Marco Polo
(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 22/2/1964-4/4/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: John Lucarotti, directors: Warris Hussein and John Crockett)
Rank: 52
After playing Kublai Khan at backgammon the Doctor played chess with Alexander The Great, snakes and ladders with Cleopatra, Monopoly with Napoleon, Hungry Hippos with Caligula, Hide and Seek with Hannibal and his elephants and then played 'Guess Who?' with himself
Marco...Polo!’ Time is a funny thing – as much as Dr Who historicals are ‘about’ the time period they’re set in, they also tell you a great deal about the time period they were being made in and the show’s changing audience and their changing expectations. Had this been the 1970s then a story like this would surely have been about how 13th century explorer Marco Polo was really an alien/robot/hybrid that single-handedly managed to stop an invasion. If it had been the late 1980s they would have been some sort of ancient God. Had it been the 2000s the Dr would have saved Marco personally and restored the timelines while getting his autograph and dropping heavy-handed hints about all the things he hasn’t had time to see yet. In the 2010s we’d have had the Dr telling us why Marco Polo was so important, before roping him into a plot where he or she ended up creating everything they’re remembered for while the hero was just along for the ride, with an epilogue about the importance of multiculturalism and appropriation just to rub it in. In 1996 the Doctor wouldn’t have had time for Marco, what with all that kissing. In the 2020s the Doctor would have been kissing Marco. If this was season 24 we’d have had an underwater hide and seek game of ‘Marco Polo’ between two differently coloured armies of Silurians and Sea Devils and a pool cleaning robot, with Bonnie Langford screaming Marco’s name in the cliffhanger sting (Marco would, of course, have been played by one of the Chuckle Brothers). Even later in the 1960s the story would have been more about the Doctor and companions being separated and having their own adventures in this time period and trying to get back to safety, possibly with another timelord having fun inventing the pogostick and giving it to Marco to accelerate the course of human history.
But this is still
February 1964 and the fourth ever story. Dr Who is so new the paint hasn’t
finished drying and the rules aren’t set yet on what this show can be. This is
the first ever historical involving people who can actually string sentences
together, and the rules haven’t been written yet – and indeed this story
couldn’t be more different to ‘An Unearthly Child’ because everyone talks at
length, fluently and poetically. This isn’t a story about one setting in one
time but lots of them, a travelogue that takes us from one end of Asia to (near
enough) the other, over the course of several days, meeting several different
groups of people along the way. Even though it’s a story filled with much
jeopardy there are no monsters as such, just differences of opinion (even the
closest, the warlord Tegana, has a really good speech about how in a world
where everyone is always prepared for war it’s only sensible to outwit them and
be first). The Doctor and co don’t play a part in shaping history or making
sure it travels on the train tracks set by history – instead, of all the Who
historicals, this is the one that’s the most plausible, without any change to
established history at all (just a bit of tweaking in the grey areas that might
not have been written down: indeed the original draft ended with the Doctor
accidentally walking off with Marco’s ‘lost’ diaries covering the events of the
story and going ‘oops’ before unleashing a tirade when reading what Marco calls
him – I really wish they’d kept it, as it’s so in keeping with the story!) It’s
a story propelled not by the real historical events so much as the Tardis
crew’s desperate need to win their time and spaceship back from Marco (who
wants it not for some evil end but so he can present it as a gift to the mighty
Kublai Khan and earn the right to go back home to Venice; he has after all
saved the travellers’ lives and doesn’t quite understand that they can’t just
make another one). It’s probably the only story where the characters from
history are the driving force, not the regulars who are the passengers not the
drivers (though ‘The Massacre’ has a claim to that too). Compared to pretty
much all Dr Who stories that come after this one nobody learns anything in what
will become in future the usual way of these sorts of stories (although there
are a lot of little educational nuggets dropped in along the way) and nothing
changes from the Tardis arriving to when it leaves – and yet that’s not quite
true either, for everyone learns a lot about each other – and about themselves.
‘Marco Polo’ remains Who’s most travelogue of stories, one that’s about the
surroundings and the characters more than the plot.
For the one and only
time, too, in the 20th century the story is narrated not by the
‘Doctor’ or the neutral third person that happens to be choosing which events
to ‘show’ us at home (the last time this happens until Rose starts babbling
about her death in 2006) but Marco himself. Many of the words come from Marco’s
actual memoirs (a 13th century bestseller still in print today!) lovingly
recreated on screen and – unique to all of Who – there’s a map showing us just
how far exactly we’ve come. Most Dr Who stories take place within a couple of
hours, with some lasting overnight, but this one goes on for days and unfolds
almost in real time across the seven weeks (episode two alone takes place
across ten days), with the real speed of the travel by horse and yurta (a
period caravan – there you are you see, you learn a lot from this story) worked
out to be realistic. It’s quite the journey too, audaciously re-creating in a
corner of the single cramped TV studio in Lime Grove some of the most amazing
sights ever seen in the series, all different to the last: The Himalayas, the
Gobi dessert, the creepy cave of 500 eyes, a bamboo forest and even Kublai
Khan’s majestic palace (they can’t quite re-create the famous palace of
opulence and 10,000 white stallions but they get a lot closer than any TV
production with a BBC budget in 1964 really ought to).
‘Marco Polo’ is, on the
one hand, an astonishing feat of plot engineering: the cast has to be small,
the sets have to appear only one per episode (because that’s all they can fit
in) with designer Barry Newbery cleverly re-using the same one, dressing it
with drapes and curtains and pillars to hide doors and windows and it can’t
deviate from details that, back in 1964, a sizeable chunk of the audience at
home would have read (and, unlike the 1970s onwards, Dr Who would have been in
trouble if it had contradicted). The costumes, by Daphne Dare, are beautiful,
full of gorgeous detail and colour that seeps through the screen even in
monochrome. They go to such lengths to make this world come to life that it
even features real live horses and a monkey (not from stock footage either but
really there: the monkey reportedly hated the cameras and became incontinent).
The market stall we see beats anything we see in, say, The Rings Of Akhanaten’
despite being made on a budget so low the entire seven episodes wouldn’t pay
for even a single set in the modern age. Yet you never feel as if this story is
being manipulated or written to a formula: it unfolds naturally, at the speed
it ought to and even the cliffhangers seem a natural progression to the story
rather than the interruption they often seem like. Writer John Lucarotti was a
friend of BBC drama head and show creator Sydney Newman’s (and the only person
the ‘boss’ ever actively pushed on the production team) and a huge history buff
who’d long been fascinated by the tales of Marco Polo since he was a boy (since
reading the full book ‘The Description Of The World’). Lucarotti knew this
world inside out, having written a full eighteen-episode re-enactment of the
full diaries for Canadian radio in 1955 (sadly long since lost) and unlike some
later Who writers who have to research at speed was happy to add period details
he knew would be right. The writer was matched in his enthusiasm by William
Hartnell (whose widow, Heather, claimed after his death had been his suggestion
in the first place). The Dr Who version only features a fraction of the
diaries, with Marco’s notes apparently lost for the years 1275-1292 (this story
being set in 1289) but they fit historical fact very accurately: we know that
Marco must have travelled to Lob Nor (where the Tardis lands) and on through
the Gobi desert, arriving in Shang-Tu. We also know that he travelled with
Tartar barons (we don’t know their names but ‘Tegana’ seems as good as any) and
while Ping-Cho is pure fiction she is very similar to one of Marco’s jobs
escorting Princess Kokachin, a teenager in an arranged diplomatic marriage on a
long trek to marry the elder Ilkhan (ruler) of Persia a mere year before (close
enough for recorded history to be ever so slightly wrong). And given that we
don’t know the details, whose to say the Tardis wasn’t part of the journeys
too? It’s not as if anyone would have written them down: Marco would have been
concerned about a ‘flying caravan’ not being realistic and Kublai Khan doesn’t
seem likely to have wanted it on record that he could be beaten at backgammon! Also,
what with all the competing translations of Marco Polo’s diaries out there and
confusion over which bits he actually wrote and what were edited out or added
by someone else, whose to say this isn’t the truest account of how his journey
went, in the same way that later Dr Who stories exploit real gaps in the
history of Agatha Christie and Shakespeare? (an idea that, remember, is being
invented for the first time here: there was no other series like DW that played
around with history like this back in 1964). ‘Marco Polo’ seems the odd one out
now as there’s no alien invasion, no scientific gobbledegook, nobody from the
future trying to sell Kublai Khan a toaster, no sudden scifi moments of peril
and the only thing that’s even remotely space-age is the Tardis – and for the
vast majority of the story being separated from it is the entire plot (Marco,
who thinks of the Tardis as magic, reckons it would make a fine gift for The
Mighty Kublai Khan, who in another sign of how unusual this story is, doesn’t
arrive till part six despite being the most famous ‘character’ in it). However
it’s still very Dr Who, the past come to life in a way that for all we know
might have really happened that way.
It’s a clever angle on
history to take too, putting the Doctor with another traveller far from home:
the only thing really that’s known about the Doctor at this early stage is that
he’s a ‘traveller’ who can’t go home (for reasons we won’t know until ‘The War
Games’ in 1969), finding a temporary home in all the different places they
travel through. Ian and Barbara, too, the audience identification members, are
cut off from home and trying to get back to it,
the over-arching theme of Who’s early days the need to see them survive
long enough to get home in one piece long enough to see London in 1963 again.
Here Marco is in a similar position to both of them, earning a living
travelling for the Khan as his envoy so successfully that his boss refused to
let him stop and go home, leaving him a curious and adventurous traveller but
one who, like the Doctor, also secretly yearsn to go home and stay put, without
the dangers and obstacles of being always on the move. ‘Marco Polo’ ends up
being story about the perils of being
cut off from home, possibly forever, with three different lots of motivations to
get things sorted and get home in one piece going on at once and like many
travellers facing adversity together it unites them to a degree despite the
different centuries they come from (many viewers too will have recognised the
Tardis’ malfunctions, losing heat and water, from travels in their car on
holiday, although thankfully even the AA and RAC are easier to deal with than
warlords out for sabotage). Of all the many Dr Who stories this is, you could
say, the closest to Newman’s original vision for the series, as a place where
the past could come alive and seem every bit as ‘real’ as the present. There
are no sonic screwdrivers here, no bits of science masquerading as magic to get
everyone out of trouble and absolutely no robot dog with blasters: every twist
of the plot comes from real things that would have been in the environment for
real. Most of all, though this story is educational in the sense that it’s
about people, who never change despite the different costumes they wear and
different surroundings they live in, with all of the people we meet united by a
theme: wishing they were back home. Back in the days when nobody quite knew
what Dr Who was ‘about’ yet the idea to make it about the one thing these disparate characters have in common – a
longing to be back home, something surely all the audience watching could
identify with too – is a very clever idea that makes for lots of drama.
Lucarotti was something of a traveller himself too, having moved from Canada
(where he met Newman) to England and on to Majorca, which is where he got the
commission (writing this story’s episode about the chilly desert nights in an
environment about as opposite as you can get!)
This is a story though
that’s only really ‘about’ the Venetian explorer’s travels in the same way that
previous story ‘Edge Of Destruction’ is ‘about’ the Tardis breaking down;
really both stories are about the regulars and how they cope with being
stranded in an adventure that doesn’t belong to them. It’s a story all about
trust and having to put your life in the hands of strangers when you don’t have
all the same information, of what lengths you would go to in order to survive
and how long the veneer of civilisation lasts when confronted with disaster, of
finding your way when the people you’re asking for directions might not have
your best interests at heart (weirdly enough, then, it really is like the ‘Marco
Polo’ game of calling games when blindfolded, a game that didn’t exist till
1965, a year after this story went out. A coincidence? Most likely, though I’d
love to think that a nation’s schoolchildren picked up on the theme of missed
communication in this story and re-enacted it on the playground). ‘Marco Polo’,
originally intended as the third story of the first season, might well have
inspired story editor David Whittaker to write his two part story in fact: both
are very similar in all ways but the setting, about the culture shock of being
stranded away from home in a place that doesn’t play by the same rules you’re
used to. Both start with a mechanical breakdown and then move on to being about
a communications breakdown, as people all have their own motivations, none of
them necessarily bad but all of them confusing to 20th or 21st
century eyes. Marco has been trusted by the Khan to keep Ping-Cho safe, but
it’s for an arranged marriage neither she nor her husband wants – she’s a
mixture of sorry and sad when she learns that her elderly suitor has killed
himself rather than put her through the strain of appearances (and while they
understandably don’t quite say ‘consummation of their marriage’ given this is a
children’s programme on at Saturday teatime that’s clearly what they mean).
Tegana has been hired to make sure Marco never makes it to Kublai Khan’s palace
and has been trusted to make sure he doesn’t get there. Marco saves the Tardis
crews’ lives on trust, despite his servant’s pleas that they are demons who
should be killed on the spot, but makes them in turn promise that they won’t
enter their ‘magic caravan’ thought to
be the source of their magic powers and intends to give it to the Khan as a
gift in return for his freedom. It’s all a bunch of misunderstandings: Marco
would never understand what the Tardis really is even when everyone tries to
tell him, he wrongly puts his faith in Tegana’s protection, Tegana wrongly
tries to kill him because that’s the job he’s been hired to do and a poor man
in need of money can’t afford to have scruples when other people would do the
job instead. You understand all points of view at different times and sympathise
with Marco’s anger and betrayal when he finds the Tardis crew have tried to
deceive him, even when we know what he doesn’t: that what they tell him is the
truth and all they want to do is go home. Marco is shocked too when Tegana
betrays him, while he lives on blind trust that Kublai Khan will give him what
he wants based on a half promise the old man can’t even remember making, being
such a straightforward and honest man himself. Matters come to a head when
Ping-Cho, the only one who knows where Marco has hidden the Tardis key, is torn
between helping her new friends and obeying her protector Marco, forced to
betray one or the other. It is, in a sense, one big chess game: the pieces of
the puzzle are forever moving across the board re-acting to each other and this
is the first (of many) Who stories where the characters actually play chess
during the course of the story. In a story broadcast to the backdrop of the
recent Cuban Missile crisis (a misunderstanding on a much bigger scale) its
message of working out who to trust and trying to accept cultures on their own
terms because we’re not that different deep down would have hit home even more
than it would today (Dr Who is such a cold war baby it’s a theme lurking at the
back of even stories set centuries before). A lot of fans find the ending,
where the Tardis is given as a gift to the Khan, then won back by the Doctor in
a game of backgammon, a cheat after seven weeks of travelling, but actually
it’s the perfect end: only by being direct, with a game that isn’t about
stealth or chance or tricking your opponent but equal skill, are things put
right and order restored. The fact that everyone (bar Tegana) get what they
want, with Ping-Cho free to marry who she likes and Marco free to go home,
makes it an even better ending after all that time spent in their company.
It is one of Dr Who’s simplest plots so the fact that it’s stretched to seven episodes (the equal third-longest of any individual story) ought to make it quite dull and slow. In some places it is (the action sags in the middle rather, when Tegana tries to come up with increasingly desperate ways to kill everyone and yet still these otherwise intelligent characters fail to see through him) but somehow the plot doesn’t matter. It was a genius move (perhaps one suggested by script editor David Whittaker, who was obsessed with it) to make the Tardis the driving force of the plot, a ‘flying caravan’ the Tardis crew need but Marco wants just as much for different reasons. To so many later Dr Who stories it’s merely transport but, on the back of ‘Edge Of Destruction’ where it was practically a fifth character, it makes sense it should be front and centre. This is really more of a character piece than a plot piece anyway, with Lucarotti’s characters impressively strong and rounded. That’s especially true of the regulars who haven’t had an awful lot of time to simply be themselves over the opening few stories. This is the grumpiest we ever see the Doctor, affronted that Marco has taken his ‘caravan’ for his own reasons and in the single best use of the regular’s week holidays (brought forward when Hartnell fell ill) the Doctor spends the entire episode sulking in the Tardis, refusing to come out. They’ll soften the 1st Doctor a lot after this (the hastily written ‘Edge Of Destruction’ being the point when the Doctor goers from being an alien every bit as scary and unreadable as the monsters we meet to being a benign grandfather with a grouchy streak) but for now William Hartnell spends most of this story in a state of apoplexy, the one person here who stays rigid and doesn’t adopt to his new surroundings (usually such a character trait of the Doctor’s) despite travel being all about adapting to a life different to yours. Ian, though, feels right at home as an explorer and history teacher Barbara is in her element at seeing history she knows up close for the first real time (you can’t blame her for not being up to snuff with the history of the cavemen of her first encounter, given how little anyone knows about them). Susan gets to be more than just a peril monkey too by gaining a friend in Ching Po and showing us that teenagers are the same in any era and on any planet (give or take some deeply weird customs. And indeed costumes). Susan doesn’t make many friends in her travels – even when we meet her in a 1963 classroom she’s the butt of the classroom jokes and a lone wolf – and it’s as important a part of her characterisation that she can freely mingle with people from other times as it is the Doctor in later stories (by contrast he looks down on everyone in these early days, be they from the Palaeolithic age, 13th 20th or the 26th centuries).
What’s most changed,
though, is that this story is actually a lot more about Marco Polo himself than
anyone we’ve got to know. Mark Eden – by far the biggest name to appear in the
series to date (he even got a Radio Times cover for this story alongside
William Hartnell; albeit probably more on the back of The Daleks’ success than
anything else) – plays him subtly, as trusting but not gullible, brave without
being foolhardy, kind and sympathetic but stubborn enough to demand getting his
own way. Partly because he’s a real person and partly because Lucarotti knows
him so well he’s one of the most rounded three-dimensional one-off characters
we meet in the series, different in every scene yet still recognisably the
same. He’s an explorer, seeking out new continents and treating every alien
culture he meets with respect on their own terms, not a pirate like so many
travellers we meet in the series out to make the worlds they meet just the way
they want it. He has all the fight scenes we usually associate with Ian,
out-thinks and out-manoeuvres the Doctor for the most part and has all the calm
fortitude of Barbara, with just a dash of Susan’s innocence. Marco’s also a
weary traveller we can relate to, cut off from home, running on fumes and the
hope of getting back to his family before he dies, but with a curiosity to see
the world that keeps him travelling...sounds familiar? For Marco is the Doctor’s
parallel in the same way that ‘An Unearthly Child’ used parallels with how
primitive Ian and Barbara seemed to the Doctor as the cavemen seemed to them, a
wanderer exiled by events beyond his control having to make do in a strange
world.
Most of all, though, he’s
the 1960s viewer’s idea of Marco Polo rather than the ‘real’ explorer taken
direct from the diaries: he’s actually as English as anyone we ever meet in the
series down to the tea-drinking, an unruffled unflappable Victorian gentlemen
in every way but the whiskers, a folk memory of the days when Britain had an
empire and all the best explorers (many of whom grew up reading Marco Polo’s
diary) were all just like him, civil and gentile and full of manners even in
the face of certain death, before people pointed out all the brutal killings of
such eras meant they probably weren’t as benignly educational as our lessons
made them out to be. All this even though Marco was Italian and born six
hundred years before Britain even had an empire! You can kind of see where
Lucarotti is coming from though: he embodies that sense of curiosity and
exploration that used to be such a part of the British psyche so it makes sense
that a programme about the ‘originator’ of such ideals should act like them. Mark
Eden might be best known for his late-middle-age stint on Coronation Street
nowadays but you can see why at the time he was regarded as one of our leading
stage actors: his Marco Polo is brimming with barely concealed passion (much
like the Doctor) and an open mind that believes in all the stories of the far
East that seem like folk tales to us now (also like the Doctor) but keeps it
hidden behind a gentile exterior (well alright then, not that much like the Doctor...yet).
Even though misser Marco’s the main antagonist who separates team Tardis from
their trip home his is a different reason to the Daleks or the Zarbi: its not
out of malice but his desperation to go home and the hope that he can impress
the only person who can possibly give him the freedom he craves (Ian and
Barbara, especially, can’t object too much as going home is all they long for
too, while to anyone who doesn’t believe in time-travelling spaceships its a
more than reasonable return for saving their lives out in the desert sands).
He’s unique, really, in being someone who stops the Doctor getting his way
without being painted as ‘bad’; indeed, technically it’s the Tardis regulars
who lie and cheat their way across the story, albeit for reasons of survival.
The real villain is
Tegana, the first outright boo-hiss baddy Dr Who ever had (following
survivalist cavemen, scared Daleks and, umm, the Tardis’ fast-return switch)
and Derren Nesbitt sets the tone for a lot of what’s to follow, making the
warlord nasty and evil without crossing the line into being silly. And of
course everyone suspects the regulars of the sabotage and chaos Tegana causes;
they’re strangers who arrived out of thin air after all, while Tegana has been
trusted for years (although really he’s been binding his time waiting to kill
the Khan). Ping-Cho is a very clever character. Despite being both Chinese and
700 years dead she’s the one the audience of children watching are meant to
identify with most, a giggly teenager whose just like them in so many ways and
who gives Susan an equal to bounce off for a change. Like all good friends they
bond quickly despite their differences and they have each other’s backs almost
immediately, Susan helping Ping-Cho stand up for herself and Ping-Cho easing
tensions when Susan accidentally speaks out of line. You really feel for her
when she’s powerless in events that see her married to someone she’s never met
(odd how often that idea crops up in the series’ first year) and when she’s
torn by her loyalties, before she becomes a forceful pro-active character by
siding with Susan over Marco despite knowing the trouble it will get her into. As
for the Khan, well, he might be the most interesting character of all and the
first instance of Dr Who giving us something very different to what we see in
the history books and against expectation: far from being a cruel and wicked
tyrant, worse even than Tegana, we get a nice little old man whose
disinterested in his job and Marco’s exploits and fed up of people treating him
with such respect (he only gets excited when the Doctor treats him as an equal).
The start of Dr Who meddling with history? Well, not quite right. You see
Lucarotti was convinced from his research that our views of Kublai Khan were
wrong and wrote his radio adaptation partly to put this ‘right’ – there, too,
his Khan is a sweet old man who would rather live and let live, driven by the
demands of his own people. The Dr Who story is merely following his own lead
and at least some of today’s historians agree (though you might have been hard
pressed to find too many people saying so back in 1964). None have true control
over their lives, their actions dictated largely by other people: Ping ho’s
marriage, Marco’s desire for freedom, Tegana’s wages, even the Khan’s need to
be seen to be a powerful ruler to keep his people safe, all of them privvy to
the whims of something outside their control. Only the Tardis crew have free will
being modern travellers – and the danger in this story is that theirs is taken
away from them in episode one. All are perfectly cast and exquisitely played,
with no sense of dumbing it down for children’s telly (as there was in ‘An
Unearthly Child’ and even ‘The Daleks’
before that story became such a hit the supporting cast of Thals upped their
game).
What this story does best,
though, is show how similar yet alien the past can be. There’s a sense of scale
and space and a subtly different set of social rules that makes China (sorry,
Cathay) feel as far away as Gallifrey and shows how, for a European, being plonked
here against your will feels like being lost in an alien world. The fact we’re
in a different time period doesn’t change that sense of culture shock, merely
exaggerates it. I love the fact that this, of all stories, was given to the BBC’s
only Indian director (and one of the few not of pure English heritage) Warris
Hussain, famous amongst fans for being the first director to ever work on the
series (and who was responsible for shaping a lot of the lore of the series in
the adjustments made from the pilot to the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’
proper). A very English director might have exaggerated the Englishness but
Warris gets the multiculturalism just right, the elegance of another world and
with the same sense of seeing a culture through different eyes. You can tell,
in short, that the writer-director team are not only well read, as usual for
early Who, but well travelled too. The result is a story where, admittedly, not
a lot happens but not a lot happens quite brilliantly, with poetic dialogue
that lolls off the tongue so easily and fluently and beautifully that it could
easily be spoken by arguably the 13th century’s most famous writer. There
are sets and costumes that are lavish and beautiful even by Dr Who historical
standards, with the attention to detail in the telesnaps that have survived
(from Hussain’s own collection, our regular source John Cura not having been
hired to take them yet) are extraordinary: of all the ‘fake’ studio-bound
worlds Dr Who has created past present or future this is the one that looks
most as if you’re watching real events take place (though I use ‘watching’ in a
loose term given that nothing, not even a censored clip, from this story
survives; it helps that some of the most stunning photos are in colour,
revealing a detail we don’t see in any other story pre-1970 when Dr Who
productions were never as lavish again. How they fitted it all into a studio
that was smaller on the inside than in any other era is beyond me.
Sadly we’ll never quite
know just how good this story was because none of it exists in moving form,
with not even a cut censored scene existing in the archives and indeed episode
one of this story is the earliest missing episode in the Dr Who canon (which is
a surprise actually: Dr Who’s first season did so well on the back of The
Daleks that it was sold abroad to more countries than any others from the 1960s
and this was a popular show even at the time). There’s a reason so many fans
long for this story to be returned: those who saw it still remember it well and
it had a big impact on many (including Walt Disney, who bought up the film
rights from Lucarotti with hopes of making a live-action version a few months
before the Peter Cushing Dalek films were even talked about), whole for those
of us who didn’t see it the audio and surviving photographs both are hypnotic,
suggesting a believable world that lives long in the imagination. This story
isn’t some cheap filler by a production team earning a crust it’s a true labour
of love, in a programme so new that it can do anything and is still exciting
and stimulating the imaginations of the people making it as much as the
audience watching it. There’s also no other story in the canon quite
like this one – by the time we meet The Aztecs two stories later Dr Who has
been re-written to be ‘about’ jeopardy happening directly to the regulars and
monsters, but this one is arguably the closest in 327 stories that we ever came
to BBC director Sydney Newman’s remit of what Dr Who was supposed to be for: to
educate as well as entertain (it did feature teachers after all), with plots
that didn’t rely on bug-eyed monsters and B movie ideas but real people and
real situations. Amongst other things pertinent to the plot and explained at
length are the way the sun melts snow and makes footprints look bigger (boo! I
was expecting an elephant!), how condensation works, which science teacher Ian
gleefully explains in great detail (saving everyone from dehydration when
Tegana wrecks the water supply in the desert), the origin of the word assassin
(it comes from the Hashahin culture, the hashish-eating hired killers of Asia,
the last mention of drugs in the series until as late as 1979), a debate about
the properties of quartz, why altitude sickness works (and why the Doctor as an
old man gets sicker quicker because he can’t take enough air into his lungs,
back in the days when he was thought to be an impossibly old Human rather than
an alien) and that bamboo can explode (a key decoy). There’s even an in-joke
for BBC aficionados, when the Doctor tries to fix the Tardis with ‘circuit 2LO’,
the call-sign for the BBC back when it was purely a radio station (surely a David
Whittakerism, following on from the half-theme in ‘Edge
Of Destruction’ that the Tardis worked just like your telly, shrinking the
people inside it and every bit as temperamental). Of course it
seems slow by modern standards, stopping for a lecture every episode or so.
There’s a sag in the middle when you long for something to happen (to some
extent the story goes to sleep in episode two when the Doctor does and doesn’t
wake up till Susan gets lost in the cave of 500 eyes). There are little things
that seem curious and odd to modern eyes (though they wouldn’t in 1964): the
way some of the words and place names are translated for us and others aren’t (nobody
should understand the word ‘China’ for a start – it was Cathay), the way some
of the supporting cast are genuine Asian actors and others are Caucasian
Europeans in wigs. However I would gladly put up with all of that for the rich
detail of this world and the way even the smallest realisations and character
developments are given room to breathe, while this is possibly the least racist
bit of 1960s telly specifically about other races that certainly I’ve ever seen
(even the later historical Whos can’t quite match it).
After all, its designed
to be slow. It’s meant to be as real to life to an actual travelogue as they
can make it, including the amount of time travelling, and the episodes were
stretched out to seven so that they could pay for it all without too much cost
cutting. Maybe, just maybe, Sydney Newman was right to push the education
aspect, all but abandoned from this point on, as this story is positively
gorgeous: a tale that’s if its about anything is about exploration, both Marco
Polo and the world of 13th century Cathay that we get to explore as thoroughly
as we ever explore anywhere (it helps that at seven episodes this is the
longest DW historical, give or take The Daleks interrupting the Victoriana of
‘Evil Of The Daleks’ as early as episode two) and even better the way we get to
explore the psyche of the regulars, who are all settling down after the shock
of being whisked to different planets and times. Like the best dramas it really
does feel as if you’ve fallen through the screen (or, nowadays, your speakers)
into another world for real. Like all the best travelogues ‘Marco Polo’ lets
you get to grips with a weird and strange world that’s very different to ‘ours’
– and yet like the very best travelogues ends up revealing that, beneath the
colour and the costume, beneath the spoken and unspoken rules of the day, people
really are the same the whole universe ever. Even the aliens. And like all the
best travel stories by the time the Doctor gets his Tardis back and everyone
says their goodbyes after seven weeks it really does feel like a wrench to say
goodbye to the characters we leave behind. Why they ever thought getting rid of
the historicals two years down the line from here when they did them so well is
a mystery: ‘Marco Polo’ feels like the future for a series that was trying a
bit of everything but not always this successfully, by going back to the past
and bringing it into the present. I can see why things changed: ‘Marco Polo is
the sort of story that was only going to happen once and if the production team
had kept trying to replicate it, in different centuries and countries, then it
would have got boring fast and the series would never have stayed as long on
the air. But I wish that other stories had as much ambition and been given as
much love as this one: it seems wrong to say that it was all downhill from here
as early as the fourth story, but in some ways Dr Who was never quite this
beautiful or this believable ever again. Maybe, if it really was William
Hartnell’s suggestion to do a story like this, they should have asked him more
often?
POSITIVES + Fresh from
arguably their greatest ever score (for ‘The Daleks’) the radiophonic workshop
come up trumps by re-creating the sounds of the Gobi Desert at night and its
famous ‘shifting sands’, an early gig for Tristram Carey. Maybe it’s because we
can’t see it, but boy does it sound atmospheric and sounds every bit as alien
and believable as Skaro or Mondas. Especially the cave of 500 eyes where, for
once, you’re totally on side as Susan screams the place down: it sound scary
and alien enough to make Skaro seemed like Skegness by comparison. I’d love to
know if the visuals came even close to matching it: Warris certainly didn’t
think they did, regretting the storm effects added in post-production that ‘made
it look as if everyone’s TV aerials had come loose’, but even that sounds
terrific coming in the middle of a story all about control and staying
civilised, with the images of lush palaces and posh caravans swapped for a
moment of pure chaos.
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Edge Of Destruction’ next ‘The Keys Of Marinus’
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