The Chase: Ranking - 30

 

The Chase

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Vicki, 22/5/1965-26/6/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Dennis Spooner, writer: Terry Nation, director: Richard Martin)

Rank: 30

In an emoji: 📺

   'Ticket To Ride is an apt Beatles song for 'The Chase' but other fab four ditties are even better for DW in general:'Across The Universe' 'Dig A Pony Called Arthur' 'Dr Robert Who' 'Drive My Tardis' 'Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Evolved Monkeys From Earth' 'Fixing A Hole In The Space-Time Continuum' 'Good Day Sunshine Until It Turns Suprenova' 'Here Comes The Sunmakers' 'Here There And Everywhere' 'I've Just Seen A Face Regenerate' 'It Won't Be Long (Unless The Tardis Goes Wrong Again!) 'The Long And Timey Wimey Road' 'Dr Who In The Sky With The Diamond Logo' 'Norwegian Ood' 'Run For Your Life' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' 'We Can't Work It Out' 'When I'm 64000''With A Little Help From My Companions' 'Your Mother Should Go' (9th and 10th Drs only) 'You Won't See Me (I've Just dematerialised!) and of course 'Help!' 

Given that he wrote some of the gloomiest episodes of Dr Who, created what must surely be its scariest monster and went on afterwards to create two of the most bleakly depressing bits of television ever screened (take your pick from all our heroes we’ve followed for four years dying at the end of ‘Blake’s 7’ and practically everyone in the world except the people we follow dying in ‘The Survivors’) people forget that Terry Nation started his career as a ‘comedy’ writer. So far Terry’s written a first Dalek story that was meant to be borderline funny and seen it come out grim when seen on screen (‘The Daleks’), a second Dr Who story that was meant to be borderline serious that came out unintentionally funny (‘Keys Of Marinus’), then added a third that was always designed to be grim that stands as one of the bleakest bits of British TV of the 1960s (‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’). ‘The Chase’ feels like Nation saying ‘the heck with it’ and writing an out and out comedy from the start which, because the director and cast aren’t necessarily in on the joke and it features a species who were being portrayed just seven months earlier as the cruellest and most vindictive creatures in the universe, still comes out as an odd mismash of serious and silly. A lot of fans don’t know what to make of ‘The Chase’ because of this. Most guidebooks refer to it along the lines of a ‘failed experiment’. However this story makes a lot more sense if you see it as the work of a man who was terrified of being viewed as just a ‘comedian’ for the rest of life, who suddenly had the unexpected chance to write ‘serious’ drama, whose suddenly afraid of being pigeon-holed as serious and wants to remind the world ‘look, I can do comedy too!’ A lot of fans don’t even realise ‘The Chase’ is meant to be funny, given the earnestness with which it’s portrayed on screen, but oh it is. Give or take the dark barbed criticisms in ‘The Sunmakers’ or Matt Smith’s stellar slapstick performances in ‘The Lodger’ and sequel ‘Closing Time’ and sort-of sequel ‘Power Of Three’ this might well be the funniest Dr Who story of them all in act. 

 To understand it though you need to see how Terry Nation’s mind works. His big break came writing for Tony Hancock in the lad ‘imself’s ATV series – the one that came a couple of years after his ‘Half Hour’s heyday (surely the single most important British television series before ‘Dr Who’) written by Galton and Simpson, a sequel series generally regarded by most people with a shudder and kept by Hancock’s own brother Roger (who also happens to be Terry Nation’s agent) safely under lock and key, never to see the light of day, though some of the Nation (and script editor Dennis Spooner) written episodes do sporadically turn up on youtube. Admittedly none of them works anywhere near as well as the famous series episodes: Hancock has lost his ability to portray a whole world of expression in his face through a combination of inner angst and alcohol, so he looks like a man with the weight of the world permanently on his shoulders even when the scripts demand him to be light and elastic and no writer – even Terry and Dennis - ever matched the Galton-Simpson wordplay. The biggest change, though is that between the original writers in the 1950s and our boys in the 1960s the Hancock character goes from being a broken idealist turned cynic whose forever frustrated the world won’t match up to his own increasingly obstinate view of how it should work, with whom you can still feel a lot of pity as well as horror at some of what he says, to a man whose the butt of everyone’s jokes because the world has moved on and he hasn’t. Hancock is an anachronism, still hanging onto dreams of glorious empire and being an intellectual, even while he sits and mopes in his run-down house and struggles to make a living. Hancock is a man who would give anything to go back in time, even when it’s clear the present is a very different and shabbier place to live. ‘The Chase’ is Terry Nation putting that idea in a ‘Dr Who’ context all over again. Only the joke isn’t on the humans in this story. It’s on The Daleks.

 They still think they’re the greatest scourge the universe have ever seen even, though they’ve been so easily and comprehensively beaten twice now. The universe no longer quakes when they hear their name – indeed, the people they come across in this story don’t know who they are because they’re an irrelevance and while the regulars know the damage they can cause they’re also safe with the knowledge they’ve beaten them twice already. The Daleks are no longer scared, scarred children hiding their vulnerability in metal casings that keep the world shut out, victims of an atomic war they started, but egocentric monsters so secure of their every decision that they can’t quite believe they keep messing up. In this story they give up trying to conquer worlds and instead try to conquer the one thing that keeps stopping them – the Doctor – only they don’t understand that this time their foe isn’t an ordered regimented population to be bossed around and exploited but an eccentric and his three friends, who always have the power of doing the unexpected, something the regimented, restricted, xenophobic Daleks just can’t wrap their tiny metal heads around. These racial purists fail, despite all their weaponry and single-mindedness, because their purity means they cannot adapt and make the most of the wide collection of cultures and ideas of other people, doomed to keep repeating themselves and failing. After stories where we ‘went to them’ and ‘they went to us’ this story takes a third tack by having them try to copy the Doctor and do what he does, with a space-time machine of their own that allows them to literally ‘chase’ the Tardis wherever it lands (called a ‘Dardis’ in the script and, I confess, in my head, even if that name is never used on screen). Only instead of exploring the worlds and inspiring the best out of the local population, the Daleks only now how to annihilate, conquer and destroy. The joke is on The Daleks because they can’t adapt to their environment the way the timelord and humans can; they’re stuck with a Hancock-like fixation on how the world should be and their all too-brief glorious past, even when those days are long and buried. They don’t have the luxury of befriending the local inhabitants for help or learning how to make the best use of whichever planet they land on, instead they keep doing the same thing over and over again wherever they land and being surprised when they get different results, because their opponents outwit them in different ways, none of which result in the extermination of their greatest foe. In ‘The Chase’ the Daleks don’t just get one go at exterminating the Doctor they get several – and they muck them all up, defeated by Aridians, Gubbage Cones (the official name for the fungal plants in episode five), Mechonoids, even the robots at a haunted house. In some ways this is a script laughing at Dr Who itself and all its clichés, which I’m not the first reviewer to point out, but what’s worth adding is that I think this story is more poking fun at the restrictions of doing Dr Who on television; this is the era of the Peter Cushing cinema films for which neither Terry Nation nor anyone else at the BBC were really consulted. How odd, then, to be making a television version of something that everyone thinks might be made with a bigger budget one day soon (there were indeed plans to make this the third Cushing film, but they were cancelled after the second ’Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 AD’ one did so relatively poorly. Which would have been…quite something. At least Hollywood leant two of their Daleks for the making of this story which gives us six in total that move, the most on screen so far). 

 Admittedly it helps that Terry is working with his second script editor – and another man who worked on that ATV Hancock series, as well as various Gerry Anderson series alongside each other – Dennis Spooner, for who comedy comes as naturally as picking up a pen. Nation’s scripts always bear the hallmark of whatever script writer he’s working with, written to be tight and plotful, with lots of room for the editors to get involved and add their own stamp to things. Spooner is a relative newbie to scifi but a big name in light entertainment, replacing the earnestness, realism and rich dialogue of David Whittaker’s era with a flippancy and lightness of touch (for an example compare ‘The Crusade’ back to back with ‘The Romans’, two historicals written by the two script editors themselves, which couldn’t be more different to each other; ‘The Crusade’ is about the horrors of the Tardis crew being lost in an alien world that comes out as high drama while ‘The Romans’ is the past being lost in what’s effectively a ‘Dr Who’ story that comes out as farce). Spooner has another trait too: his era is the most effortlessly contemporary, a TV landscape where swinging London is so clearly going on you can almost feel it just out of reach of the camera whether the stories are set in past, present or future and an era when more often than not the teenager of the Tardis crew clubbed together with the youthful looking locals to kickstart a revolution against the ‘oldies’. We say this in a lot of 1960s reviews but ‘Dr Who’ really was one of the few things parents and children sat down to watch and a lot of stories touch on the generation gap that, in this era, is really more of a chasm, that very different approach between ‘wars are just and noble’ and ‘peace at all costs’. 

 Terry Nation (born 1930) was a war baby who wrote the Daleks to be to all intents and purposes The Nazis and in their last appearance had them fighting a generation who are obviously the ‘blitzed Brits’ of the 1940s, whatever the 22nd century dating says. Dennis Spooner, though only born two years later, is clearly much more in touch with the hippie philosophy, given the amount of revolutions and overthrow of outdated regimes there are on his watch. So the two come together and the hippie ways win: like Hancock, the Daleks’ war approach is an anachronism in a 1960s world that’s moved on without them, a throwback to the black-and-white way of thinking of the past of heroes and villains in a world that’s become increasingly colourful and multi-layered (even if the technology still hasn’t caught up with that – it’s a tragedy that so much of the 1960s is so obviously meant to be ‘seen’ in colour, whereas the technology switched over to colour just as the early 1970s went all gritty and beige, before colour TV kick-started glam rock circa 1972). The Daleks believe that you can solve everything by shouting and shooting at obstacles, but the baby boomer generation have grown to avoid war at all costs on principle. Terry Nation started the career of The Daleks by trying to show the youthful Thals that there were some times when even pacifists have to fight back, only now he’s up against a generation of Thals who want to do no such thing and a script editor who agrees with them. The times they are a changin’. Even and especially for Daleks. The fact they won’t adjust means the joke’s on them, the way it is on every parent who still believes a war would solve Britain’s ills and recover the Empire. In this Dr Who is at one with both Hancock and ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ (a lefty-wing series laughing at right-wing Alf Garnett still very much stuck in the past that doesn’t exist anymore) and, of course, the first Beatle movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ (‘I fought a war for the likes of you sonny’ ‘Bet you’re sorry you won!’) 

 Talking of which, even though it’s something they’ve never even remotely tried in this series before it somehow makes perfect sense that this story that opens with an appearance by the men who did more than anyone else to inspire this feeling: The Beatles. The Doctor’s been tinkering with the space-time visualiser he got from ‘The Space Museum’ (basically a big space telly that can see backwards and forwards in time. Not that you can see it very well on screen, but apparently the prop had knobs labelled ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Saturn suggesting there are different ones for every solar system; given how many planets here are apparently empty in the Whoniverse it makes you wonder what the Xerons were tuning in for: the Ice warriors doing ‘Strictly Come dancing On ice’ perhaps or Venusian karate?! The technology isn’t there yet to show pre-recorded clips on screen, as they will in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’, so for now it’s all done live from opposite ends of the studio and works a lot better than it has any right to). After Ian and Barbara ask to see The Gettysburg Address and Shakespeare looking uncomfortable meeting Queen Elizabeth I (neither of whom look anything at all like their future Dr Who appearances or, indeed, any surviving portraits of them) of course Vicki wants to see The Beatles because, well, she’s the junior audience at home’ representative and she’s not going to choose something old and fusty is she? The original intention was to show The Beatles as they appeared in 2012, at theirs and Dr Who’s 50th anniversary ‘reunion show’ in Liverpool made up to look like old men. Despite what you may have read in other guidebooks they and manager Brian Epstein loved the idea: there’s a lot in the Beatle publicity in 1964-1965 about how they were more than a fad and ‘even the kids of the year 2000 will be listening to them’ (check out Derek Taylor’s sleevenotes to ‘Beatles For Sale’, arguably the Beatles album people are least likely to listen to in the year 2000 onwards but never mind…) The idea of The Beatles still being important in the future really appealed to Epstein and The Beatles were big Dr Who fans and highly scifi literate (you can hear them discussing the anthology scifi series ‘Out Of The Unknown’ in the ‘Get Back/Let It Be’ sessions and it’s just generally assumed without asking that its one of the few series they’d all have watched). It’s just that The Beatles were so busy and booked so far in advance (they were at the time they were invited to appear seven weeks into filing second movie ‘Help!’ and indeed wrote and recorded the title song the same week) and Dr Who is being made on such a tight schedule that everyone ran out of time to make it happen. As it is Dr Who is one of only two non-music programmes blessed by The Beatles’ management and ‘allowed’ to have a clip of The Beatles included in them (the fab four singing their then-latest single ‘Ticket To Ride’, from a Top Of the Pops show that was wiped long ago and missing entirely but for this three-minute segment; the only other show granted permission was ‘The Monkees’ if you’re wondering). Of course Vicki, a girl from the 25th century, wants to see The Beatles: they’re where the future started, as important a stepping stone to the days to come as Shakespeare and Lincoln were to theirs. And as fun as it is to travel to the past or future why would anyone want to be anywhere else? The 1960s is where it’s at. Similarly at the end of the story Ian and Barbara risk life and limb to pilot the DARDIS (yes seriously: everyone thinks its a stupid name and laugh as if no one noticed but its meant to be; the joke is on The Daleks who don’t have the imagination to realise ‘Tardis’ is an acronym not a name) to head back to London in 1965 because there’s nowhere else in the universe they would rather be. The Daleks, who want to take everyone back to the horrors of the 1940s, are yesterday’s news. Because why would anyone want to go back to the days of fleeing for your life from falling bombs and watching loved ones die when you can be like the Doctor, travelling the universe righting wrong and being kind and when the soundtrack is so good? (The original script included the Tardis crew watching a Churchill speech on the space-time visualiser too, but it was cut for space – or perhaps it was a bit too on the nose?) 

 Like ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ but more so ‘The Chase’ is a travelogue that involves lot of different locations and settings, with the same sense of breathless rush that makes it seem more like a story from new-Who compared to its slower 1960s contemporaries, only better because now there’s an actual threat chasing after the Tardis and a time limit. Some of the stop offs on the way admittedly work better than others but most are delightful and all fit this theme if you look out for it: Aridius feels like Nation/Spooner’s attempt to put the swinging scene of the 1960s on screen from their ‘older’ perspective: exotically dressed aliens dancing carefree, emerging from the underground (and war ‘bunkers’) blinking into the daylight and celebrating being alive, planting flowers in the wilderness. Vicki discovers a ‘key in the sand’, our 1960s ITGirl recalling a moment from her childhood where she found something similar and effectively opens up this door to this whole new world. The Daleks land and try to fight the way they always do, by blundering in, but they haven’t accounted for the different terrain and how locals understand it better, so they’re defeated by the Aridians who can fight through the sand. As far as I know no one else has ever raised this but, given the other bits in this story, I’m convinced that somebody somewhere was writing this section as an allegory for the unpopular war in Vietnam and how the youth of the day were refusing to fight the way their elders wanted them to, that going in guns blazes just wouldn’t work against a population determined to fight every bit as hard and whose trump card of knowing their way round a terrain beat all the firepower and weaponry the Americans threw at them. The Daleks, built to resemble tanks, are still fighting a war as if its WW2 with crude firepower because that’s the only way they know how, as a fight between multiculturalism and racial purity, but the younger kids are smart enough to know that’s not how you win wars anymore and that the threats around the world are about liberty and independence, not genocide and so morally feel less obliged to fight. I really like the amphibious Aridians despite their small amount of screen-time and they’re well acted for what they are, with future British acting legend Hywel Bennett saying his first ever lines on television (and so is, presumably, a little green around those gills). It’s also a rare chance in this era for some location filming, in Camber Sands, though not involving the regulars (who are in a sand-filled studio instead). Note that the scene of the Dalek coming out of sand for no apparent reason (other than we have a cliffhanger) seems to be a direct parody of the celebrated first episode cliffhanger in ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ (when one comes out of the Thames for no apparent reason). 

 Moving on we land at The Empire State Building in 1966, a building which, given its 1931 vintage, feels like a continuation of the world before WW2 interrupted it. Even before John Lennon moved there, though, New York is widely regarded as the height of the post-War civilisation, a city more swinging than even London (even if they don’t have a Beatles of their own and had to import ours). Here the ‘joke’ against The Daleks is that they’re on a roof with stairs they can’t climb down, so they’re stuck at the top of a building kept apart from humanity (though see 2007’s ‘Daleks In Manhattan’ for why they might yet be lurking in the basement). They’re outsmarted not just by our experienced heroes but by a country bumpkin hick, played by Peter Purves with an outrageously ‘wrong accent, who thinks they’re either a prank, a magic trick or a stunt gone wrong (his take on things is that they can do some gosh darned things in the world’s hippest city these days). This is, admittedly, one of this story’s jokes that goes too far (and it’s amazing that the Daleks don’t think of exterminating him – or, for that matter, why Ian and Barbara don’t just get in a lift and go home, seeing that they’ve been trying to get home to London in 1963 for years now and new York in 1966 is easily the closest they’ve been while we’ve been following them). 

 Next we’re onboard ‘The Marie Celeste’ in 1872 and The Daleks are trapped there too, unable to cope out to sea, although they do threaten the sailors who leap into the deep blue, accidentally causing the world’s greatest maritime mystery without anyone ever realising it (perhaps the best gag of the show, whatever everyone says – the Doctor is always talking about not being ‘allowed’ to meddle with history because of laws of time, but The Daleks just blunder in anyway because they won’t stay in their ‘1940s’ bubble of the past and don’t realise the implications of changing history the way the Doctor does). Even in it’s second year it was already becoming a bit of a cliché that Dr Who stories from the past were being sued to explain great mysteries so sending that up is very clever. It all looks quite convincing too, considering it’s a bit part in a single episode and still looks as if the budget has stretched to meet it and do it properly. 

 Then we’re in a haunted horror theme park in the future for the one part of the story that really doesn’t work. The ‘joke’ is that because the Tardis can land anywhere in time and space our heroes assume its ‘real’ and later the Dr, weirdly, supposes we must be ‘in the dark recesses of the mind’, when in reality The Daleks waste five minutes shooting at holograms and robots of the world’s weirdest looking Dracula, Frankenstein and a wailing banshee (played by Roselyn De Winter, she of the ‘insect choreography’ credit on ‘The Web Planet’ out of costume) because their xenophobia makes all humans look alike – even robotic ones. It’s also a joke on this series because everything being made in the 1960s had a ‘haunted house’ story in there somewhere (The Monkees had three!) Nation’s scripts were adamant that the Tardis had travelled to ‘a place within the human mind’ the way the Doctor says in this episode, but producer Verity Lambert was concerned that this contradicted the science-plausibility element she’d been aiming for in the series so added the pull away to the sign that reads ‘Haunted House Festival Of Ghana – Cancelled By Peking’, in 1996 according to the script. This in itself might be significant to the push-pull between war and peace and parent and child. Ghana was unique in the 20th century, a part of Africa that seemed to be forever changing ‘sides’ in the Cold war depending who was in power and what coup had just taken place. For much of the 1950s it had been allied to Western powers, embracing capitalism and imports and The United Nations and turned into a mini-clone of Europe. By 1962, though, the regime in power had embraced China instead and was on the verge of turning communist. This sign feels like it’s the Dr Who team laughing at the fact that, in the future, it flip-flops again, with an exhibition that puts it just a smidgeon behind England’s own Victorian celebration ‘The Great Exhibition’ cancelled by their new paymasters. In a wider sense, though, I’ve often wondered if these sequences that seem so far out of the usual template is Terry Nation, convinced his future lies in the better paid world of American television, trying to do their ‘past’ and future’ instead of Britain’s, given that Halloween isn’t really a holiday at all over here now and was even less of a one in 1965; he came very close to getting a Dalek spin-off show on US TV, down to removing the rights to his most famous creations from Dr Who to make it for a few years (see ‘Mission To The Unknown’ for how the pilot sort-of looked, starring ‘relatives’ of the characters exterminated in that story). 

 Next the joke is on The Daleks for spectacularly misunderstanding who the Doctor is by sending a robot after him that sometimes looks just like him (when William Hartnell is playing him anyway – less so when it’s Edmund Warwick playing him). This sequence is, so it’s said, a thankyou to Warwick for standing in for William Hartnell at the last moment in episode five of ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ when a bunch of extras accidentally dropped Hartnell down the ramp of the Dalek spaceship and saw him have to take a week off. Officially Warwick had been an extra so didn’t get any extra pay despite the amount of extra screen-time and lying on the ground so uncomfortably. Warwick thought of this episode as a thankyou that gave him a screen credit and helped boost his career and I’m sure it was; however there’s no getting round the fact he looks even less like Hartnell than Richard Hurndall in ‘The Five Doctors’ (and that’s saying something!) Even this early on in Dr Who’s history the idea of doubles being played by another actor with their back to the camera is a cliché and features in many a 1960s series from ‘Bewitched’ to ‘The Time Tunnel’ (Who’s closest American cousin of the 1960s till Star Trek comes along) and at times it seems particularly badly done, emphasising the differences between the pair. More than that, though, the joke is again on The Daleks: the robot Doctor has all his mannerisms but who acts nothing like him character-wise, without his humanity and morals his companions seeing through him when he becomes blood-thirsty (and not unlike how the Doctor was when we first met him: have The Daleks been watching an earlier version of the Doctor on a space-time visualiser of their own?); it’s easy for the others to see through which one is which. I like to think this scene is a payback for Ian imitating a Dalek in their first encounter too – only while he could pretend to be a one-note Dalek well enough to fool their captors, the Daleks haven’t a hope of being multi-dimensional enough to fool our heroes. 

 Then finally there’s the biggest ignominy of them all: The Dardis follows The Tardis to what’s effectively the second Dr Who story (you know, ‘The Daleks’, written by Terry Nation). They discover an impossible alien city, built by amazing technology and clearly home to an alien much wider and bigger than they are and who basically beat them up for being ‘different’, but not in an evil way – more by accident in confused self-defence. Despite the Dalek’s origins are as scared mutated children scarred by an atomic war of their own making who had to hide in metal casings for protection, but a good 90% of the audience at home (including some of this show’s future writers and script editors it has to be said) have assumed that they’re really robots, which is what their new rivals actually are. I love The Mechonoids more than almost any other Dr Who aliens: they’re what everyone who hadn’t been paying proper attention assumed the Daleks were: stupidly large robots who spoke in monotonous robot voices and who repeat the same dialogue over and over again (‘Input...Enter…’). They’re Dr Who laughing at itself again, putting their most famous creations up against a knock-off version and having them come off worst. While sadly we never get to find out if they’re as racist as The Daleks, in every other way they’re the same, just bigger, badder and even more destructive. What’s more, they’re the invention of humanity in the far future, sent to colonise this world for humans who never come (because, like the Daleks, they blew themselves up horribly in an atomic war?) Poor Daleks: there they are priding themselves that they’re the purest race in the universe and they’re beaten by a monster even ‘purer’ and with even less traces of humanity than they have, thrashed not only by the multi-level Dr (as usual) but a race even more one-note than they are. Some fans think The Mechonoids are stupid, but I love them: people say they’re hopelessly impractical as a ‘war machine’ and they are, but they aren’t meant to be a wart machine; unlike The Daleks they haven’t tried conquering the galaxy - they were just minding their own business when The Daleks turned up and started shooting at them (again they could be a metaphor for the Vietnamese, or perhaps the Koreans or even the Russians, a more modern variation on Nazi Germany). As much as we hear about the horrors of being held hostage by them through newcomer Steven’s eyes, basically the humans are an extinct species being kept alive in a zoo as much as prisoners of war, kept alive by a culture who doesn’t quite know what to do with humanity who don’t have the right ‘code’ to be let free (Daleks, of course, don’t keep prisoners of war, they go for slavery or extermination). The Daleks, then, end up being defeated not by the Doctor this time as such, but by a mirror image of themselves. 

 By the time The Daleks are destroyed in that epic end battle (which looks quite amazing on screen and goes on much longer than usual) we’ve lost two companions and gained another in Steven, an astronaut from the future whose date is never quite pinned down. Future stories will make him bland and as one-note as The Mechonoids, but Dennis Spooner (who filled in a lot of gaps in this last episode) makes him shine: he’s the decent straightforward chap we’ll come to know and love but also someone clearly pushed so far out of his comfort zone by having no one to talk to that he’s understandably suffering a form of PTSD, histrionic and vulnerable (I love the idea Steven, of all people, usually portrayed as a butch hero, cherishes a panda teddy bear that’s become his only link to his own time; its a real shame we never see it again past the next story, especially after Steven risks his neck going back to Mecchanus for it – it could have been a real piece of characterisation going forward or, yknow, back given that the next story is set in the 11th century. It was, apparently, an improvised idea by actor Peter Purves who also changed his character’s name from ‘Michael’ because he didn’t’ feel like a Michael). Purves is excellent, remarkably so given his awful take on Morton Dill just a few episodes early, and already feels like the start of a bold new era (Purves was hired by Hartnell, Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) and director Richard martin all going to Verity Lambert individually and commenting how good he was and how well he fitted in with them, the only time a regular is hired by the request of their fellow actors, though Mary Tamm suggesting Lalla ward as her successor Romana II is a similar case) ‘The Chase’ is a strong story for character all round though, despite the comedy moments and with passages of real terror in between. It would be easy just to dismiss this story as a laugh, but there are moments of quite genuine horror and terror that keep you watching too: you really feel it when one of our friends is in danger: when the Daleks threaten Ian and Vicki on Aridius, or Vicki has to knock out one of the ship’s crew holding everyone at gunpoint on the Marie Celeste, or Vicki getting separated from the others in the haunted house while unknowingly trying to warn a mannequin about extermination and the others’ desperate searching for her, or the Doctor’s attempts to impersonate his own double to save his friends, or the fungoid Gubbage cones’ (as the script calls them) looking to swamp our heroes, or Vicki quaking at the thought of climbing down a tall building that scares her more than any other Dalek, the robot double telling Barbara that Ian is dead, or Steven’s flight of terror across the jungle terrain. They aren’t just little moments to make up a cliffhanger either: e see the horror of these realisations sink in, that these characters might be alone forever, their friends dead, cut off from home for all eternity on a strange alien planet. For all the laughs ‘The Chase’ also knows when to stop joking and be serious and it’s the range between the two that always gets me. especially after the genuinely teary ending when Ian and Barbara go home, risking their lives one last time in the Dardis, despite the Doctor’s anger at them risking their lives. While there’s golden bits of comedy even beyond the scenarios and laughing at The Daleks: William Hartnell’s deadpan delivery (he was well versed as a comedy actor after all), the way Vicki and Barbara claim not to be scared in the haunted house then immediately clutch each other when they hear a noise, Ian and Barbara making shooty noises like a couple of schoolchildren when they rehearse their Dalek attack in episode five or Vicki accidentally hitting Ian over the head on The Marie Celeste (a joke about how many times Ian is being struck unconscious, though not normally by one of his friends!) 

 At other times though this serial isn’t about ‘real’ emotion at all; its a cartoon strip done on telly – not surprisingly given that Nation and Spooner have been collaborating on a ‘Dalek Chronicles’ one for the TV Century 21 comic since January 1965. Running till January 1967, this series was set in the 2060s to better fit in with the contemporary dating of all the Gerry Anderson titles inside the pages and featured many more wars between the Daleks and Mechonoids, the Emperor Dalek getting involved long before its appearance in ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ too. Basically Dr Who with the Doctor removed they’re a collection of endless fights, ruthless chemes, back-stabbing and all sots of things tey couldn’t possibly put on screen. Much of ‘The Chase’ feels like the sort of thing they couldn’t possibly put on screen either…until they do. 

Comedy, drama, horror, spectacle: few series make me feel as much when watching them as Dr Who and few Dr Who stories make me feel as much as ‘The Chase’. yes everyone calls it a comedy that doesn’t quite work (mostly because of the ’thick’ Dalek who can’t count, which really isn’t very funny at all) but I think people miss just what a rounded, emotionally complex serial this is. There’s everything in this story: as well as all that comedy and drama we get two highly under-rated and under-valued new races in the Aridians and Mechonoids, a battle sequence to die for that seems to last forever which – until the last episode of ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ turns up so we can view it properly – is surely the best (certainly the busiest) ‘action sequence’ in all of Who, plus there’s a design team working wonders to build no less than four highly distinct worlds (plus what we see on the two ‘acted’ scenes seen on the visualiser) and moments of Dr Who at its most charming and sweet (especially the first episode where everyone’s effectively on holiday; name me an episode with better Doctor-companion dialogue than the one where Ian and Vicki bound off to explore like the overgrown kids they are, while the Dr and Barbara sunbathe; best gag of the whole story, perhaps the whole series: ‘What’s that noise?’ says Barbara as the space-time visualiser bursts into life again with footage of The Daleks plotting their downfall. ‘Don’t be rude about my singing!’ splutters the Dr ‘No, not that awful noise’ the other one’ deadpans Barbara. Genius!) This is the cosiest DW ever becomes and they’ve earned it after two years of fighting the biggest things the universe can throw at them, and yet unlike other ‘cosy-ish’ stories (‘The Sensorites’ ‘Black Orchid’ ‘Husbands Of River Song’) this one still bares its teeth when it needs to. 

The result is a story that’s a true delight: yes there are better deeper and bigger budget Dr Who stories out there but few make me feel as much as this story. Yes its sprawling – too sprawling in many ways, with the budget clearly strained by the end with so many sets, costume and characters we never get to know as fully as in every other past Dr Who story (even close cousin ‘Marinus’). Best yet might well be the model shot of the Mechonoid City which rivals even the Skaro model from the original Dalek serial for sheer spectacle: referred to isn the script as ‘a Frank Lloyd Wright style edifice’ designer Ray Cusick goes the extra mile and turns into a building which out-thinks anything Wright could have come up with, complete with space-age viaduct. For any era it’s staggeringly good, never mind 1965. For a while this story was meant to be even more sprawling: Terry ran out of room for planned episodes in Ancient Egypt, on a planet full of invisible aliens and a mist-filled world (all of which will end up in sequel ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ instead). Given that the plot is all about the Doctor trying to shake the Daleks off and nothing more we don’t have the same focussed plot we had in the other stories either, with no build up between episodes. Even so, it’s a fabulous and very under-rated story this one, especially if you see what it’s trying to do: this is a new world of 1965, a future where anything is possible and where the youthful hippies have as good as inherited the Earth and made it a better place already. The Daleks don’t belong here anymore and if ‘The Daleks’ and ‘Invasion Earth’ could be seen as scary versions of a Britain where The Nazis won, either blown to smitheroons or bombed to pieces with the population turned into slaves, ‘The Chase’ is a celebration that this scary future never happened and that a better world has sprung out of it, a story that makes everyone watching the first time around in 1965 feel good about living in this present, not the possible futures or pasts. This won’t last: as early as Christmas The Daleks will be back bolder, badder and nastier than ever in an epic that lasts twice the length of this already epic story as the world becomes a darker and scarier place all over again, before Terry hands over the reigns of The Daleks to other people, returning to write a prequel that’s like Germany in the 1930s complete with its own Hitler-style creator (‘Genesis Of The Daleks’) before a cop-out final story that’s about The Nazis fighting a cold war (yes another one; ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’). For now, though, this is the perfect end to the first Dalek ‘trilogy’ and if you come to this story in the right way (not just the ‘joke being on The Daleks’ but watching this story unfold a week at a time, without knowing when the end will come or what will happen next) then this is a story every bit as good as the first two and in some ways even better. All that and The Beatles too: far from seeing this as a jokey-one off they should never have tried (the way most fans see it), I’m left asking ‘why can’t the show be more like this every week?!’ 

 POSITIVES + Ian and Barbara get what must surely be the best ‘companion leaves’ scenes in the entire 60 year history of the show. Given that Susan was always meant to be ‘other-worldly’ the two school-teachers been our eyes and eats into this mad world of the Doctor (future stories will see companions learning what we already know at speed, but we learnt together, as it were) and losing them is a real emotional loss. They go out the way they came, bravely entering a time machine, only this time they’ve earned their stripes from all their adventures and they’re the pilots of their lives now, not the passengers. The Doctor and Vicki get to ‘tune in’ to them arriving back home in London (at the time of broadcast, having been away the nineteen months the show’s been running; we never do find out how they explained it away!) and it’s hard not to cry as we all watch them together, so ecstatic to be back and safe as they get to enjoy all the things they missed: London busses, feeding the pigeons and posing for what look suspiciously to modern eyes like selfies (I mean, who is filming this? They don’t have a camera and their arms are in shot – have they guessed the Dr will be watching and they’re doing it for his benefit? One hopes so, it would be very in character is they are). The locations are, if you’re interested, White City Tube Station, The Albert Embankment and Trafalgar Square and were taped during rehearsals for next story ‘The Time Meddler’ (when Ian and Barbara were no longer needed). The moment the pair say ‘goodbye Doctor and thankyou’ just in case he is watching is one of those scenes is one of my favourite from any story: it’s hard to say goodbye, but this is s exquisitely done and the perfect end for two of the most perfect companions. Jacqueline Hill and William Russell are as brilliant and natural as they always are, their characters often out their depth but never out of control, the very best of the stereotypical British stiff-upper lip. Daft as it sounds, given all the wonderful stories to come, all the brilliant companions of the future, the higher ratings, the advanced technology and bigger budgets, I’m not sure Dr Who ever fully recovered from losing these two characters, they’re both that good and so central to the show. 

 NEGATIVES - By contrast, while he’s perfect as Steven, not only am I amazed Peter Purves won that part on the back of his performance as American tourist Morton Dill, I’m amazed he ever worked in television again. He’s awful, a one note joke with a comedy hick accent who can’t stop laughing at The Daleks with the single worst accent seen in the series outside Professor Zaroff. Amazingly he’s the first human in the entire series they don’t at least try to enslave or exterminate. Goodness knows why – this time they would have been totally justified. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘My dear boy, we're trying to beat the Daleks, not start a jumble sale!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Juggernauts’ (2005), no #65 in the Big Finish main range, features a re-match between the Daleks and Mechonoids, this time arranged by Davros. The main influence on the TV story ‘Dalek’ this is one of the best things in the series.

Simon Guerrier’s novel ‘The Time Travellers’ (2005), part of the ‘Past Doctors’ range of books, reveals that before they got home Ian and Barbara first landed in a parallel Earth where the Tardis had never arrived and The Daleks, Cybermen and Wotan had all led successful invasions.  The epilogue has the Dardis getting it right next time and features them arriving safely in much the same way as on TV, but with more details.
 

 Previous ‘The Space Museum’ next ‘The Time Meddler’