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. 

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