The Three Doctors: Ranking - 77

   The Three Doctors

(10th Anniversary Special/Season 10, Drs 1, 2 and 3 with Jo and UNIT, 30/12/1972-20/1/1973, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Lennie Mayne)

Rank: 77

   'The Edwardian, The Clown and the Dandy can be friends 

One of them keeps the rest in order 

One of them has brought his recorder 

One of them has a hovercraft that goes on water And though they've ended up in a world of antimatter that's about to annihilate us all that's actually a good reason why they should stay friends' 

 

 Onto the 10^th anniversary story now, which just wins he questionable award of being my favourite multi-Doctor story by a whisker. Not least because its the first one: how brilliant a concept it is to have the current Doctor meeting his past selves at all, the sort of thing no other show could do. So much so that many people have tried to take credit for it down the years: the fans who wrote into the production office suggesting it, the production team of producer Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks who wanted a gimmick for the 10^th anniversary and even William Hartnell, whose said to have dropped into the production office looking for work and asked for a way he could plausibly come back for a story(which seems unlikely given his health, but he was certainly game for the challenge and relished being asked back again). This is the one and only time we get to see the three actors who played the first three Doctors on screen together and they’re brilliant: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, with help from Terrance, really nail both that these are three distinctive characters with their own characteristics and quirks and that this is still, underneath it all, the same man (they act like brothers here, triplets maybe, distinct but with a shared history, DNA and drive, rather than clones or colleagues, the other ways they could have played it). Pertwee is as he always is, dashing, heroic, straightforward. Troughton is cuddlier than he was in the past, his comedy just what he does rather than what he hides behind to bring the monsters down, but he’s never funnier than here and the combination of writing and acting make him feel as if he’s never been away. Hartnell should have been an equal player and eagerly agreed when the production team phoned him up, but his arteriosclerosis meant that a full day standing around in drafty a recording studio remembering lines was beyond him (his wife Heather is said to have phoned back and explained her hubby got carried away ans they’d have to make allowances if they wanted him) so instead the 1^st Dr gets a few key scenes over-seeing from the Tardis scanner. He still steals the show, at least for me, with his old mixture of grumpy goodwill and tough love we’ve seen used on so many people over DW’s first three years now used on his future younger-looking but older selves, who he treats as a pair of slightly dense children. We get several firsts here along the way that it still amazes me people actually sat down and invented out of thin air: its a masterstroke to make the multiple Dr reunion a bitch-fest rather than a love-in, like a family reunion where they just clash again and again – it would have been an obvious thing to do to make this a love-fest or a superhero team-up, but its right that nobody did this, given that the best DW stories go out of their way to show the Dr as flawed. Dr 1 has the best put downs of his future selves as ‘a dandy and a clown’, but Troughton’s sly smile and Pertwee’s look of exasperation are great too: its worth remembering that all three men were known for their comedy at least as much as their drama before taking the role and take it in turns being the straightman and comedians. Katy Manning and Nicholas Courtney are wonderful too as Jo and the Brigadier, while John Levene gets his biggest amount of screentime so far (mostly because he got all of Jamie’s intended lines, Frazer Hines having to back out because of other commitments at the last minute). Note how Dr 2 is much more patient with the Brig (who he met twice after all) and much more indulgent towards Jo, to the point where Dr 3 gets most protective of her, rather than having the same relationship with the people around him as the ‘other’ Drs automatically. As for the main story, it means well and like the other reunion stories is a lot more original and ambitious than perhaps it needs to be (after all, if you can’t be self-indulgent and get away with stuff on your birthday when can you?) I’m intrigued that Dicks gave this story to Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write rather than keeping it for himself or one of his closest pals like Robert Holmes or Malcolm Hulke. At this point in time the two men had only delivered one DW script and while ‘Claws Of Axos’ has a tonne of energy, ambition and imagination its not what you’d call a milestone of the series. Giving this all-important first anniversary to them, the junior members of the writing team, was like asking your three year old toddler to plan your aunty’s birthday: you know everyone’s going to have fun galore but not that everyone’s necessarily going to be in one piece by the end of it. They do, however, come up trumps with what’s easily their best script and one that adds a great deal to DW mythos without clashing with what we’ve come to know (it helps that so much of the Dr’s past was still open-ended at this point). This is the first time we meet Omega, creator of the timelords banished to a world of anti-matter, whose still so cross about it that we get the wonderful concept that he’s created a world for himself out of sheer belligerence, refusing to die out of spite. We’ve spent so long thinking of the timelords as being noble and emotionally even (including The Master and to an extent the Dr) that Omega is a surprise: a shouty ranty being whose spent an eternity raging at the injustice of being left behind while the people he ‘created’ live their lives forgetting him. This being a Baker-Martin script there’s a lot of scientific concepts being discussed, far more than other writers would put in, even though the story makes less scientific sense than usual. Still, while scifi plots about antimatter seem old hat now (Star Trek: Next Generation did them every other week at one point) this was pretty much the first TV scifi episode to address the idea. The same with black holes, a concept so new the Drs actually explain it to the audience instead of assuming they’ll know what they are. Don’t go looking for too much accuracy though, with the 2^nd Dr’s recorder from ‘our’ universe causing the anti-matter universe to collapse one of the great ‘what the?’ plot moments of DW. Notably its a very 3^rd Dr plot (science-based, with an individual whose up to the Dr’s level and tries to out-think him – in between all the shouting – with the Dr an authority figure battling to make people believe him), rather than a battle under siege like the 2^nd Dr stories or a world to explore in search of a plot like Dr 1. To be honest there’s a bit too much plot and it gets in the way of the banter and the story falls apart slightly when the Drs get separated and end up in Omega’s anti-matter lair (though check out the visible relief when Pertwee’s back with Jo again and on more familiar ground – he got on with Troughton great but they had very different acting styles; Pertwee was word perfect and pre-rehearsed every last expression and pause; Troughton improvised wildly and often left Pertwee scrabbling to work out where his cues were meant to be). Dr Tyler, for instance, gets far too many sub-plots taking up precious screentime and just gets in the way, even though his dotty professor taking everything in his stride would be a highlight of other DW stories. Considering that this story was such a big event – getting a Radio Times front cover and much loved pull-out souvenir and everything; the last until the 20^th (and it seems amazing in retrospect that there wasn’t one for the whole of Tom Baker’s run) its odd that this story only got the same measly budget as the stories around it and it really shows – particularly in the Gell Guards, which are just Axons painted a different colour and who don’t really need to be there at all (typical, we wait ten years for a multi Dr story and then they get put against the flimsiest monster going so everyone who tuned in just for this story thinks all DW aliens look like this). Omega is supposed to have God-like powers but the most amazing thing we see him do on screen is, umm, magic up a chair. Apart from the Drs themselves there’s some truly atrocious dialogue at times, with this in many ways the most ‘B’ movie of Pertwee stories just at the time when the extra attention of such a big occasion means the series desperately needs to show its ‘A’ game (The Brigadier being whisked through space for the first time should be a big moment: instead its played for a cheap laugh – it seems ridiculous that the man who believed the Doctor over the yeti the first time they met without hesitation thinks he’s woken up in Cromer, not an alien planet. I mean, it can’t be Cromer, the sky wasn’t overcast). Still, set against all the ways this story could have gone wrong and how many new concepts are being whistled up out of nowhere here, its amazing how much of this reunion story works. It was a brave move getting two of DW’s newest writers to compose it.. It was a brave move throwing in so many new plots and concepts rather than simply involving The Master, The Daleks Or The Cybermen (at least two of whom are in the 20^th, 30^th and 50^th stories). It was a brave move giving so much of the plot over to what’s actually quite a complicated story. It was a brave move revisiting the past and getting ex Doctors back to remind people that the show isn’t what it was like in the olden days, while having them be so rude to each other.This show could have gone wrong so many many times. Yet it works: no ‘The 3 Drs’ isn’t perfect, the middle sags even for a four parter and some of the effects are poor bordering on atrocious, even taking its age into account (the rest of series 10 looks pretty good by comparison, give or take the Drashigs). But despite all the things working against it this story is a triumph, with just the right mixture of laughs, gasps, spills, thrills and everything that made DW gathered together in one place. How amazing it was, back in 1973, to even have a show that had been running ten years (approximately half the life of UK TV at that stage). With stories and concepts as strong as this one, of course DW was going to make sixty: watching this story you’re in no doubt it will go on for a hundred.
+ Before this story was shown fans wondered if the multi-Dr meeting would be noble and sweet. An idea dismissed by the 2^nd Dr’s more-or-less opening line: ‘I can see you’ve been re-decorating. I don’t like it!’ This is one of the laugh out loud DW lines from one of the best of all DW scenes, perfectly delivered by Troughton with the perfect huffy look from Pertwee. Later in the same scene Jo even gets to quote ‘I Am The Walrus’.
- Stephen Thorne is an amazing actor in other series. He is, to me, the definitive Inspector Lestrade (in the superb radio Sherlocks which star Clive ‘Assistant Caretaker’ Merrison). But when cast as monsters/aliens in DW he has a tendency to start at shouty and then build up to screaming himself hoarse by the end. It’s a problem in ‘The Hand Of Fear’ but at least he only turns up in episode four; here, up against three leading actors of relative subtlety, its a nightmare. I mean, Omega probably has a right to shout, what with the fact that he’s keeping himself and his anti-matter world together through sheer willpower (and the moment he takes his mask off to reveal...nothing is a really under-rated scene), but on paper Omega is a really intriguing character, sympathetic and not actually that different to the Doctor (who doesn’t exactly get on with the timelords and their authoritarian ways either). It’s a shame he ends up coming across as just another shouty wannabe. Oh and how come this story was shown in December 1972 – a full eleven months before the actual 10^th anniversary? That’s like peeking at your presents before your birthday. I’ll buy that this happened to be when everybody was free to make it, that BBC schedules were more rigid in those days and the series was due to end in June, but they could have just kept it back and shown it at the start of series 11 (where it would only have been a month out). The Dr always says time is relative I suppose – apparently anniversaries doubly so.