The Time Meddler: Ranking - 61

 

The Time Meddler

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Vicki and Steven, 3-24/7/1965, producer: verity Lambert, script editor: Donald Tosh writer: Dennis Spooner, director: Douglas Camfield)

Rank: 61

   'Dear Monk, King Harold here calling you on the phone you left behind. We'd like to add to our previous order with you: the bazookas have been really useful and the cannons were great fun, but we don't really think a civilised race needs nuclear weapons. Also, we've been experimenting and we've found the best way to hold off the rampaging Viking and Norman hordes alike is to stand around with umbrellas tutting and saying 'it looks like rain' while eating beans on toast using the toasters you left last time. I'm afraid the gramophone and recording studio you left us have been a flop too: we had a group called Ye Olde Spice Girls, who at first worked well at frightening the invading warriors away and making the burst into tears. Unfortunately they also did the same to our own troops. Well, must dash, my news spectacles are arriving by helicopter - that's one in the eye for my enemies eh?!? Cio for now, King Hazza'  

 

 Across its first couple of seasons the past had been sacrosanct in DW: the 1^st Dr is forever warning his companions about the danger of changing history, no matter how bleak things look. We’ve spent whole adventures visiting Aztecs, Revolutionary France and The Crusades where nothing fundamental has changed by the time the Tardis leaves at the end, despite all the adventures along the way. And then, at the finale of the second season, we find out why: for the first time it seems The Doctor isn’t the only renegade timelord on the block. As much as fans talk about how The Master is set up as the ‘anti-Doctor’ actually The Meddling Monk got there first. He’s mischievous and silly where the 1^st Doctor’s (usually) serious, he lies his way through the story where the Doctor follows absolute truth at all costs and brings out the worst in the people who trust him, not the best. No wonder, then, that The Meddling Monk spends this story doing exactly what the Dr has been telling his companions off for: changing history on a whim, delivering weapons to the local Anglo Saxons to fight off the Vikings and filling his monastery with toasters and gramophones. For once his motives are refreshing – he does this not to take over The Earth, in the way The Master would, but out of a very Dr-ish curiosity to see what would happen. Where the Doctor is an observer he’s a meddler; where The Doctor is respectful of other times and cultures The Monk treats it as a sandbox to remould in his image; where the Doctor morally respects free will The Monk has locals pay the price for his own warped brand of mischief. And while his monk’s habit is a natural part of his disguise in Saxon England, he’s still wearing it in his second (and so far last) on screen appearance in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, which makes you wonder if its more of a chosen uniform: in which case his costume representing faith means he’s the scientific Dr’s opposite in that way too. The Monk is one of DW’s great characters, a menace that giggles and chortles where others rant and rave and Peter Butterworth is perfect casting, playing the sort of charming, bumbling part he always plays but with a darker edge when the script demands it too. It takes a rare actor to stand toe-to-toe with William Hartnell but he does magnificently, so much so you’re almost rooting him on – while Hartnell brings out a gentler sillier side to his Doctor we’ve never really seen before, too with more twinkling than usual. There’s a visible difference though: The Doctor’s still the rigid moral centre even when he’s chuckling away himself – The Monk though can’t take anything seriously and can’t see the damage he might do, so is therefore is every bit as much of a threat as a Dalek or Yartek, Leader Of The Alien Voord (maybe even a bit more so with that last one). The dialogue between the two is a particular delight in this story but this is one of the all-time great DW plots too, one that seems to take the mickey out of the seriousness of all the other trips to the past and comes out of nowhere if you’re a viewer watching the series unfold in real time: until this story we didn’t even know there were any other timelords out there (not that we even had that word back in 1964; the Doctor refers to The Monk as ‘one of my people’ without saying who they are). While other scifi series including later DWs have repeated this plot, somebody had to invent the idea of someone taking the present back to the past before the likes of ‘Back To The Future’ and ‘Star Trek’ made it mainstream. That person was second script editor Dennis Spooner, who had already had fun lampooning the first David Whittaker with the high farce of ‘The Romans’ (officially third script editor Donald Tosh takes over here, to enable Spooner the time off to write it without having to, in effect, mark his own homework). Just as The Monk is The Doctor’s antithesis, so it was with the two script editors: for Whittaker the past was something to be re-told in such minute detail that all of the science, geography, even the intonation and flow of the dialogue was all painstakingly perfect; Spooner though doesn’t understand why the historicals can’t be treated with the same flippant tone as some of the futuristic stories where the Dr is forever changing the worlds we see and makes his point by giving us the first DW historical that feels like a backdrop to a much bigger story. You can also see the difference in how Steven’s treated: in his debut, in the last part of previous story ‘The Chase’ he’s an embittered, layered character, someone whose been in captivity for years and had given up hope before The Doctor came along and who finds it hard to trust – in this story he’s just stubborn, refusing to believe in something as unlikely as a time machine even though he’s just been locked up by a bunch of ginormous mechanical aliens with immeasurable powers and the evidence of his own eyes; thankfully Peter Purves finds ways to make this slightly new character work anyway. The change in Vicki is more subtle: this is the first story where she’s gone from the child with surrogate parents and grandfather to juvenile lead and she’s a lot more proactive and less scared than usual, even if she seems to have lost her character trait of excitement of curiosity and giving the people she meets pet names; thankfully Maureen O’Brien too makes this new character seem a natural extension of the old. This is the script’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness: there’s a lot more space given over to the Doctor and companions Steven and Vicki (especially in episode two when Hartnell takes a much needed holiday) and instead of exploring this world instead we explore the lead characters, with very little screentime given over to anyone else. At the same time though look at what’s going on just out of shot in this story: a full-on Viking invasion of an Anglo Saxon village! The Battle of Hastings and the era around it might just be the single most interesting period in British history (and everyone was gearing up for its 600^th anniversary the year this was on), a time when we went from governing ourselves to Viking rule to Norman invasion and back again in quick succession (we won’t have that many changes of power in the UK in one year again until Liz Truss collapses faster than a wet lettuce), while England and Wales’ splintered communities came together for the first time to put on a united front to fight off both invaders – we really need to be seeing it, not just be told about it and then get one brief battle sequence near the end (and even that’s mostly cut from the only surviving print as it was considered too violent by Nigerian censors). That’s all part of Spooner’s quest to defy the expectations of a series that as early as its second year he felt was in danger of falling into a rut: after all, anyone who read about this being a Viking story in the Radio Times set in 1066 would have assumed to be much like ‘The Aztecs’, only with pillaging instead of human sacrifice and horns instead of cocoa and endless fight sequences. Instead we get a story set just before things kick off (even the battle of Stamford Bridge hasn’t happened yet) with the surprise of The Monk playing gramophone recordings of a churchly choir and writing lists about his battle plans (which seems oddly organised for The Monk I have to say, not to mention foolish when the Doctor comes across it) and the Doctor’s fiddling with his Tardis to make it dimensionally unstable. That’s a real shame, partly because DW seems to have an aversion to Vikings and is always featuring them in stories as secondary figures to something less interesting going on (‘The Curse Of Fenric’ ‘The Girl Who Died’) and partly because the re-creation of an Anglo Saxon community is really convincing: its only after getting to know this story well that you realise there isn’t any location filming and its all in the studio or off stock. We’ve rather lost sight of what a surprise this story would have been now we know what happens (and even if you don’t reading the back of the VHS or DVD box gives it away) but, had I been there in 1965 this might well have been the single biggest surprise of the 1^st Dr’s era (after entering the Tardis and before he suddenly regenerates into Patrick Troughton anyway). Thankfully the acting is strong even for this era of DW and the characters so well made that you don’t care the incidental characters are, well, incidental, while the urgent rush to stop a silly Gallifreyan child meddling with things he doesn’t understand makes a welcome change from stopping a megalomaniac intent on controlling the universe. What impresses you most about this serial, though, might just be the confidence – for the last time until the 3^rd Dr’s era at least. This is a series at the end of its first flush of youth when it had the bravado to attempt anything and know it can get away with it for pretty much the last time, including sending its own self up. Where season 1 was full of promise and bursting with ideas and season 2 was made with the knowledge the show was a success, season 3 will end up DW’s ‘troubled third album’, when producer Verity Lambert and Dennis Spooner leave while Peter Purves and Maureen O’Brien get pushed out as companions and DW loses some of its magic, unsure of itself and what it stands for and even its biggest success stories are great despite the many things going wrong. By contrast ‘The Time Meddler’ is a series so sure of itself that it shows off 1965 ‘s contemporary inventions as the height of sophistication and technology that even timelords want to use (the script even more so as it had the gramophone as a tape recorder) and what’s more can even laugh at itself – and most delightfully too. I so wish The meddling Monk had been a regular character (as opposed to a patsy for the Daleks like he is the next time we see him) and we are long overdue a sequel on TV, though Graeme Garden is a more than fair substitute for The Meddling Monk in the Big Finish audios.

+All three cliffhangers in this story are amongst the show’s best and – some forty years before Steven Moffat starts writing for the series – each one pushes the story in a whole new direction. Episode one looks as if its going to be the start of a standard historical tale – then at the end the Doctor finds the chanting monks are in fact a gramophone record. Episode two is Steven and Vicki playing hide and seek looking for The Doctor, only when they find out where he was locked up he’s disappeared. Episode three is all about finding out who The Monk is and ends with the companions investigating his sarcophagus – only to find its bigger on the inside and The Monk’s from the same people as the Doctor! I don’t know about you but I’m definitely tuning in next week after that lot...

- Poor Edith, what a life. Sweet local in episode one, brutally assaulted by pillaging Vikings in episode two, near catatonic with shock in episode three and making tea for the Doctor with a smile on her face by episode four: that’s really quite a character arc. Although mostly it just feels as if she was meant to be lots of different people and budget cuts (it was the end of a year after all when money’s traditionally tight) saw them shrunk down to one person whose having one heck of a day. There’s a distinct lack of people and extras all round in fact – this is more of a hamlet than a village, which makes you wonder why The Monk has decided to start his plan here, on the Northumbrian coast (I like to think that its Carlisle, thus explaining why the 12^th Dr joined in with Clara’s insults in ‘Hide’ rather than just telling her she was being rude). Although its lucky given that The Vikings also send the tiniest of raiding parties to attack them. We didn’t exactly have that many Aztecs or Crusaders running around in earlier stories either, but somehow you notice it more here.