The Moonbase: Ranking - 23

 

The Moonbase

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben Polly and Jamie, 11/2/1967-4/3/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Kit Pedler, director: Morris Barry)

Rank: 23

   'I see the moon and the moon sees me 

A round speck of hope in a starlit sea 

Until invaded by Mondas monsters all silvery 

Replacing all we've gained with what they want us to be 

How can mankind ever be free? 

By embracing the situation's gravity 

And saving the moon for you and for me'

Ever since original producer Verity Lambert had left at the start of season 3 Dr Who has been in freefall. Second producer John Wiles lasted a whole three stories before promptly retiring and third producer Innes Lloyd is pretty certain about what he doesn’t like about the series (getting rid of lots of traditions like world-building and exploring, alternating futuristic stories and historicals, companions galore and even the Doctor) without being quite sure what it is that he wants to fill the vacuum of time and space with. A lot of season 4 is an exercise in vamping before something better turns up – sometimes quite brilliantly (‘The Tenth Planet’ ‘The Power Of The Daleks’) sometimes, umm, not (‘The Underwater Menace’). It reaches the point where every story since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ twelve whole stories ago would have been described as ‘oddball’ by people who were watching them in sequence and even the ones that have the strongest glimpses of what’s to come (‘The War Machines’ ‘Power’) seem deeply odd seen in context of stories about celestial toymakers and fish people. Out of nowhere, though, like a cyber army invading a human base on some cut-off corner of some distant planet, in comes ‘The Moonbase’ and pulls everything into sharp focus, offering a whole new way of doing Dr Who that’s every bit as frightening and fascinating and imaginative as what’s come before it but which feels more urgent and desperate somehow. For ‘The Moonbase’ is the story that ends up standing on the shoulders of the sometime silvery giants before it and starts leading Dr Who into the promised land as a hit series about monsters and invasions and what it means to the invaded humans who fend them off. ‘The Moonbase’ is the template for easily the next seven years of the series and arguably the next fifty after that. From now on Dr Who isn’t about exploration and gaining new insight into the universe but about survival and losing what we already have.  More than just being important, though, whilst there have been better loved, better remembered, better conceived stories that use the same template there are few that do so with such charm and intelligence. 

This is the ultimate ‘survivor’ race up against mankind in the most remotest outpost you can think of (this is the story that has the Doctor’s speech about ‘terrible things that must be fought’ out there in space, a speech it’s inconceivable of him making in any earlier story than this one – you’d never get the 1st Dr being so black and white about alien life for a start). To my eyes at least it’s part of a shift in who the ‘threat’ really is. Most kids sitting down to watch The Daleks for the first time in 1963 would have seen them as a recognisable threat from the days when you were afraid that your enemy would become more powerful and outright invade you. In their first appearance in ‘The Tenth Planet’ that’s kind of what The Cybermen do too, charging through the snow impervious to the cold and overpowering the humans at a base at The South Pole unstoppable because they don’t have the same weaknesses humans do. In this hastily scheduled sequel, though, writers Kit Pedler and script editor Gerry Davis have been doing some thinking. Instead of just being an army of soldiers, a physical presence, the Cybermen are more like a virus, an ideology that gets under your skin and converts you without you realising. They’re no longer the ghosts they were last time, both literally because of their bits of white cloth still hanging from their bodies walking across a polar blizzard but also symbolically, as they stood around looking menacing but are more about talking than killing.

The Cybermen are still a ghostly presence though, compared to say the directness of a Dalek, playing hide-and-seek with the base so that you’re never quite sure where one’s going to pop out from next They’re a subtler menace in this story as befits a new cold war era of espionage and propaganda rather than outright fighting, with The Cybermen both lurking in the shadows (well, as easily as a seven foot tall being dressed all in grey can do), out for your body but also your mind and soul. They don’t kill you they convert you and make you like them – a fate worse than death because it’s not really living and your body just ends up being used to convert your friends, family and work colleagues too. They even release a literal virus that makes you become like them, infecting you with their ‘mind control’. They do this so subtly that you don’t even notice when the people around you have been converted. They’re still close enough to us to be cousins and while they’re more than good enough to bring back they’re just another promising idea rather than a monster on a par with The Daleks. On the surface the threat is the same as in ‘The Tenth Planet’ just four stories ago: The Cybermen, late of Earth’s doomed twin planet Mondas, are still travelling the solar system to look for spare body parts they can convert and despite having defeated them once humanity is still an obvious choice, especially as we tend to be a bit smaller, and punier than they are. What’s changed is how they come across. By ‘The Moonbase’ though they’re that much further along in their evolution and that bit further cut off from their humanity, their hands and faces now covered by metal, their survival instincts darker and more desperate, their methods more ruthless, their voices scarier. They look like robots now rather than men in costumes, standing tall and menacing (only actors above 6”2 were cast in the roles so that they tower over the actors, particularly Patrick Troughton’s Doctor; this is another reason why the lone 4th Dr Cybermen story ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ doesn’t work so well as he’s the same height they are and sometimes taller!) Only instead of just being another physical monster army there’s the clever scifi twist that they became robots, rather than were made that way, still with memories of what life was like as flesh and blood, however much the idea repels and sickens them now. The Daleks are so scary partly because they hate humans so – by contrast The Cybermen used to be humans and hate ‘us’ because we remind them of all they’ve lost and given up. In other words, if The Daleks are Nazi Germany that wants to destroy you for being different to them then The Cybermen are communist Russia, beings who want you to be just like them.

Whist while we in 2023 know how the story of Soviet Russia ends back in the 1960s the thought that you could end up ‘like them’ was a very real fear. More than just another unthinking unfeeling bunch of soldiers they’re scary precisely because they weren’t always unthinking or unfeeling. Circumstances changed them, harsh conditions (like the rumours about harsh Russian winters) turning them to throw their lot in with a collective that changed them and helped them survive only by sucking out their soul. Now they’re brainwashed, talking with the same voice about the system that ‘saved’ them and how much better life is for them – and how much better it will be for you too if you allow yourself to be ‘upgraded’. It’s not true of course (capitalism is responsible for at least as many evils as communism and will go on to get its own stories where it’s the baddy, such as ‘Terror Of the Autons’ and 9/10ths of ‘Kerblam!’ until the rotten ending) but to a lot of the audience watching at the time a cyber-communist conversion was the single scariest thing that could happen to you. Plus The Cybermen really do seem unstoppable while the humans in this story, despite being as fit and healthy as well trained astronauts would be, seem frail and vulnerable. It’s no surprise that The Cybermen start their take over in the sick bay, a sign of human fragility (you can bet your cyber chrome dome head The Cybermen don’t have an equivalent sick bay, though they might have a garage full of spare parts!), while they can kill you outright, take over your body, smash up your base or deliver a virus that can convert you. This isn’t a race who can be defeated with just a bomb or an explosion they’re a race that can attack you from all sides and you never know when they’re about to strike. Shot in black-and-white, with director Morris Barry’s shot selection emphasising the Cybermen’s tallness and stillness while the humans flutter around emotionally and going to pieces, as these unstoppable giants take them over one by one, is one of the most threatening scenarios Who ever provided. Give or take a few Dalek cliffhangers ‘The Moonbase’ is the first time Dr Who is properly scary and had there been room behind my sofa (most people have them up against the walls don’t they?) this would still be one of the top five Who stories of any era that would send me scurrying there. I mean what’s the only thing scarier than being killed by a ruthless killing machine? Becoming a killing machine.

The biggest change is in the voices – where they used to be actors speaking in a sing-songy type of way now their vocals are fully robotic, not like the Daleks’ grating emotional staccato but a more even tone, via a ‘mechanical larynx’ used in the ‘real world’ on people who had lost use of their vocal chords (mostly smokers) by placing an electronic gadget up against the actors’ throats as they mouthed words (a lot of the poor actors will get sick from all the vibrations including poor Peter Hawkins in this story, who felt nauseas and suffered headaches across most of the four weeks of recording). The metal, too, is a logical update of the old look, with all those previously vulnerable parts like hands and faces replaced, with the addition of an ‘accordion’ full of bits on the front (useful for holding the few squishy body parts you still need to function) and carry-handles on the head (useful for hanging up in a closet). All traces of humanity have been removed so that even the eyes that stare back are no longer human and obviously that of an actor. Not every update in Dr Who is good (let’s face it, there have been more bad and pointless 21^st century updates of 20^th century monsters than good, the earliest of which have dated more badly already than the ‘men in suits’ made half a century ago) but this one not only looks amazing it makes total sense. All these updates are something recognisably ‘our world’, yet also something totally robotic and alien, a logical progression to Pedlar’s original inspiration of the Cybermen from his human transplant patients awaiting new body parts and how that might end up. It’s also perfectly in character that The Cybermen would keep ‘upgrading’. Monsters like The Daleks are already convinced they’re perfect and don’t need to change a thing, but Cybermen are always on the look out to be better and (literally) heartless enough to chop and change and leave past templates behind. 

This is only the second true Dr Who base under siege and the one that really sets the format: weirdly this moon set feels more ‘real’ than The South Pole, perhaps because so much of the imagery was based on real documentaries of space travel (and there were a lot in 1967, in the run-up to man’s first mission to the moon). It’s a natural place for the series to go, with space the next great unknown after The South Pole (whose explorers were the astronauts of their day) and with the moon being the backdrop to the ‘space race’ in the cold war and a reminder of the days when the Cyber-Russians were competing with the Americans to get to the moon. It’s an obvious place for any monster from out of space to set up a base to invade us and it’s a surprise we hadn’t had in the series before: the moon is our closest neighbour and our next big thing to get to and a sign of humanity’s own evolution and progression, now a step further on from the last encounter with the Cybermen 84 years earlier. It’s the big buzz word of the day too: ever since JFK promised about getting a ‘man on the moon by the end of the decade NASA have been working on real moon missions. This was an era when everyone went loony for the lunar surface and it was everywhere, with endless news bulletins and updates from NASA about their planned moon missions. And oh the thrill of seeing that we actually get there, with the surprise as the Tardis crew turn the corner and find a base there on the lunar surface. In fact the first of these, Apollo one, has been planned for February 1967 right at the time this story was going out on air, something that I’m willing to bet this story’s two scientists creators knew well – alas that mission will be cancelled in January after a huge fire in testing but they weren’t to know that when they were making this story. Just imagine how much extra shock value there would have been if man really had got to the moon a mere week after the Tardis landed there on screen! (In the end Apollo eleven lands in July 1969 in the off-season between Drs 2 and 3, six months after ‘The Seeds Of death’ makes out that this gloriously new and exciting space travel by rocket is ‘old hat’ that belongs in a museum). The Cybermen’s original home ‘Mondas’ too is a word that sounds like ‘Moon’; both of us may have got it from ‘month’ and the idea of time registered in orbits round the Earth, but whereas the moon is regular and stable, rotating every 28 days like clockwork, ‘Mondas’ is irregular and unstable, which might be why the Cybermen have become such cold, hard, logical creatures as compensation. Technically Mondas was destroyed, with a cut scene making mention that these Cybermen are a group of stragglers who were away from home when The Doctor blew them up in ‘The Tenth Planet’ and have resettled on Telos, to be seen in the sequel ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ but you don’t hear that on screen; besides just as you the moon astronauts will always be from Earth so you can’t separate the Cybermen from their home planet which made them who they were. Quite literally, out of bolts and metal.

Anyway the moonbase itself is one of Dr Who’s greatest ever sets. both the moon outside and inside. We’ve seen it recreated so many times in big blockbuster films now that it’s worth remembering how few TV series had ever series to re-create the moon in a TV studio and they do it really well. So well that I’ve actually seen it quoted in ‘moonlanding conspiracy’ sites to argue that yes of course Hollywood could re-create the moon’s surface in 1969, because they managed to do it so successfully on a BBC budget two years earlier. As for the base itself it was designed as a deliberate money-saver by having one huge set rather than lots of little ones (even the brief Tardis scene is in a shrunken set that uses blowup photographs for the missing walls, not that we can see this sequence anymore either). It’s terrific, looking every bit as big and technological as you’d expect for a base set up to control The Earth’s weather (the hint is that Pedlar is again attacking mankind for playing ‘God’ and trying to change his environment, the start of a slippery slope towards becoming unfeeling automatons. I bet he didn’t even own an umbrella). The gravitron machine, much ridiculed in some quarters for looking flimsy, is also really good for the times I think, a prop so big and heavy it nearly killed Patrick Troughton when he went for his usual wander round the set pre-filming to familiarise himself with his marks and it fell over, missing him by inches. Some Who sets stretch the idea of future technological marvels past credulity given that it’s clearly made of cheap polystyrene but this one feels like it could plausibly be us in the future (the setting of 2070 is getting ever closer - a small child watching this first time round  might have had hopes of living in their twilight years in this date with advances in medicine) and the fact that the Cybermen are crashing what was in 1967 mankind’s biggest achievement as if its nothing adds a whole frisson of vulnerability to mankind in this story. Like the best Dr Who stories we’re a speck of dust in an infinite cosmos, nothing that special, so up against a real threat we come over feeble and useless.

Something else feels quite ‘modern’ about this serial too in the way it depicts the future. Back in 1967 nations are still squabbling and wars are breaking out every few minutes but belatedly, perhaps as a result of all the monster threats in the Dr Who version of our universe, somehow we’ve pulled together by having an international base made up of people from lots of different countries who were ‘enemies’ when the episodes first went out. This is the first real time Dr Who has been inspired by its new rival in town ‘Star Trek’ (on in America since 1966 and not shown over here till 1969, but people still talked about it) and this tale reads like someone whose read about Star Trek without getting the chance to actually see it. Europe, it’s fair to say, doesn’t do utopias the way America does. We’re too old, had too many enemies for too many centuries and we’re all so packed together we’re always looking  over their shoulders with a wary eye on who might be invading us next. So what happens in this story is what would probably really happen for real: there are lots of people from different countries (two Australians, two New Zealanders, two Frenchmen, a Canadian, a German, a Scandinavian, a Nigerian and a Welshman with a Brit in charge, naturally -  I mean what other nationality would be this obsessed about the weather? One of the extras who doesn’t speak with the thick moustache is Victor Pemberton supplementing his writing income with a quick buck on the side; he’ll be back in Who as the writer of ‘Fury From The Deep’; the one whose sick and unconscious from the first scenes is the voice of the controller back home, Alan Rowe) but they all stay in their bubbles and make jokes at each other, while teasing each other about their racial stereotypes. Somehow they’re still all very British in character, unlike Star Trek where despite their nationalities everyone is very American (Star Trek will repay the compliment by ‘borrowing’ the Cybermen concept for the Borg). Still, even the idea that there is an international community of people working together is quite a hopeful change compared to most Whos of the 1960s and even with its token Frenchman in a cravat (actually there to hide a mistake in the spelling on Benoit’s name-tag because they’d given him the ‘wrong’ first name; good job they made the mistake with the Frenchman really!) it’s a remarkably forward-looking vision of the future and notably everyone is a fully rounded character with motivations of their own, not just a bunch of people we barely know (as per a lot of the base under siege stories to come). There’s even a Nigerian, a dashing pioneering hero like all the others here, back when black actors tended to be the butt of the jokes if they were on TV at all and our equivalent of ‘Uhura’. One fascinating point: this is an era when only two countries have the means or money necessary for a space race, with no other countries possessing any form of space travel at all. But where are they? Do the Americans and Russians have their own bases by now? Or, given the complete lack of Americans in particular in future-set stories, did they finally kill one another off? For ‘The Moonbase’ is another of Who’s great cold war stories even if it never quite comes out and says it, about the dangers of heartless rational beings treating enemy humans as cannon-fodder and how that sort of ‘progress’ isn’t really progress at all. 

In his last two stories the 2nd Doctor hasn’t skipped a beat, plying off to the side of stories and merrily leading Scottish highlanders and Atlanteans on a joyful dance as he plays his recorder while Ben, Polly and Jamie did all the difficult stuff. Till now the 2^nd Doctor has been very much the clown, wearing a stovepipe hat (removed at the suggestion of head of drama Andrew Osborn and only agreed to by Troughton reluctantly) and big baggy trousers (which Troughton refused to remove, so were sneakily taken in little by little by the costume department so subtly that he wouldn’t notice; they’re almost a good fit by the time of ‘The War Games’), but no sooner has his hat been removed at the end of the previous story than he gets down to business with a more serious and tough persona, as if the shock of encountering Cybermen again has shaken off the cobwebs of his regeneration. Till now 2nd Doctor has been in shadows, having adventures on the side to make contrast with the 1^st Doctor’s habit of owning every room he walks into, but here is where he takes charge, even giving one of the most quoted Dr Who speeches about it being his moral duty to combat monsters. Troughton has till now been unsure how to play this quirky little Doctor and make him different, but director Morris Barry finally did what none of his predecessors did and sat down with the actor to discuss how to go forward. Fun as the first three Troughton stories are they aren’t scary because The Doctor never treats them as anything serious but in this story he’s scared. So much of this story’s drama comes from the Doctor’s conviction that the Cybermen can wipe humanity out in seconds and trying to make the second of many a sceptical base of cut-off humans realise the danger they’re in (it helps that Ben and Polly are every bit as scared following their first encounter with the Mondas metal meanies). This is also the first time we really see the Doctor’s scientific credentials as he tries to work out where the cyber-virus is coming from and why it only affects some people at the base and not others (spoilers: I still think of this scene whenever somebody asks me how many sugars I take in my tea and might be the reason why the answer is zero, while it’s so Cybermenish to hide the virus inside something that gives human tastebuds pleasure and exploit human ‘weaknesses’ for sweetness that they abhor; although it still seems illogical that the Cybermen don’t, say, poison the water supply and therefore affect everyone who uses it not just a chosen few).

The Cybermen also have a natty space plague that kills people horribly, affecting their nervous systems and making people’s veins turn dark as they become infected, a strikingly visual idea that makes humans look as if they’re turning into Cybermen without needing clunky body parts (I’m still half-convinced covid is a Cybermen plot as it works in much the same way, just invisibly – people might start taking it seriously again if they could flipping see it!) Which is another thought. Why sugar at all? Despite my earlier assertion that the Cybermen are Russians I have wondered if instead this story is another one of 1960s Who’s generational discussions (or maybe both at once?) with parents afraid of what their ‘flower children’ will turn into when they’re grown and running the planet. I mean, sure everyone’s working together in peace and harmony (a few jibes aside) which is great, but will these hippies really do what it takes to keep their people safe from invasion? Are they up to fighting off the monsters their own age that are surely being bred in secret by those crazy communists? For I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the plague comes in the form of sugar cubes; this is, for those not in the know, how many a 1960s youth took their LSD dripped on top of sugar and, well, this was shown in 1967 when LSD was the in drug in a story written by one of the few adults who knew the chemistry behind the drugs if not the realities of taking it, so if Dr Who was ever going to slip in a sly drug reference it would be this particular story in this particular year. Note the way that it targets the nervous system specifically: it’s both the thing that Cybermen certainly don’t have and which in many ways makes Humans weak (Cybermen you see don’t get ‘nervous’) and what in the end causes the humans to sort-of win, thanks to their ‘fight or flight’ adrenalin response to their invasion. The idea that it only affects the nerves of some people and not others though feels like another drug reference: for some hippies on LSD it was a miraculous experience that opened up their creativity and led to creative and philosophical insights that helped them understand their place in the universe; to others it was a slow burning death-trap their bodies couldn’t tolerate that put too much strain on their nerves. Note also the big chance since last time is that they’re ‘equal’ with no leader, something the hippies dream of. This plotline seems like a horrified parent idea of drug culture based on stories and gossip – this is a bit early for Syd Barrett but he’s an obvious example of a drug casualty who took much ‘doped sugar’ it set his nerves on edge and turned him (we think) schizophrenic. Admittedly if anything drugs enhance your emotions and put you in touch with your ‘inner child’, encouraging playfulness and enhancing memories long forgotten in ways the Cybermen can’t stand, and doesn’t turn people into hulking great six foot cybernetic droids, so maybe its all coincidence. Nevertheless this story fits a more overall theme of the people making Dr Who in the early years becoming afraid of what might happen in the future when they’re dead and gone and the youngsters have taken over and it is a story set in the future when the youth of the day have become the ‘old guard’.

Taking of youngsters, while Ben doesn’t get much to do as usual this is easily Polly’s best story, the one where she gets back a lot of the sarcasm that was her biggest character trait in ‘The War Machines’. As much as people quote Sarah Jane as being the show’s first feminist there are actually lots of candidates going back to Barbara at the beginning; Polly though is one of the more interesting examples – she screams and runs away with the best of them, but she also keeps a cool rational head and fights the idea that she should sit things out and let the boys have a go. She effectively saves everyone twice: everyone laughs at the way she’s told ‘Polly put the kettle on’ but it’s her tea-making duties that help identify the virus is in the sugar, whilst realising that her nail varnish remover might attack the Cybermen’s dangly metal bits in much the same way as her nails with the idea for the ‘Polly cocktail’, as realistic and real world a solution to the danger as any we’ve had in the series (it’s a compound of real chemicals, this being a story written by a scientist, made up of things you could find round the house like acetone, benzene, ether and alcohol. Despite being the first to spot The Cybermen heading out a door and being terrified they might come back Polly is no wimp either, staying put alone with the others rush around, something that, say, Jo or Rose would make far more fuss about. It’s all incredibly forward thinking for 1967. Of course people don’t talk about those scenes; they talk about Ben’s refusal to let her use her own invention because it’s ‘man’s work’ as a stick with which to beat Dr Who’s sexism. I love the way the camera lingers on Polly’s eye-roll when Ben says this though, which says more about gender equality in 1967 than any amount of women’s lib speeches from Sarah Jane a few years later. As for Jamie he has a mixed time of it. On the one hand he still suffers from how last minute his addition to the Tardis crew at the end of ‘The Highlanders’ is, a decision taken after many of the season four scripts had been ‘finished’ which has him knocking his head on the moon flight in episode one and remaining in bed for most of the story. Yet on the other hand Davis and pedlar switch him round with one of their supporting characters who spots The Cybermen from sickbay and invents a very natural sounding story about a feverish Jamie’s memories of ‘the phantom piper’ who haunts his Scottish regiment, taking souls at the point of death. It’s a brilliant bit of character that also gives us the point of view of someone we know and trust, so we believe Polly’s story that bit quicker (and is a lot better than simply giving Jamie either Ben’s or Polly’s lines, that don’t fit his character). We trust Jamie but we can also see why he’s so easily dismissed before the mass invasion in the last episode turns them into a living nightmare. They’re a braver bunch than most these scientists too, as in future most stories will take a more cynical view of mankind and have us wilt under the slightest pressure but here they hold their own – there’s no bunch of men (of course there’s no women: that’s a stage too far for 1967) I’d rather entrust the future of humanity to in the face of such a disaster than this one.

In other words it’s another close run thing this battle: the Tardis crew are more than just hangers on leaving things up to the Doctor (give or take a poorly Jamie out of it till the last episode) and the base are worthy but the Cybermen are such a powerful apparently unstoppable force in this story you still feel that they only just win this battle, especially the epic fourth episode where the stakes keep getting higher and higher, ending with (spoilers) a glorious shot of the Cybermen flying into the air on kirby wires as the moonbase turn off the gravity, these supermen just as susceptible to natural forces as we are for all their posturing and weaponry. A tense, taut, frightening thriller with one of the Cybermen’s more logical invasion plans (till the last episode anyway: The Cybermen have near enough ‘won’ through a combination of hypnotism and virus with a waiting army about to invade when they suddenly decide to blow a hole in the base for good measure, knocking out the human they’ve taken over) and filled with a great script, great acting and great ideas, there’s very little in this story that goes wrong at all. What does tends to be common to other Who stories of the era: three companions is one too many even with Jamie unconscious for half of it (at least in this era when stories are more compact; it worked in the first season of sic and seven parters but in four parters there aren’t enough lines to go round; this gets even worse in the 5th and 13th Dr years when there’s almost always somebody with nothing to do), we don’t get as much of a chance to explore this world as we would have done with the Hartnells as all we see is one set and a sick bay and some of the dialogue seems woefully dated at times (mostly whenever Polly is told to put the kettle on and make everyone a cup of tea). Unique to this story too is a weird experiment that doesn’t quite work where the Doctor talks to himself while mulling over his investigations and we hear him talk back to himself via pre-recorded tape as if we’re hearing his thoughts (you wonder why he never does it again – the 4th Dr barely tolerates conversation with anyone else as it is).

Mostly though you notice what this story gets right: it’s faster paced than anything seen in the series before (except possibly close cousin ‘The War Machines’), the monsters are a real threat rather than something odd to gawp at and if you’re not scared at or moved by something somewhere in this story then I have bad news about how Cybermen might have taken over and replaced your nervous system already. The Cybermen are a wonderful creation, mankind’s killer cousins who used to look on us with envy and spite who are now taking us apart limb by limb out of logic and reason. As great as all the 1960s Cybermen stories are, though (not so much the later ones) this is the story that makes best use of their threat, the one where they’re the most cunning and evil, the backdrop of mankind’s greatest achievement being the time of our possible disaster only adding to the tension and power of this story. The result is a story that’s a real trip, one that manages to recreate the moon (amazing to think that episode four was back at Lime Grove, the BBC’s tiniest studio!) and then throws one of Dr Who’s most realistic and believable monsters at it. ‘The Moonbase’ takes all the things that made ‘The Tenth Planet’ so good (an unstoppable monster that wants to convert you, taking over a base) and upgrades them by throwing in some extras (That voice! Those bodies! That set! The idea that the Cybermen aren’t individuals with names nd a leader who can be knocked out but a proper conglomerate army! The claustrophobia!) I love the mirroring too: the further mankind heads into space the more we become like Cybermen, adapting ourselves in order to survive. The Cybermen aren’t that different to the humans in this story, wearing space suits and controlling the weather, adapting life to make it easier. But there’s a danger that we might take it too far and that our next great leap for mankind will come with all sorts of unseen steps that really take us backwards and take us away from our true selves. As great as ‘The Moonbase’ is an adventure story it’s a wonderful philosophical debate too, as Pedler moves on from his pet worry about transplants in the present and looks towards the future with problems mankind is still grappling with today.

This is a story that might not be perfect from beginning to end but still includes so many of my very favourite Who moments. Alas we can’t see it as episode one is missing (so is episode three, though two and four exist) and Dr Who sets tend to look different when people are moving on them rather than standing statically on them in telesnaps, but judging by the surviving photographs of it and contemporary memories the recreation of the lunar surface was breathtakingly good. There are lots of stories about how uncomfortable and strange it was for the actors crammed into heavy spacesuits and flown by kirby wires across a set full of mock-up craters and after reading the novel first I had a sinking feeling it would just look stupid on screen, but no – the delight as Ben, Polly and Jamie launch themselves across the moon’s surface (and thus rather neatly getting in the gravitational plot element for later) is infectious. At least until poor Jamie comes crashing down and bangs his head; a clever way of writing him out for this story. In many ways it’s the most important scene of them all outside the first Tardis take off and regeneration, given that it was this scene that encouraged so many curious viewers to try a fading series after being featured in a trailer and rescuing this series from a fate where it might have been cancelled (or worse ‘upgrading’ into a show that no longer felt like Dr Who rather than one that’s a ‘regeneration’ of it). The glorious cliffhanger when the Doctor recognises the cyber Doc Martens sticking out from under a bed sheet in the sick bay before it lumbers towards him with no hope of escape that’s one of the best; near-immediately beaten by the epic end to episode three when a whole army of Cybermen march across the moon, totally in control, their heavy regimentation in sharp contrast to how the Tardis crew individually bounce their way over in episode one in their fragile spacesuits, an army that can’t be stopped by such puny human ideas as peace. Even something as simple and funny as The Doctor turned scientist taking the commander’s boots off and checking his feet as he tries to keep control during a crisis (one last hangover form the earlier stories of the 2^nd Doctor being a clown not the bringer of death; future stories show that’s not necessarily a contradiction). It’s Dr Who at its primal basics, reduced to a fight between good and evil as The Doctor himself says for the first time, as the best of us are held up against the worst of ‘them’, whether they be paranoia of Russians hippies or fears of the future.  It’s a quite brilliant little story considering that it was written from scratch within just 14 weeks, the length of time since ‘The Tenth Planet’ was shown (and I love the early playing around with time travel in that, while it’s been 14 weeks for the viewers it’s been 84 long years for the people in this story, enough time for the events of ‘The tenth Planet’ to become a fairytale told by the base’s grandparents and for the baddies to get a makeover).  No wonder this story became the template for so many future stories and no surprise either that this is the point (thanks mostly to a nifty mid-season trailer in the build-up to episode one) when Dr Who’s ratings began to recover. This story might feature a lot of period details to seem hi and contemporary to the times it was made in but it also feels like the future – and still does even now.  

POSITIVES + Part of the reason this story is so scary and memorable is its unique, deeply unsettling score, the Radiophonic Workshop coming up with a ‘tune’ that sounds like a Clanger playing wine glasses through a food mixer, but even weirder than that. I get goosebumps every time I hear it still and run under my bed for cover and I’m 42. What little music there is comes from stock, from an Eric Siday composition originally written for a film ‘The Horror Of Party Beach’, but works a lot better as the soundtrack to marching human converts than it does the motorcycle mods of the original.

NEGATIVES - This is the third story born from the fruits of Dr Who’s association with actual scientist Dr Kit Pedler, as part of his mate Gerry Davis’ quest to get ‘proper science’ into Dr Who under his watch as script editor. Most of the science is scarily accurate: Pedler’s concern over transplants and the point at which we ‘lose’ our personality is key to the Cybermen’s creation, whilst an outpost on the moon just like this one is still being talked about now (and might yet become a real thing by 2070, the date of this story’s setting, if only we can sort out the mess down here first). There are lots of little nuggets of scientific fact smuggled in too: the way that fire extinguishers won’t work in the vacuum of space (which is why fire was and is the biggest danger to manned missions) and ‘The Doppler Effect’, a real problem whereby radio transmissions can’t stay stable when received from moving objects like a space shuttle which is why there are so many breaks of transmission back to Earth in real tapes of 1960s and 1970s space missions with everyone praying they’ll switch on again later. Even the ‘virus’ subplot isn’t the filler it seems today: this was a genuine worry of the era, when the biggest threat to spaceflight was something that we might not be able to see. Even today astronauts spend days in quarantine in coming back to earth just in case they’ve picked up a microscopic germ we can’t see. As for the Gravitron controlling the weather – I doubt it would ever work quite like that but I’ve seen actual scientists put forward similar ideas about how to combat climate change by having parts of the planet given over to crops and carefully watered by capturing clouds to stay above them. And then they go and spoil it all when the Cybermen invade and damage the moonbase’s dome and the air is sucked out of it at speed. How do the humans get out of this sticky situation? By placing a drinks tray in place of the hole and filling it with sandbags. Erm, err...not so sure about the science of that one, which must be one of the dumbest bits of science in the series which even I can see through. I guess even scientists have their off days… Oh well, at least they didn’t do anything really stupid, like make out that the moon is an egg the way they do in ‘Kill The Moon’, a story you think would have more impact on this one given that its set a mere 21 years earlier (and before you point out that the alien insect hatched that egg and this is the ‘real’ moon it re-laid another one at the very end of the story. Surely it would have woken up when the Cybermen started marching across it even if the humans didn’t wake it up somehow?)

BEST QUOTE: ‘There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things, things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Doctor had already visited the moon once in the comic strips back when he was still William Hartnell in a story entitled ‘Moon Landing’ which ran in Tv Comic across July and into August 1965 (issues #710-712). In a neat bit of fortune-telling the first men land on the moon a mere year after they did in real life (which isn’t a bad guess at all) – although as far as I know they didn’t see a police telephone box there when they landed. For the only time ever the comic strips actually do a more scientifically accurate job than the telly (and not just the lack of polystyrene trays covering up holes in a dome either): the entire first part bar the first panel is about the astronauts rather than the Doctor, John and Gillian and concentrates on the difficulties in space, of the prototypes that went wrong (the mechanical failures, the natural hazards and the occasion when the rocket goes completely off course and misses the moon altogether’), not being able to communicate in the vacuum of space very easily and the moon’s low gravity. The moon expedition goes badly wrong with the expedition team trapped down a crater and the Doctor is desperate to communicate with them but of course cannot shout or talk using the radios inside their suits so he has to resort to placards telling them that they can jump to safety on the moon’s low gravity. Worried that they’ve been beaten to being the first people to set foot on the moon the expedition wonders what they’ll say back hoe before the Doctor grins and tells them that technically he never left the Tardis and that he doesn’t want to change the course of history which will record their exploits forever. Not the best comic strip ever (it’s a bit dull) but an informative one and quite the time capsule: Interestingly the faces of the astronauts seem to be loosely based on the Apollo one astronauts who died in a fire on base in January 1967 (and look nothing like Armstrong, Aldrin or Collins), a sad reminder of how, back in 1965, Grissom White and Chafee were the household names expected to be heroes forever).

Previous ‘The Underwater Menace’ next ‘The Macra Terror’

 

 

The Crusade: Ranking - 24

 

The Crusade

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Vicki, 27/3/1965-/17/4/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Denis Spooner, writer: David Whittaker, director: Douglas Camfield)

Rank: 24

In an emoji: ⚔

   'Ja Nus Hons Pris by Richard the Lionheart - Draft One

No man in prison can tell his tale true 

Not least the adventures of strangers from a box so blue 

That altogether made for such a strange crew 

I brought on them dishonour with ransom due 

In winters past 

They saw through my words, that they were untrue 

I felt remorse for what they had been through 

But what else is a needy King to do? 

There's always a part of the kingdom to woo 

I wonder where they travel to now, in futures to come or history passed?'

There it sits in the Dr Who canon between the one with the unrealistic ants and the one about jumping time tracks, sandwiched by historicals where The Roman Empire becomes a recurring farce and Monks living amongst Ancient Britons and Vikings use electric toasters, a last gasp of realism in a series that’s become increasingly gonzo, only half remembered and indeed only half returned (we only have episodes one and three and we only got the first of those back relatively recently in 1999, when someone bought it at a film fair in New Zealand not knowing it was rare but thankfully found out and sent the BBC a copy – given that officially New Zealand never even bought this story it’s given us all hope that more episodes are out there even in places that aren’t supposed to have them). There it sits in the back catalogue as a last minute bit of ‘old school’ to educate us, just as Dr Who is becoming a series that’s increasingly made purely to entertain. But I put it to you, dear reader, that even in a canon of some of the most exquisitely crafted, multi-textured and grown-up scripts ever written ‘The Crusade’ is special, deep and complex and full of rich dialogue that makes you feel as if you really have stepped back in time to another age. For this is the story where the ants are real and used by evil men on good people and where the time tracks are the difference between the haves and the have-nots, where the only farce is the problems caused between good men who want the same thing deep down and where time is so brutally set in stone our heroes can’t change it however hard they try. This is a world where the people who sit on top of an awkwardly stacked pile of cards that could come crashing down off their throne at any time, one where the only comedy is dripping in bitter irony and the only anachronisms in a tale of man’s inability to ever truly change is the Tardis. 

 This is the third time original script editor David Whittaker wrote for the series and, surprisingly, the only time he got to write one of his beloved historicals (he was a true history buff who loved researching and immersing himself in another world even more than writing and it shows). Whittaker is a class act who always did his homework, whether he was writing about feasible science in the near future or inventing impossible worlds that might exist out in space somewhere, so you can bet he goes the extra mile with material he can actually sit down and learn about. Of all the many great trips into the past Dr Who has taken down the years this is the one that feels the most ‘real’, as if you really have been transported back in time and, good as the serials that centre around the Dr and companions are, there’s something to be said for the historicals that throw the past at them rather than them at the past, so that for the last time the whole plot revolves around not the impact they have on the people they meet but their attempts to get their way back to the Tardis, to the impossible machine that represents home and rescue, in a land so brutal and harsh that you really don’t want to be stuck in for any longer than you have to. What with its tales of Kings marrying off their sisters, misbehaving Arabs and possible blackface or at any rate Caucasian actors in heavy make-up to play people from the Middle East some fans think ‘The Crusade’ is a story best to be left unremembered anyway, a tiny embarrassment from the days when we didn’t know any better and thought our Westernised central idea was ‘right’ to the point of blotting out all other voices (which was how we ended up in the mess of The Crusade in the first place after all). But ‘The Crusade’ is misunderstood precisely because its ‘about’ those things and how different life is now (i.e. in 1965), Whittaker picking up on the crux of other scripts he worked on like ‘The Aztecs’ and ‘The Reign Of Terror’ and asking out loud why people put up with things they knew at the time to be hurtful and deceitful without putting up more of a fight, coming to the conclusion that humans are scared, frail creatures terrified of being seen to do the right thing in case it makes them look weak and who live in a world made up of a tapestry of deceit and lies that means even when they try to do the right thing everyone is so suspicious that they assume they’re up to something. Everyone is a victim in ‘The Crusade’, worried about how they’re perceived, from Richard the Lionheart trying to save his kingdom by showing God is on his side, to Joanna the sister he intends to marry to keep the peace, to Saladin whose just trying to appear strong to his people against the Christian invaders, down to Barbara ending up in a plot to pretend that the King’s right hand man is really him, to the Doctor’s pretence of being a nobleman to steal some clothes to Ian pretending to be a knight to rescue Barbara to Vicki dressing up as a boy. Everyone in this story is trying to be something they’re not and it’s that tapestry of lies and deceit that causes ordinary people to become monsters, as the best means of survival, rather than pure cruelty. The closest to a noble motive the whole story is Muslim ruler Saladin in a move that’s practically blasphemous by 1965 standards, back when King Richard was still treated as almost an English patron saint. As deeply grateful as I am for all returned episodes of missing Dr Who, how I wish it had been episode four not episode one returned most recently, just to prove how modern this story is and how it subverts the slightly uncomfortable subtexts of its opening episodes. 

This is a complex story with no winners only losers, that shifts perspective so that you see it from several sides at once. At first you’re with the noble King Richard The Lionheart as he goes on a daring quest to bring education and knowledge to the barbarian hordes, especially when viewed from the eyes of the soldiers who are so impressed by his words and his valour in battle that they would gladly give their lives in his name (unthinkable in an age when British Royals stand for sleaze, corruption and charging us money for stuff that isn’t truly theirs: just compare how regal Richard is here to shots of Charles having a strop over a leaky pen and you can see where things have gone wrong). But then, the closer the plot gets to the King himself, the more you see this as a good p.r. stunt, that The King is really on a Crusade to make his name and keep his critics quiet as much as anything else, a last ditch attempt to raise funds by a man whose spent too much on the finer things in life that he can’t rule his kingdom (and suddenly the direct line between Royals then and now becomes easier to see). By the time Richard has refused to send help after Barbara and is busy attempting to marry his sister Joanna off for a proxy peace deal without asking her first, you start to see the sham as it really is. Equally while Palestine is painted at first as a dark and evil land, full of cruel and sadistic people who need to learn a bit of that English stiff upper-lip (especially when Barbara is captured by the evil El Akir almost as soon as the Tardis lands, a man whose as close to a pure sadist as any we see in Dr Who until Davros). By the end we see the Middle East of 1191 as a place with a culture and history all of its own, that doesn’t ‘need’ the Christianity and civilisation the soldiers are promising to bring to the ‘infidels’. Before Ian has a chance to rescue her Barbara is rescued in turn by more sympathetic locals who take pity on her plight and who are still trying to seek justice even in a land that’s patently unfair, risking their lives to stop their own ruler even at the cost of their life. 

 ‘We’re’ the invaders in this story, the aliens from outside imposing world domination on another, not ‘them’. Usually Dr Who, at least in these early days finds a historical setting and throws our heroes and heroines at it to see how they cope, but in this one there’s too: the England of the 12th century is portrayed as being just as alien and strange as the East. Basically everything we thought we knew in episode one turns out to be a lie by episode four, but that’s because in this strange medieval world where religion is key and science doesn’t exist yet and everyone’s so jumpy the truth can get you killed. Everyone survives in this story by hiding behind lies: The Doctor can’t let on that he’s a time traveller, Vicki has to pretend to be a boy to be allowed anywhere near court, Ian and Barbara have to be careful who they confide in, Haroun feeds his daughter white lies that the rest of their family is still alive and out there somewhere because without that she would have nothing to live for, Richard has to hide from his people that he’s not really pursuing The Crusade out of noble religious reasons but to hold a shaky poverty-stricken kingdom together, while Saladin hides from his people that he’s not really the brutal murderer they think he is but someone more civilised and understanding (he even sends snow and fresh fruit to Richard, just as he did in real life – and no that’s not an insulting present, fruit and snow were rare and valuable in Europe back then). The only person telling the truth is Joanna – and as a ‘girl’ she has no power whatsoever, despite being a princess, privy to the whims of her brother. Even more than that, though. ‘The Crusade’ points out how typically human and yet unnecessary it all is. Had everyone come clean from the beginning about their motives, had Richard gone to Saladin with trade in mind rather than conquest, had the Dr opened up about who he was to an open minded King, had Ian gone to fight as himself rather than a supposedly rich knight of Jaffa, had Vicki been a girl from the first instead of spooking Chamberlains with dress orders (there’s a great moment, now lost to modern viewers, where he laughs at the idea of sexes dressing as each other and moans about what times they’re living in just like every parent of every hip young trendy thing watching this in 1965) then everyone in this story could have been happy – but they aren’t, because humans are odd little distrustful creatures who don’t seem to be able to stay happy for any length of time.

 Whittaker is clever enough a writer to show that this isn’t just a bleak view of the Middle Ages but a view of humanity in general – and in an era when there were still ‘cold wars’ in Vietnam and Korea it would have struck a lot of viewers the first time round as being familiar (if anything it’s even more spookily familiar today, with two super powers fighting a religious war over Jerusalem). Whittaker’s been writing this story for some time too, threading it into the core of ‘his’ series in his days as the show’s first script editor: this is all pretty close to ‘his’ episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ about the distrust between the Doctor and future companions when if everyone had been open and honest from the first Ian and Barbara wouldn’t now be so far from home and in constant danger (an episode credited to Anthony Coburn, whose son is causing all the fuss over rights to the first story and its availability on i-player in November, but generally recognised as mostly Whittaker’s work, based on ideas from original Who script editor C E Webber, who didn’t last long enough to see the show on the air, because in those days it was the norm to only credit one writer per story in any BBC series weirdly enough).The Tardis crew have all learned a lot about themselves travelling together and knocking the rough edges off their characters so have become trusting of each other, to the point where when Vicki talks about her worries of being left behind, Maureen O’Brien visibly quaking at the thought of being trapped in this deadly world (she’s always good, far better than she’s given credit for, but especially here where she really makes the most of what little she’s given to do) and the Doctor is shocked – they’re a team now – in this crazy world the only people they can rely on is each other. 

The writer who more than anyone created all four of these people really makes the most of going back to their characters and asking how much their time spent together has changed them, made them stronger by working together – at times faith of being rescued is the only thing that gets Barbara through some pretty horrific ordeals in this story. Whittaker has really taken to the kindlier 1st Doctor he wrote in at the end of ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ when it was clear the series had a future but pushes him further than ever before so that instead of, say, ‘Marco Polo’ where it’s the Dr being unreasonable in a land of nobles, this time he’s the noble in a world of savages, with William Hartnell unbelievably good as he becomes the only person brave enough to rage at the King, seeing through the charades and publicity he’s built up for himself to the scared little boy out of his depth and trying to hang his kingdom together by a thread. Being diplomatic, however, doesn’t come easily to him and the Doctor finds this harder than fighting of an army of Daleks; it’s scenes like this where he loses his temper in the presence of a jumpy King and his loyal soldiers where you sense here just how young he is (yes at the time Whittaker, like every writer on Who, considered the Doctor impossibly old but it’s notable how much it works equally well now that the Doctor has lived so much longer how green around the gills and short-tempered the first Doctor is; that’s why he’s my favourite in fact, because he’s more flawed and less super-timelord than the others). There’s a terrific shown between politicians and soldiers where, for once, the Doctor seems to come off worst (and a great speech about how ’when you men of eloquence have stunned each other with your words we the soldiers have to face it out, while you speakers lay bed our soldiers sort out everything’ something true of every era: I re-write this against the backdrop that posh politicians are talking about conscription and sending working class boys and girls to war against Russia, though of course they’ll never send their own kith and kin). 

 In every previous story you could count on Ian’s British heroics and sheer goodness to put things right, but in this one his moral upstanding makes him easy prey for the people around him who trick and con him with their honeyed words to the point where he finds himself being staked out in the desert and smeared with actual honey, at the mercy of drones who are action heroes like him but without his gained wisdom, just taking orders blindly without thinking (both ants and humans; bet Ian wishes he’d kept a bit of that DN6 back from ‘Planet Of the Giants’). Vicki found the pace of life too slow in ‘The Romans’ and treated it like a giant holiday but she can barely keep up in this story, her 25th century way of thinking even more appalled by the injustices and casual cruelty than her 1960s friends. Barbara has been at the mercy of people in power many a time in this series, be they Aztecs, Roman Emperors, French revolutionaries, Dalek surrogate Nazis, Voords, Sensorites, insecticide pedlars or Giant Ants. You suspect that this is the adventure she remembers late at night most though, shaking from a nightmare long after she’s back safely in 1960s London, as she really goes through it: she isn’t just in the wrong place at the wrong place but kidnapped at knife point, not just leered at in this story but very nearly raped, while standing up to the baddy the way she always does very nearly comes at the cost of her life. Barbara started her time in the Tardis dreaming of changing the past, but all she wants to do now is survive long enough to go back to her own time. It’s quite the journey. 

 The main players all learn valuable lessons too: King Richard can fool everyone but not his sister and her barbs sting in a way no one else’s do, while Joanna learns that while blood is thicker than water a King with a kingdom to rule is thicker even than that, her life turned upside down at the cost of a kingdom that isn’t. Richard gets an early insight into the humility that will see him captured in Austria on his way back from the Crusades, where he becomes a prisoner, spending his time doing what he always should have been doing instead of fighting – writing poetry (Ja Nus Hons Pris’ is his best known, though weirdly a lot better regarded in France than here. I take it back, Royals really are different nowadays, I mean King Charles writing poetry?!) Saladin, too, is the reverse of Richard: The King’s problem is that he has a noble band of men fighting an un-noble war for money that’s only pretending to be about Christianity, whereas Saladin’s a noble man surrounded by thugs trying to keep his goons under control by telling them it’s all for money, when really he’s trying to keep his kingdom together any way he can. He’s also a ‘true’ Muslim in a way that Richard patently isn’t a ‘true’ Christian and is only spouting religious fervour because it’s the best way of making money (he looks positively appalled when his sister claims the Pope has greater rights to loyalty than a King). The only person who learns nothing in this story is the racist sexist thug El Akir, a baddy as mad, bad and dangerous to know as any we see in the series – though even he gets a reason for it with a back-story of being a victim in Whittaker’s brilliant novelisation that shows how he’s angry at all women after being rejected by the love of his life, his brother’s widow and being angry at every female since (in their parlance he’s an infidel – in today’s parlance he’s an incel). Everyone it seems has a personal crusade, a quest to change things and gain new territory that makes them learn about themselves, even if that quest is only survival. And that’s such a good fit for Dr Who as a series where, more often than not, we see the effects that people’s actions have on the people around them and the ripples across past, present and future that every action takes and why we should do the right thing by people where we can because of that (one of the few constant themes across the show’s sixty years) Dr Who was unusual from the first in being a series where people did grow from story to story, where the adventures they had weren’t interchangeable and where you couldn’t just drop in and out in any order the way you could most dramas and soap operas but under Whittaker’s guiding hand especially this becomes exactly the series Sydney Newman created it to be: a drama where people learn things, not just about the environments they land in but about themselves. 

 Of course you can write all the glorious words you want and it won’t mean a thing if the cast can’t deliver them properly, but the brilliance of ‘The Crusade’s dialogue is matched by the brilliance of its cast. Julian Glover is an excellent King, a renowned stage actor even back then when he was just thirty, risked his reputation by doing Dr Who back in the days when it wasn’t the cultural phenomenon it is now and dismissed by many for being merely a ‘children’s show’. He did this story on the back of the script, which he rightly recognised as being on a par with any of the big revered history plays he was in at the time, with Richard arguably richer and more complex in this story than he is in any of the actual books and plays directly about him (including ‘Age of Kings’ a 1961 drama with the same director as this story Douglas Camfield in which Julian Glover played, umm, Richard the Lionheart and ‘Ivanhoe’ a 1982 drama directed by Douglas Camfield in which Julian Glover, err, played Richard The Lionheart, despite the actor not having more than a passing resemblance to the paintings of him; not to mention the most famous interpretation ‘The Lion In Winter’ and works by Vidal Gore and Tariq Ali; naturally Richard The Lionheart is an actual lion in the Disney universe when he turns up in ‘Robin Hood’). Incidentally, when Glover returns in Dr Who in ‘The City Of Death’ he plays the last of the Jagaroth, an alien race whose been splintered and sent back across twelve different stages of history, which involved the actor briefly dressing up in lots of different costumes from different time periods – one of which is a Crusade uniform. Could it be that the King himself is an alien?!) Jean Marsh wasn’t yet as well known (though she had been in excellent Twilight Zone episode ‘The Lonely’ before this) but you can already tell that she will be, the first of her three Dr Who appearances in many ways her best as she makes Joanna simultaneously soft and warm, harsh and tender, haughty and common, caught between a life as the revered sister of the most important man in the land and the little sister who can still be put to the sword if she angers her Royal brother too much. It’s a brilliant portrayal – I yearn for more of this story to be found if only because of all the rich acting that’s going on in Jean Marsh’s eyes in the episodes we do have, when the camera’s meant to be looking at someone else and which you can’t see in photographs or from a soundtrack even if you squint. Bernard Kay too is excellent as Saladin, peeling the layers of a complex character away one by one, while George Little superb in the little he gets to do as Haroun, a man of honour in a world that doesn’t often let him use it (again the novel gives him more back story for his motivation: revenge against the leader who gave the orders to set his house alight and murder his wife in cold blood, something only vaguely hinted at here). By contrast Walter Randall has a whole different job as El Akir, being one-note nasty and a threat around which the whole story turns, but he’s excellent too, a rare person in Dr Who with no redeeming features whatsoever who still feels ‘real’ rather than a caricature. Mostly, though, everyone’s a scoundrel in one way or another or at best dishonest for no worse motive than trying to stay alive. 

 Yes to modern eyes its a shame that they give the three decent Arab parts to Europeans (though if anything Who is going against the grain for TV traditions of the time in having genuine Arab actors at all and not just in this story – this is the middle of three times Tutte Lemkow is there, an actor whose become very popular with fans on the back of his three appearances in the show, though you might not recognise him without the pet monkey or the one-eye of Cyclops of ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Myth Makers’; the poor chap cut himself badly at rehearsals, sticking the knife he threatens ian with in his own finger down to the bone, resulting in a trip to hospital and a Tetanus jab, but he gamely turned up without missing a rehearsal). Forget what some of the Dr Who textbooks tell you though: this isn’t a story that’s clumsy about the racial issues at all but one that’s very much aware of the complexity of this period of history in this part of the world and how people of the 20th century view it through different eyes. Compare it to almost any other 1960s TV about the Arab world and what impresses you most is just how fair this is, right down to the actors speaking proper BBC English rather than silly voices. 

One of the best things about ‘The Crusade’ is that it doesn’t feel like it’s ‘just’ a stop off back in a time that couldn’t possibly exist again and needs to be imagined – it feels like another part of an ongoing tapestry that exists to this day, another stalemate in an ongoing battle between ‘locals’ and ‘invaders’ that can never be won. The cleverness of ‘The Crusade’ is that feels like another chapter in part of an ongoing story about man’s inhumanity to men that don’t look like he does, part of a long lesson in learning that we might learn one day but probably won’t. It feels like a long time ago this story and in other ways no time at all – it’s quite eerie to be reviewing a story about how peace in Palestine feels impossible during a month when the ongoing wars in the middle East, which have ebbed and flowed going back to the 12th century, have flared up into massacre-levels again, with a similar tapestry of lies and propaganda and skirmishes and betrayals setting the tone for our current battle. Spookily both stories are about an invasion of Jerusalem, although Richard never quite gets there on screen (or in real life: the Doctor fudges his soothsaying for the King but though Richard sees the Holy Land he knows he doesn’t have enough troops to capture it so turns back). We’ve been here before so many many times because humanity never ever learns: chances are David Whittaker, writing in 1965, had the Suez crisis of nine years earlier at the back of his mind when he wrote this story (an Egyptian blockade of Israel) or maybe even the 1950 ‘Law Of Return’ that saw the English promise a ‘safe return’ of Jews to their homeland they couldn’t possibly make good (much like the ‘Crusade’ itself its ‘our’ fault for meddling in things bigger than us, however much the history books tries to paint us as trying to spread civilisation to a backward land to make people’s lives better, which is what most British viewers were being told at the time). You can absolutely draw a line between the fake-peace of this story in the 11th century, secured by marrying off a princess who doesn’t want to go to a man who doesn’t care for her, in a war fought for money but hidden behind religious banners, and today when war overturns ceasefires that overturns wars, depending on the people in power and splinter terrorist groups at any one time, in an ongoing stalemate that neither side can win. 

 Even if you don’t see that then, like other Dr Who historicals in the 1960s, the past is still brought brilliantly to life, perhaps more so than any other example (which is really saying something this decade’s trips to the past are all so accurate and detailed) not just with costumes and make-up and props as normal (the BBC often did plays set in this time period in the 1960s so had a lot of stock ready made to hand – perhaps another reason this time period got chosen in the first place) but with the rich dialogue. While The Romans and Vikings and Aztecs still talk much like 1960s people with the slang turned down and some old-fashioned words sprinkled throughout, Whittaker writes this story as it would have been heard in the day, rich in iambic pentameter and blank verse and with practically everyone saying something quotable most of the time (So many of my favourite lines are from this story: ‘All wise men look for peace. The terms of peace make wise men look fools’ ‘Give him every liberty – except liberty itself’ ‘You must serve my purpose – or you have no purpose’, ‘Hold one hand out in friendship, but keep the other on your sword’ ‘The brave deserve their favours ‘The only pleasure left for you is death – and death is very far away’ and a line I use all the time ‘You ask for the impossible very lightly’, something I’d forgotten even came from Dr Who until re-watching this story again). The dialogue is especially rich when the Tardis quartet aren’t around and we’re dropping in on the people here in their ‘natural habitat’ – the full on argument between Richard and Joanna in episode three, a brother and sister squabble heightened by the fact he’s King of England and she resents having to obey her sibling even though she has to, is particularly rich with insults and language. No wonder ‘The Crusade’ was one of the first three Who stories selected to be turned into novelisations soon after it was on the air (alongside ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Web Planet’), novelised by Whittaker himself: at the time, far more so than now, ‘The Crusade’ was being held up as being a particularly sophisticated entry in a series that was always far more educational and classy that it had any need to be. The novel is in fact where I first fell in love with this story, long before I could see the remaining half or listen to the soundtrack taped off the TV onto a reel-to-reel and decades later made available to buy on a shiny CD by a combination of science and magic (I’ve read how ‘cleaning’ processes and compact disc mastering works enough times in my ‘day job’ as a music reviewer, but I defy anyone to not see a little bit of Dr Who like magic in how something taped in murky audio sixty years ago can be cleaned up to sound better than a lot of things being made now). The original TV version didn’t disappoint when I saw it though: everyone is going the extra mile in this story and everyone means every last worthy word they say, from the main parts to the regulars to the extras. 

 The accuracy too is first class. Richard isn’t the patron saint of other dramas or the butcher with an axe to grind, or a gullible fool, or a religious zealot as so many lesser dramas do, but a more complex man, who knows what he does is probably doomed but does it anyway as it’s a better alternative than poverty or all-out war. They could have made him a noble explorer like ‘Marco Polo’ or a comedy twit like Nero but he’s neither: he’s a man trying to be the King his people need. Richard’s not a glorious lion-hearted ruler here but a newly installed cub, two years into his reign, watching his kingdom unravel but doing his best to keep it from the people around him. Admittedly in real life Joanna was meant to be married off six weeks after the fake-Richard got captured rather than more or less simultaneously, but that bit of artistic license aside every single bit of this story is true and there are plenty of spaces where the Doctor and friends’ adventures can fit. Whittaker even correctly guesses at the incestuous relationship between Richard and Joanna, of which more has come to light since this story went out. Although this element got toned down (reportedly because William Hartnell was outraged: in his childhood Richard would have been painted as even more of a folk hero as much as anything else, though I shouldn’t think producer verity Lambert was too happy at having such an idea go out under her watch either) Glover and Marsh still pitch their performance as something more than siblings if slightly less than full on lovers, something they found fairly easy to do given that Glover was in fact married to Marsh’s best friend actress Eileen Atkins at the time (and a rare name you think must have been in Dr Who at some point but never has). Even so Lambert left them notes after the producer’s run – which they seem to have ignored given episode three – that read ‘don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to!’ Jean also knew Hartnell having started her career in the 1953 film ‘Will Any gentlemen?’ in which he starred (though both are upstaged by newcomer Jon Pertwee! It’s where he and Jean first met and the pair married not longer, though had divorced by the time Pertwee became the Doctor. So as you see very incestuous all round!) 

The result is a story that feels a class above anything else on offer, even in what I consider Dr Who’s most golden patch, a smart story by a smart writer that doesn’t ever talk down to its audience or make the kind of sacrifices for TV viewing that other Dr Who stories do, in all eras. Like the best writers of history you can tell both that Whittaker adores this place but also that he’s done enough research to know that in reality he’d hate to live there. This isn’t a sanitised version of past at all: Barbara in real danger, at one point handed a knife by Haroun and told to kill herself and his daughter if soldiers get near otherwise expect a fate worse than death: you feel it too. The attention to detail is extraordinary, from the script to the costumes (al proper period) and down to the sound (there’s an extra echo added to the scenes in the Arab world, to better reflect being inside temples rather than being outside). Even the livestock: Camfield hired actual ants from London Zoo from the scenes where Ian’s arm gets daubed in honey (something William Russell, understandably, refused to do so that’s production assistant Viktors Ritelis’ arm you seen on screen…well, telesnap photo) not to mention a live animal carcass (which reportedly made the studio stink to high heaven) and a real life falcon – Richard’s favourite pet. If there’s a downside it’s nothing that can’t be explained by time or budget: this story doesn’t look as lush as the earlier historicals (though I’ll gladly take that back if episodes 2 and 4 are returned and prove me wrong!) and while the script mentions battles –aplenty most of what we get on screen is the talking, bar a very lowkey skirmish at the very start and a swordfight at the end. The whole is almost unrelentingly grim: only ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’ cut this one close to just how dark a vision of the world it is; much as I admire that, much as its better than just making the past out as fun and games, I do prefer my Dr Who stories to come with just a dash of hope. Especially from Whittaker who usually excels at happy endings: this one just ends with a cowed Tardis crew being grateful they escaped with their lives and a cut shot of Richard finally praying to the God he claims to serve, even though we at home know his Crusade is doomed. This isn’t just gratuitous misery though: Whittaker uses this story to explore a lot about the misery of being human in any era and how misunderstandings can quickly grow and spread and above all other things this story is a tragedy with a capital T, a world of people with clashing convictions equally convinced they’re right rather than heroes and villains. Which is exactly the sort of story Dr Who should be telling and one I wish they’d tell more. ‘The Crusade’ remains above all else a real high point of the ‘intellectual’ side of Dr Who’s ever elastic catalogue, a story that’s rich in words and costumes and ideas, even if the starting point is a King whose really very poor indeed. 

 POSITIVES + Even in the middle of one of the grimmest, most serious Dr Who stories of them all there’s a prime comedy moment where the Doctor outwits a hapless merchant whose on the take, pretending to be of high standing and what you might call an ‘influencer’ today, someone sure to tell everyone he meets about this wonderful market stall. Both men think they’ve got the better of the other (he’s a crook whose stolen these clothes in the first place) but there can only be one winner and William Hartnell’s sheer delight at his own ruse as he tries not to get the giggles and give the game away is TV magic. 

 NEGATIVES - There is, however, one element that’s maybe not quite as great as in other Dr Who historicals: the sets. Barry Newbury is stretched by other jobs so we just don’t get the same level of care and attention to detail we usually had under his watchful eye. The ‘forest ambush’ in the opening episode is particularly poor, being basically a cluster of droopy fake looking trees gathered together on what’s clearly a studio floor (shot in Ealing, not Lime Grove or TV centre, to afford bigger space in a sign of how regarded this series was now at the BBC– which they then don’t seem to use. Most odd. That, incidentally, is probably why we don’t get one of Whittaker’s beloved Tardis chat scenes the way we do in at least his original draft of every other story he wrote or re-wrote, which is a real shame: more than anyone he viewed these stories as about how the characters reacted to events, not the events themselves). And this eighteen months after they successfully brought an alien petrified jungle to life in ‘The Daleks’! Thankfully the sets get better as the story goes on (the harem and castle look particularly good) but still without ever reaching the luxurious heights of ‘Marco Polo’ or ‘The Aztecs’. 

 BEST QUOTE: Joanna on the Doctor: ‘There is something new in you yet older than the sky itself’, which is as good a description of Doctor as we ever hear in any story. 

Previous ‘The Web Planet’ next ‘The Space Museum’