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 Dr Who: the 1st 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. Whittaker’s scripts have told us so many times that something terrible would happen if The Tardis crew changed history, without quite specifying what, so Spooner comes along and does just that. 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 1st 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. He’s the snarky mischievous kid in the classroom to The Doctor’s patient teacher, thumbing his nose at al the timelord rules and living a carefree responsibility-less life. 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. It’s the sort of threat we’ve never had before: The Monk isn’t a religious or political zealot ready to die for his cause and nor is he an invading alien force that wants to conquer the world. He’s just messing around with stuff because it’s fun.

For once The Monk’s 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 (most fans assume that first episode title refers to The Monk on the hill watching the Tardis materialise, but I say it’s The Doctor keeping a wary eye on The Monk); 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 it’s more of a chosen uniform: in which case his costume representing faith means he’s the scientific Doctor’s opposite in that way too. He even has a bit of a point: he says, whether truthfully or not, that he’s just trying to speed humanity’s long slow evolutionary process up so that we can avoid those thousands of years of wars and needless trying to get to where we are by 1966 (because of course ‘swinging London’ is the in place to be in this series: note that all of The Monk’s inventions bar the gramophone are very much 1960s models, with the exception of the 1930s gramophone which was a last minute substitute for the scripted state of the art reel-to-reel tape recorder, of the sort fans used to record the soundtrack of missing episodes on). The Monk even boasts of having Shakespeare do Hamlet on television – something of an injoke at the absurdities of s series about time travel, given that we sort of got that at the end of ‘The Chase’. The Monk, rightly in my eyes, even thinks Harold would be a kinder, fairer King than either William The Conquerer or the Scandinavian Harold Hadraada (why is it always the better, fairer, more noble monarchs who die young, get exiled or executed?) He even treats Edith with anachronistic penicillin which The Doctor never thinks to do (Steven will call him out on this sort of thing by the time of ‘The Massacre’). But The Monk doesn’t see the vast interconnected web of time the way The Doctor does, of the way the past impacts the present to become the future – he can’t see the consequences of his actions. Can you imagine giving jet aircraft to Ancient Brits? There would be nothing of Scandinavia left. Telly might have been better, but would people fighting over scraps really care? (I’d like to see a Saxon variations of hit TV programmes though if The Monk remembers to provide a transmitter too. They probably wouldn’t be all that different. Incidentally why has he brought a transistor radio with him? Who is he planning to listen to, or is he going to give a Saxon Terry Wogan his own programme?) The hint is that he’s new to this time travelling lark (he’s fifty years younger than The Doctor anyway and he’s not old in this first regeneration – or at least he wasn’t till the ‘timeless child’ arc messed up the timelines).  

But even if he’s a rubbish time traveller The Monk, the third timelord we ever meet after The Doctor and Susan (not that we know who they are quite yet) is one of Dr Who’s great characters, a menace that giggles and chortles where others rant and rave and has fun where other enemies take their plans oh so seriously. 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 eye-twinkling than usual. The pair, who both trained as comedians, are having such fun in this episode with a number of terrific slapstick moments (such as The Doctor throwing food in The Monk’s face) and both give some terrific double-takes. 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 Dr Who 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).

The shock of ‘The Time Meddler’ has lessened now that we’ve had so many similar stories where the past and future become a blur, but at the time it would have been the last thing any viewer would have been expecting (indeed, the original audience research reports are more damning about this than perhaps any other story, with lots of casual viewers not getting it because this story is so removed from anything they might have seen: ‘I don’t understand it all – since when were wristwatches and gramophones in 1066?’ asked a puzzled housewife. She wasn’t alone. Till now the historicals and futuristic stories have been kept very separate, always alternating (unless there was an oddball ‘sideways’ filler like ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ or the multi-destination ‘The Chase’) and in very different boxes, the historicals a bit more serious and reverential and the future stories more imaginative and often a lot sillier, but now the edges have become blurred. While other scifi series including later Dr Whos 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 Who script editor Dennis Spooner, who had already had fun lampooning the first David Whittaker with the comedy characters in the otherwise serious ‘Reign Of Terror’ and the high farce of ‘The Romans’ (officially third script editor Donald Tosh takes over here, to enable Spooner the time off to write this story without having to, in effect, mark his own homework while Spooner is preparing to run off to join his friend Terry Nation on his new series ‘The Baron’, about an undercover spy working as an antique’s dealer, no seriously).Just as The Monk is The Doctor’s antithesis, so it was with the two script editors. Whittaker, the future head of the screenwriter’s guild, took writing and research very seriously and adored his history, seeing the past as something to be re-told in such minute educational lovingly researched detail as possible, so that all of the science, geography, even the intonation and flow of the dialogue was all painstakingly perfect. Spooner though has come straight from the world of TV and thinks it’s there to entertain first and foremost. He 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 Dr Who historical that feels like a backdrop to a much bigger story. I’ve long felt that Whittaker, who did more than anyone to originate the character of The Doctor, made him a sort of older wiser alien version of himself, right on the borders between logic and imagination, with a keen eye for observation, an unending sense of curiosity, a fierce intellect and an empathy that allowed him to feel at home writing for any character in any time. 

Spooner is his antithesis the same way The Monk is: his is a more slapdash ‘ooh, what does this button do?’ approach that doesn’t take anything, never mind something as transient as a children’s TV series that’s never likely to be repeated, too seriously. He’s working in television for fun first and foremost and because it’s an entertaining way of paying the bills; it isn’t the calling for him it is for Whittaker. Just look at the way the Vikings come out dressed with horns on their helmets, the way the first archeologists assumed they did in everyday life yet only ever wore when buried in their graves; by the time we worked that out though the imagery had stuck (Whittaker would have known that; Spooner doesn’t care). Similarly Spooner didn’t do much research on the names: the Saxons are all relatives of King Harold:  Edith was his sister, Ulf was his uncle, Wulnof his Grandpa and Sven – originally Sweyn – was his brother (Whittaker would have looked through a book of Saxon names and spent aeons getting it just right; Spooner checked one page of a family tree. You get the feeling that the verbal sparring is similar to what must have gone on in the Dr Who office back when Whittaker was in charge, lots of discussions of ‘well why can’t we?..’ ‘No…’ between teacher and pupil and now that the teacher has left (at the end of Who’s first year) the pupil is having fun. Just look at that joke about Shakespeare again (such a dig at ‘The Chase’) and the way The Monk seems to have the upperhand right up until the last ten minutes: Spooner hates the idea that these characters have to sit and observe history when they could be out there having fun. This is a children’s show after all and Spooner is in many ways a big kid himself, with nearly everything he ever wrote lampooning authority figures or taking the mickey out of the biggest adult in the room. It’s a good job they were friends, used to teasing each other, having worked on many series together before (a lot of them by Gerry Anderson).

You can also see the difference in how new companion Steven’s treated: in his debut, in the last part of previous story ‘The Chase’ he’s an embittered, layered character, someone who’s clearly good and upstanding in the way that Ian and Barbara both are but an intriguing mix of younger and more naïve yet someone who’s been through a lot and aged in a very short time, with a weary cynicism his predecessors never had. He’s been in Mechonoid captivity for years and had given up hope before The Doctor came along and he finds it hard to trust – he looks as if he’s going to be the Tardis’ token sceptic, the naysayer of all The Doctor’s plans, the grownup in a room of giggling children even if The Doctor still ultimately knows best. But in this story and in Tosh’s hands there’s none of that. Instead Steven’s the comedy relief, the joke constantly on him for refusing to believe in something as unlikely as a time machine (such as this story’s most quoted line, where The Doctor finally snaps on finding a Viking helmet ‘I suppose that’s a space helmet for a cow, hmm?’) even though he’s just been locked up by a bunch of ginormous mechanical aliens with immeasurable powers and is disbelieving the evidence of his own eyes. His cynicism, such a key part of his character in his first few minutes on screen, is used against him: don’t be such a stick in the mud Spooner says, look at how much fun you could be having! Even so, Steven gets to question The Doctor in a way we’ve never seen before (Ian and Barbara were too much in awe, Susan and Vicki too young) and it’s probably no surprise that it’s in a storey where The Monk questions The Doctor’s way of doing things either, all part of Spooner stretching his legs on the series. Even so Steven’s not in the unlikeable untrustworthy Turlough or Adam camp; Steven is also bossed around by Vicki who, as the audience’s representative, knows what’s going on in a way he doesn’t, much to his annoyance. They seemed to get on well in ‘The Chase’ but suddenly they’ve become another first, the ‘bickering companions’ who don’t get along (till now it’s only ever been The Doctor in a temper with someone). The script asks a lot from him, especially co-carrying the story when Hartnell is on holiday in only his third week in front of the cameras, but thankfully Peter Purves, despite being relatively new and inexperienced (compared to his five predecessors anyway) is a strong enough actor to make Steven both believable and likeable anyway despite everything working against him. From now on he knows his place and his arrogance will only rise up occasionally, against the ‘right’ people when they deserve it.  

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 too. Some of the best scenes are the ones where the two companions get to know each other and score points off each other and unlike the Tegan-Nyssa-Adric-Turlough Tardis team you get the sense they would still do anything for each other. This is the script’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness: there’s a lot more space given over to the Doctor and companions (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! Longboats in the sea! Norwegians on the way! Tiny scattered shelters dotted across Britain that have no possible way of defending themselves! Great as what we see on screen is there’s still a sense of deflation that we don’t see more and that such a fascinating action-packed time period is reduced to one very boring slow-motion fight (because it was done in the TV studio rather than on film at Ealing and there was no time spare for re-takes and even that’s mostly missing, given that the two copies in existence – one of them returned from Nigeria – were both trimmed by censors; the re-creation on the DVD from the soundtrack  – twelve seconds of a Viking screaming across a blank screen – is one of the weirder extras I’ve ever sat through; the rest) and lots of noises off. The Battle of Stamford Bridge, for instance, is only days away but we don’t see so much as a plank. The problem is that ‘The Chase’ cost quite a lot of money to make and budgets are tight, so the only way they can do this is to have a small handful of extras (hardly a sufficient Viking horde) and sets stacked up tight one on top of each other – sometimes they manage this well (there’s a nifty new backdrop projection of birds and scuttering clouds that really does seem like we’re outdoors if you don’t look too closely and a nice lot of sound effects, from crashing waves to howling wolves and tweeting owls) and sometimes badly (there are some truly bizarre camera angles in this story, because they have to shoot people in close up otherwise we’d see how small and cramped these sets really are). The use of stock footage is sort of medium: it’s nice that they tried, but it’s dropped in so lazily and at odds with what’s seen on screen that they do stand out a mile. It is good footage though, a 1949 newsreel about a genuine re-creation of what a Viking invasion would have looked like named ‘Land Of The Vikings’ re-creating a trip in Viking longboat ‘The Hugin’ which sailed from Denmark to Kent in 449 (the re-created ship is still there in fact, in a museum in Pegwell Bay, while a still from one of the parts not used in Dr Who became the front cover of a Stranglers album in another anniversary, 1979). The fifty-three Vikings in that clip would have outnumbered these Saxons about ten to one.

Had they lavished ‘The Time Meddler’ with the same skill and attention as, say, ‘Marco Polo’ it could have been finer yet. After all, Spooner chose the setting for a reason; The Monk is here in 1066 because it’s the moment in British history when everything was up for grabs, when a small nudge one way could have changed our fortunes forever (and it goes without saying, especially in 1960s Who, that changing Britain’s future impacts the world). We could be talking Scandinavian now, or possibly have a British empire half a millennia early had the battle gone a slightly different way. It was 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, the first small but important step towards unity. The Monk couldn’t have chosen a better time: with so much change around already even small tweaks could have big consequences. It was also a period in time that every schoolchild watching this would have studied and with the 900^th anniversary coming up fast there were no end of boring serious documentaries on the impact of the battle on the present day. It’s typical Spooner, then, to take a period in time that seemed so drab and dead to kids and make it exciting again, to mess things up, to ‘unlearn’ everything we thought we knew (it’s never mentioned but The Doctor, unable to steer his Tardis in this era, never does go back in time to undo what The Monk has done already, helping Ancient Britons create Stonehenge – so was he in on ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’? - and giving Leonardo Da Vinci his first ideas about man-powered flight). As a result a lot of kids ‘got’ this story in a way their elders didn’t: this is no stuffy history lesson but a reminder that life is a series of possibilities that we choose every day. It’s just a shame that we don’t get to see such an interesting time period properly – and a swizz that one of only three Viking stories in Who keeps them in the background (not that ‘The Girl Who Died’ is any better as they play second fiddle to The Doctor having a meltdown and cursing a local with everlasting life and ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ is a WW2 story with a brief longboat and a curse written in runes). It’s not just budget though; they could have managed a little something extra there, even if it was only a Viking going ‘raaaaah’ into a camera. I suspect it’s also 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. You think you know what’s going to happen, that The Doctor prevents someone from rescuing King Harold and someone has to be rescued from a longboat.

Instead we get 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, because the re-creation of an Anglo Saxon community is actually really convincing: its only after getting to know this story well that you realise there isn’t any location filming and it’s all in the studio or off stock. They’re a sweet bunch too, not the primitives you might be expecting but real salt of the Earth people struggling to do their best. These Ancient Brits are not unlike Ian and Barbara too, getting on with things and being resilient, even though they’re caught up in something so much bigger than they are. The Doctor talks to Edith especially as if she’s an equal, someone who has the right sort of moral code (and given later stories it’s a surprise that Steven at least doesn’t call The Doctor out on the fact that actually The Monk’s plan would have given her a greater chance to live). 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 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 12th Dr joined in with Clara’s insults in ‘Hide’ rather than just telling her she was being rude). Although that’s lucky really, given that The Vikings also send the tiniest of raiding parties to attack them (David Maloney, production assistant and one day director on Who, once joked to a fanzine that this story was going to be called ‘Dr Who and The Vikings’ before somebody pointed out how few there were and they’d be better off calling it ‘Dr Who and The Saxons’!) We didn’t exactly have that many Aztecs or Crusaders running around in earlier stories either, but somehow you notice it more here in a story that also has the smallest cast of credited talking actors across a full story since the ’stuck in a lift’ ‘Edge Of Destruction’ . Barry Newbury tries his best with the sets, researching what they’d have looked like and going to so far as to put mock-up ox blood on the floor of the Saxon huts while his monastery is gorgeous, but they look even smaller and more ramshackle than most textbooks show, unlike most Who historicals where things tend to look bigger by virtue of being on TV. It’s a real shame: usually in early Whos the lack of budget is part of the charm and you don’t really notice, but this one needs to be on an epic scale.

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) and ‘The Time Meddler’, though largely forgotten by fandom at the time, has become one of the most seen 1^st Doctor stories after a repeat in 1991 (rare for a black-and white story. It’s this version that first edited the two prints together, using the better quality copy from Nigeria with the lower quality bits cut by censors: there was a really interesting documentary about the editing on ‘Late Night Lineup’, how more than a few Tv buffs first discovered Who when it was off air) but had I been there in 1965 this might well have been the single biggest surprise of the 1st Dr’s era (after entering the Tardis and before he suddenly regenerates into Patrick Troughton anyway). The Meddling Monk comes out of the blue like a bomb has just been detonated in the series and it changes all the rules from now on: without this story we might never have had The Master, or Gallifrey, not least because till now the hint (and Whittaker’s theory) was that The Tardis was built by The Doctor, a Human from the future, in a shed somewhere (Whittaker had a lot to do with the Peter Cushing Dr Who/Dalek films where they finally come out and say exactly that). It’s not just a daring experiment though but a really strong story in its own right, with the drama of things unfolding and lots of great fun comedy moments, from The Doctor hurling The Monk’s breakfast right in his face to sticking a gun in his back and pretending it’s a revolver. Thankfully the acting is strong even for this era of Dr Who 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. This isn’t any better than the way Whittaker used to run things, but it is different and a reminder that as a series Dr Who can do absolutely anything, with no telling what you might get next. ‘It’s more fun my way’ says the Monk apologetically and you kind of agree with him. It’s a real shame that Spooner leaves so soon after this so we never get to fully see what his vision of Dr Who would have looked like, getting just one more writer’s credit as a co-author of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ (it won’t surprise you to learn he mostly wrote the sillier episodes in the second half).  
Even so, this trip back in time feels like ‘the future’, gaining whole new following in the 21^st century who’ve seen other later episodes play with similar building blocks. They didn’t always ‘get’ this in 1965 because it was too new, but looking back you can see another stepping stone towards Who as we know it now.

 What impresses you most about this serial, though, might just be the confidence – for the last time until the 3rd Dr’s era at least this is a series confident it can do anything and the audience will follow. 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 itself up. Where season one 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 Dr Who loses some of its magic, trying to compete with other shows and unsure of itself and what it stands for. 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 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 the way 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. He’s such a great character and Peter Butterworth such a great actor he makes this story really soar. A high budget version would have been even better still though.   

POSITIVES +All three cliffhangers in this story are amongst the show’s best and – some a decade before Douglas Adams starts writing for the series and forty years before Steven Moffat and both do something similar – 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! (The Monk’s Tardis is just the Doctor’s set slightly tweaked – he keeps his central control column on a raised plinth for some odd reason).  I don’t know about you but I’m definitely tuning in next week after that lot...

NEGATIVES - Even the score is low budget, using a single musician for the only time before synths get invented – that’s Charles Botterill banging various bits of percussion, which must have been a comedown from the last time he worked on Who in the elaborate orchestral score for ‘Marco Polo’. There are only eight minutes spread across the four stories too, which makes this the single shortest original Who ‘score’ in a story lasting more than two episodes. The rest of the music comes from stock but even there they hit problems, having to re-record an entire scene in episode three when someone played in the wrong track they hadn’t yet gained clearance for (and this in the days when stopping for any re-recording was a huge no no). There’s a weird closing montage too, to take us into the Summer break, of a stylised distorted close up of the three traveller’s faces looking out as the Tardis travels off into space – intended as the cliffhanger to go into the summer break, it doesn’t really come off and they never tried that sort of thing again.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘That is the dematerializing control, and that over yonder is the horizontal hold, up there is the scanner, those are the doors, and that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Time Meddler’ was the 1^st Doctor pick for the sixtieth anniversary series ‘Tales From The Tardis’, reuniting Steven and Vicki inside a ‘memory Tardis’ in a really lovely bit of nostalgia written by Phil Ford. It’s lovely to see our old friends on screen together for the first time in fifty-eight years (not to mention in colour for the first time) and Peter Purves and Maureen O’Brien still nail their characters after all these years, Steven overjoyed to ‘have my little sister back’ (although it would be even more in character for Vicki to whallop him for calling her little!) Vicki comments on Steven’s regal outfit (‘when I left The Doctor I did become a King you know!’), Steven comments that ‘the years have been good to us’ as Vicki talks about her years as a farmer’s wife in Ancient Greece and they both wonder if this can be The Doctor’s Tardis or someone else’s (‘Can you imagine our Doctor wearing this?’ asks Steven as he handles the 6^th Doctor’s coat!) Steven urges caution, Vicki is having none of it as she searches for proof that it is The Doctor’s Tardis, discovering his pocket watch and the Viking horns from ‘The Time Meddler’. Vicki laughs that Steven didn’t believe her that they’d gone back in time (‘Well it had been a very trying week!’) as two friends recall how ‘it was all such a long time ago – and yet it feels like yesterday’. Post story-memory Vicki discovers The Monk’s Tardis dematerialisation circuit, Steven recounts how they met him again and Vicki pouts over him having more adventures after she left. Vicki says The Doctor was ‘so special, there was no one else like him’ and that ‘he rescued me – I was an orphan and he became my family, I became the grand-daughter he lost’. Steven adds how fond The Doctor was of her and how he always talked about her after she left with Troilus in ‘The Myth Makers’. Vicki sighs that he never came to visit her as she secretly hoped and Steven comments that maybe he thought she was better off alone and visited her without her knowing. Steven adds ‘The day I left him, the day we said goodbye, something in his eyes said that it was never goodbye’ and they both wish very hard that their old friend would be with them again, as a Hartnell giggle arrives over the closing credits as old friends are reunited. There are a few clunky lines in this one that don’t ring true but overall its one of the best and works nicely as character piece, story link and nostalgia fest.  

‘Follow That Tardis!’ (April 1989) was a comic strip from Dr Who Magazine issue #147 that saw the brief return of The Monk for the first time since ‘The Dalek Masterplan’, his likeness a sort of younger angrier musclier Peter Butterworth, if you can believe such a thing, again dressed in his monk’s habit. In a truly bewildering story two brothers with the unlikely names El Ape and Deadbeat are too busy reading a book of mysteries and are involved in a car crash with The Monk’s Tardis, disguised, of all things, as a public toilet. The Monk is up to his old tricks and fixing an election, popular president Sinatra ushering in a period of peace and prosperity in ‘our’ universe (he won his election campaign ‘my way’ no doubt). The 7^th Doctor is ordered at gunpoint to chase him, to get him to pay up for the damages, but The Monk takes off through time, to Tunguska 1908 (whoops – big explosion!), a boat on The Atlantic in 1912 (whoops – big iceberg, which is really The Monk’s Tardis in disguise!) and Bermuda in 1945 (whoops – missing planes!) The Monk, facing extinction in the Bermuda Triangle, finally gives himself up. The Doctor realises that, far from saving the universe from The Monk interfering with time he’s accidentally  caused half of the changes himself and kicks the two brothers out, telling them to take their book of ‘unexplained mysteries and disasters’ with them. Truly bizarre, it will make you feel as if you’ve wandered into a parallel universe when you’ve read it!

A mere 45 years after his last appearance on TV The Monk came back to meddle again in a new reincarnation on Big Finish audios in a run of 8^th Doctor stories starting with ‘The Book Of Kells’ (8^th Doctor range series 4, 2010)  Graeme Garden is excellent casting as a slightly more acerbic and deadpan Monk, nothing like Peter Butterworth and yet recognisably the same character in the same way all The Doctors and all Masters are intrinsically the same and his mischievous meddling makes a great foe against Paul McGann’s straightforward heroic lead. Landing in Ireland in 1006, around sixty years before ‘The Time Meddler’ is set, there are rumours that the local abbey has been taken over by demons, what with strange goings on and dead monks spotted by locals. Really, of course, The Monk has taken over and has been trying to get the monastery to work on his Tardis’ directional circuit (as stolen by The Doctor at the end of ‘The Time Meddler’) as ‘God’s work’. The plot revolves around a sacred text, The Great Gospel of Columkille, a real text which genuinely did go missing from a monastery in Ireland for some time and is rather cleverly woven round the plot as a Gallifreyan lost artefact (Roger Murray Leach, designer on ‘The Deadly Assassin’, based a lot of Gallifreyan symbols on the real book so it had a lot of links with Who already). Of course nobody who worked on this story knew about the ‘timeless child’ arc and The Doctor’s own beginnings in Ireland or they might have had even more fun with that idea! As a concept it’s terrific: as a story though it’s blatantly there to re-introduce the Monk in as similar way as possible to last time and set up the rest of the 8^th Doctor run and isn’t a great listen on its own.

The Monk appeared a couple of stories later in the same series in ‘The Resurrection Of Mars’, one of the best 8^th Doctor adventures. The Monk shows a nasty side we’ve never seen before, throwing companion Lucie out of the Tardis into space, his sudden arrival and her panicked plea for help being the cliffhanger from last episode ‘Deimos’, the name of one of Mars’ moons. Much of this episode is told in flashback, The Monk travelling with Lucie who he’s hoodwinked into thinking of him as a cleverer flashier Doctor. Wanting to show off he takes her to the amazing world of Halcyon, only to discover The Ice Warriors have invaded it so The Monk changes the dates on their suspended animation chambers to wake them up several centuries early (as discovered by The Doctor in ‘Deimos’). The Monk also takes Lucie to Questus, a planet with a ruler who has a disagreement with The Monk and changes the monarch’s timelines to make him a failure. Lucie is appalled at this blasé attitude to time travel and tries to protest, which is when she’s hurled out into space, just in time for The Doctor to rescue her and put things right. A real nailbiter and a good character piece for The Monk, everyone’s friend until there’s a disagreement.      
Aware they were onto a good thing The Monk returns for the season finale, a two parter titled ‘Lucie Miller’ and ‘To The Death’, a decent send-off for Sheridan Smith’s character (a send-off the first time round anyway – she’ll be back). Here he’s more of a bit-player, both helping and hindering Lucie’s struggle to survive in a Dalek war-torn Earth and this story is like his return in ‘Masterplan’ in that he keeps switching sides, neither all good or all bad. It’s revealed that the plague that weakened The Humans and led to them being easy prey for The Daleks was released by him as a prank and that he never imagined the problems it would cause – the fact he loses his own companion, Tamsin, to his meddling is a huge shock that sees a stunned and tearful Monk begging The Doctor for forgiveness, which never comes.   

 ‘The Secret History’ (2015, #200 in Big Finish’s main range) is, oddly enough, far more satisfying if you haven’t heard the 8^th Doctor’s range, when you don’t automatically see Graeme Garden’s name in the credits and see the twist coming. Goodness knows there are enough other twists going on in this story: an anomaly with the Tardis means the 5^th Doctor lands in exactly the same spot as the 1^st Doctor’s Tardis, just in time for an exploring Vicki and Steven to burst into what they think is their Tardis on the run from natives of an alien planet. As fun as it is to have multi-Doctor stories I kind of like the ‘wrong Doctor’ stories more: Steven’s cynicism and Vicki’s wide-eyed credulity that their Doctor can change faces is perfect for the setup and there are some lovely little moments between them, from the older Doctor remembering the things they went through and Vicki’s shock at how old her friend has become (‘You’re a lot more fretful than our Doctor’), older in personality though younger in appearance. Peter Purves steals the show with his one-liner when the Doctor is trying to persuade Vicki he really is the Doctor, remembering how they giggled during a trip to Rome where between them they threw an assassin out the window (‘It doesn’t sound that funny!’) Peter Davison sounds as if he’s having much more fun being with this gentler pair than his usual more explosive companions while Maureen O’Brien continues to astonish at effortlessly recapturing Vicki’s childish glee into the actresses’ sixties. The bulk of the main plot and the overall feel is very Hartnell too: a trip to the 6^th century AD Byzantine empire, where Steven gets whacked on the head and abducted with everyone cut off from the safety of the Tardis. Oddly enough, though, the returning camouflaged Monk and his angry revenge on the Doctor feel far more like the Davison era and more in line with the Ainley Master. All in all it’s a good mix of genres nicely handled by the cast. And yes, the 5^th Doctor does get to say ‘brave heart, Vicki’!  

The Monk also appeared later but in an earlier regeneration (such is time travel!) in Big Finish’s ‘Short Trips’ story ‘The Blame Game’ (2016). Now played by Rufus Hound, he turns up to gloat at the newly exiled 3^rd Doctor in exile at UNIT and is a perfect match for the usual unruffled-with-ruffles no-nonsense Pertwee Doctor, taunting him about his punishment with malicious glee. The Doctor inevitably gets so peeved off that he tries to steal the Monk’s Tardis, but the Timelord software that’s wiped his brain of all its knowledge of time travel spreads to The Monk too so they have a very bumpy flight (which ends up being Liz Shaw’s first trip in a Tardis!) The story goes downhill a bit when the real plot comes along, but the first half of bickering is well handled and Liz’s alarm at having to re-think everything she thought she knew about her best friend after seeing how he behaves around one of his own kind, rethinking her place at UNIT alongside him, is very believable too. Hound, a keen Whovian himself, really gets inside the brain of an all-powerful being who doesn’t want to cause harm or damage, just a bit of mischief – he’s much more like the ‘Peter Butterworth’ Monk than the Graeme Garden one (the script is ambiguous as to whether it is the same incarnation or not, given that he and the Doctor share a timelord gift that instantly ‘recognises’ each other). One of the better ‘Short Trips’ in the range.   

Previous ‘The Chase’ next ‘Galaxy Four’