just his feet is when he’s pointing a gun at Victoria, hardly normal Brig behaviour). UNIT are a great invention too, even if here they’re just a new name for the same old lot of soldiers – if anything its long overdue that Britain should only get its own designated alien-fighting army division at this point, in near-contemporary 1968, after invasions by Daleks, Ice Warriors and multiple groups of Cybermen. The yeti clearly make a lot more realistic sense in Tibet, but moving them to the London underground (the natural home of more than a few viewers watching this – no, not the actual underground having re-read that sentence, but you know what I mean, a place everyone knew of and a lot of people had used) really nails one of the things that makes DW great, turning the ordinary you see every day into something extraordinary that reminds us what a mind-bogglingly big and strange place the universe might be and how small out part is in it. After all, you can’t get more ordinary and realistic than a dark place full of manmade trains – or more DWish than a lumbering hairy beastie set to kill us all. As always it goes without saying that the regulars are superb – even Victoria is less wet than she often is as being against her dad makes her up her game, while Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines have worked together long enough by now to improvise their way round the dialogue and nail every line instinctively. The sound of this story is particularly memorable too: the warbling when the ‘great intelligence yeti balls’ start moving of their own accord is one of the great memorable sounds of DW and the music soundtrack is one of the better ones too, really adding to the fear and menace (it was almost a shame when we finally had pictures to go with the soundtrack, given all the things my imagination had come up with). So how does a story this full of scares, ideas and acting possibly disappoint? Well, as much as the script builds up episode by episode it also repeats itself a lot. Of all the six-parters in DW this is the one I’d take the scissors to most: there are six full episodes set in the underground without a break and while there’s a lot of mystery over who the baddy might be and where exactly the yeti are, this is one of the few stories where you could jump from the first episode to last without really having missed much (it doesn’t help that Patrick Troughton’s on holiday for part two and the plot struggles to do anything without the Doctor there). We also never find out how the yeti end up down the underground: there’s only one scene where the great intelligence gets to talk to the Doctor at all and he (She? It? Can a disembodied voice have a gender?) never reveals that much. As scary as the yeti is when close-up on screen and roaring (in reality the sound of a toilet flushing slowed down, which is a lot more effective than it sounds) for the most part they don’t do a lot and a lot of the threat relies on you remembering how scary they were last time (plus I rather liked the cuddlier look – and why would a voice and a bunch of robots feel such need for cosmetic surgery anyway?) Dare I say it, the second half of this story is a little bit boring and the story as a whole is, like many a sequel, a lot sillier and less interesting all round than the impressive debut. Nevertheless that’s just a reason why this story isn’t one of my very favourites or as high as a lot of fans would put it – this is still a great atmospheric story, one that even in the ‘monster’ season full of bases under siege is properly scary and full of new inventive ideas that will last on DW far into the future. Far from ‘abominable’ in other words.

+ Those underground sets really are extraordinarily lifelike and a real triumph for the design team. The story goes that DW’s production office got in touch with the real London underground to ask if they wanted to be featured in a story where people who ventured down to their stations were zapped by yeti robots and died a gruesome death; unsurprisingly they said no (honestly, its a bigger surprise so many similar organisations said yes to DW down the years). They couldn’t stop the BBC manufacturing their own sets though and the attention to detail, down to the railway sleepers and the mock near-future posters, is glorious. The chap at the underground who turned them down happened to see the first episode go out on TV and was so convinced the BBC had really filmed in the underground despite his refusal that he rang up to complain and was only mollified when someone sent him a photograph of the sets under construction. If they could fool him they could fool anybody and they’re a huger part of why this story works as well as it does. Oh and Pink Floyd fans should check out the names of the UNIT personnel, ‘Arnold’ and ‘Lane’, which might well be a topical joke about them being the first ‘underground’ band the writers could think of (or might just be coincidence). Sadly nobody sees a yeti called Emily play to confirm the point. In retaliation (or another coincidence) Pink Floyd return the favour by riffing on the Doctor Who theme tune during their instrumental ‘One Of These Days’ from the ‘Meddle’ LP in 1971.

- A lot of 1960s DW stories have a ‘token’ comedy character. While not as bad as, say, Pigbin Josh (unlikely yokel stereotype eaten by an orange bouncy castle) or Morton Dill (New Yorker on the Empire State Building who thinks the Daleks are a magic trick but amazingly doesn’t get exterminated...worst luck) Harold Chorley is still extremely irritating and doesn’t have any plot function except getting in the way. Apparently he’s the writers’ idea of David Frost, getting under people’s noses in the middle of an emergency and asking them stupid questions about how they’re feeling world seems doomed, but David Frost was never that irritating (Chorley’s actually a lot more like Robert Peston, though he was all of eight when this story went on air). No serious army would ever tolerate his presence, but then UNIT never seem that serious an army organisation even here in their first appearance, what with blowing tunnels up without checking whose down them (the Doctor as things turn out..), letting civilians roam around instead of cornering it off and not really having much of a plan which soldiers to send where. This will only get worse when UNIT become regulars, strangely.