The Ice Warriors: Ranking - 31

 

The Ice Warriors

(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 11/11/1967-16/12/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Peter Bryant, writer; Brian Hayles, director: Derek Martinus)

Rank: 31

   'All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey,

 I've been to the Earth for a holiday, 

I'm so glad I chose Britannicus, so much colder than LA, 

Just a Martian on vacation enjoying such a Winter's day!'

 

The trouble with predicting the future and turning it into a metaphor is that occasionally you get it wrong. We are now so far into the era of man-made global warming that the only people who still disagree with it are cranks, crooks and right wing politicians (not necessarily all different people) so it seems odd to us now in 2023 that back in 1967 Dr Who was predicting an ice age for us by the year 3000. Which wasn’t actually quite so far-fetched at the time: only a few scientists were mumbling about the prospect of man-made Armageddon and they were mostly keeping to themselves while gathering data so as not to scare everyone. As a result a lot of fans dismiss ‘The Ice Warriors’, set in a near-future ice age, figuring that if it gets something that fundamental wrong about the weather it can’t possibly tell us anything about ourselves – and yet Brian Hayles is such a clever writer and such a close observer of human nature that to me he might just have nailed our future better than any other Dr Who writer. In every other way it’s quite scary how close ‘The Ice Warriors’ is to imagining our own age. We’d had computer-logic in Dr Who before of course, but where ‘The War Machines’ imagines a mad computer intent on taking over the world, this one is just plain faulty and one that everything is connected to and left unregulated, a bit like the internet. Britain, which is now a ‘base’ named Brittanicus rather than a proper country and has cut itself off from the rest of the planet, is ruled by people who’ve been taught not to doubt the computer even when everything it tells them to do is obviously wrong. Only one luddite scientist is still using his eyes and seen what’s going on and do people listen to his warnings? No of course not, he’s been shunned as a pariah, living out a life on the fringes of society. Everyone is angry, everyone is cross, everyone is making do for the sake of appearances and nobody trusts anyone else, even though the computer - the system at the core of this world – is treated as a God that couldn’t possibly go wrong. Oh yes and there’s a hulking great threat waiting to invade us at any moment if we can’t get our act together. No other story from the 20th century gets what life is like in the 21st century (or the 30th or 50th or whenever this story is set – that’s up for debate) so accurately: we got there a bit early and a bit hotter, that’s all).

There are too, I suspect, two very clever bits of metaphor being balanced in this story. We never fully find out what makes this ice age arrive, which causes everyone to distance themselves in separate ice-boxes round the globe, but there are lots of hints that it might not be all natural. Given that the 1967 backdrop puts the making of this story firmly against the backdrop of the Cold War it could well be that this is Hayles’ version of a ‘nuclear Winter’, a side effect of somebody somewhere pressing a nuclear button that caused such colossal destruction somewhere round the world (there’s a very elaborate prop that’s a map of the glacial movement in the world, but it’s frustratingly incomplete on screen) that everything got thrown up into the air and it blocked out the sun, a little like what Adric did to the dinosaurs  by crashing without design in ‘Earthshock’. There are even bears on the loose in Britain the only wildlife with a thick  enough coat to survive for long outside (and it’s a real bear too –albeit a not very scary not qyite grown up yet teenage one borrowed from a zoo and deliberately shot when no actors are around so no one is in any danger). ‘The Ice Warriors’ comes at the end of a run of similarly ‘cold’ stories this psychedelic year, the ice world of Telos on ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and Tibet in ‘The Abominable Snowman’, a sign that this sort of thing was on a lot of writers’ minds across 1967, although the most obvious parallel is with ‘The Tenth Planet’ the year before (the very Cyber-like stage directions in the script suggest this is what Hayles had in mind). Oddly enough nobody seems that fussed though: unlike every other version of global warfare in Who they’re more concerned with survival than revenge, especially when The Ice Warriors themselves become the ‘real’ threat that mankind needs to come together in unity to face, although this might well be what causes everyone to turn to computers and cold hard logic (because look where big emotions got humanity  The big clue, though is how this story is pitched as a fight between the individual (scavenger Penley) and the computer (as represented by commander Clent) in big arguments that dominate the story (to the extent they nearly forget about the bright green monster for scenes at a time): living by computer makes everyone equal but takes away any individuality, any freedom. ‘The Ice Warriors’ is, at its core, an old fashioned fight between communism and capitalism and unlike, say, most of the people working on the series in the 3rd Doctor era, Hayles is clearly on the side of the capitalists. The computer keeps saying no and causes harm over and over and still nobody thinks to unplug it – because the computer itself keeps telling people not to. Nowadays it seems an odd metaphor: we thinks of computers as something individual, literal ‘personal computers’ that we can detach from (and all software updates and accessories we have to keep paying for makes them the height of capitalism to modern eyes) but it’s a very 1960s idea to have one big computer giving out the orders that everyone else follows and obeys without question because they’ve been trained to. Just like the succession of Russian leaders with their propaganda. There’s a telling detail that this is what Hayles was after: near the end, when base commander Clent consults his precious computer to find out what damage the glaciers have causes, discovers that every base is under that and worse, except Asia who are better. ‘They would!’ he chunters, in such a way that suggests they’ve had centuries of Russian lies and double-speak. 

There’s another metaphor too I suspect, one already covered a lot across the 1960s stories reviewed in this book: that of generational angst. We used to get quite a few Hartnell stories wondering loudly about what will happen in the future when the ‘youth of the day’ take over and they seemed split down the middle on whether things would get better with the youngsters in charge or not. Well this story is more like solidarity in the then-present, one that asks what happens next after all the warmth of the summer of love dies, a story that was fittingly transmitted in the ice-cold Winter of 1967 when things were already starting to fall apart (the last episode went out ten days before The Beatles’ much slated ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ Boxing day special) and wondering out loud what might happen next when the hippies find not everyone their age believes in peace and love after all. We miss the joke nowadays, when you can walk down any high street and see aging bald or greying punks and when some old folks homes have even started playing punk music, but back in 1967 the idea that rock music and hippies were anything other than a ‘fad’ was absurd. It was youth music, something people would grow out of when they became adults and had to head out into the ‘real’ world. Look at this base though: everyone is wearing what, if only this story had been broadcast in colour, would look totally great and groovy and psychedelic: one-piece day-glo suits in bright swirling patterns, only they’re being worn by actors the wrong side of fifty (Miss Garrett aside this is one of the oldest average age supporting casts in the series and she’s not the usual dollybird but a lady clearly heading for middle age). If they were to the joke now it would be, well, ‘Dot and Bubble’ actually – a bunch of Tiktokkers with crazy eyebrows using the base computer to post selfies. They’re acting though, like a bunch of teenagers who’ve suddenly been put in charge – Clent believes in the computer because he’s not used to thinking for himself and taking on responsibility so hands all that to the machine to let the system take care of itself, while Penley basically has a stop and leaves the base altogether, all but slamming the door as he goes. They’re clearly not ready for the adult world at all, however long in the tooth they are. It’s an age old story Who has been doing since the first ‘dalek’ story portrayed the Thals in the same way. 

And yet what I love about ‘The Ice Warriors’ is how sympathetic Hayles is and how the world might well be better if more hippies were around as grown-ups. Penley is the smartest person here bar the Dr, but he rejects technology and science to become, in effect, a hippie living outside society by his own means. I mean, that’s ridiculous to us now we know that nice Peter Sallis famous for ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ about a bunch of OAPs spending their retirement running down hills in tin baths (and even this early on in his career, the youngest I’ve ever seen him, he’s a not so sprightly 46), but look at him: if any Dr Who character can be said to turn on, tune in and drop out its him. He even has enough knowledge of ‘illicit chemicals’ to help save everyone (which, this being a Saturday teatime kid’s show, ends up as a stink bomb). What’s more he’s right and saves everyone at least as much as the Doctor does, his ability to see outside society and point out uncomfortable truths that no one else will accept makes him the hero of the hour. The thrust of this story is that, when we grow up, we should all be a little more like Penley and a little less like Clent. Back in the days when ‘grown ups’ were making TV and tut-tutting about the youth of the day this was rare indeed and very refreshing given Dr Who’s family audience with so many mums and dads watching. In Who terms only ‘The Space Museum’ is kinder to the youth movement (Brian Hayles, incidentally, was a youngish 36 when this went out). 

Of course no one notices any of that because they only have eyes for this week’s ‘monster’, though in keeping with the intelligence of Hayles’ writing ‘The Ice Warriors’ are less like your usual outside invaders and more touchy defensive aliens who are at least as scared of Humans as we are of them (at least until they have something of a character change by the second half). Poor Varga doesn’t invade us for resources or power or just for a laugh; it doesn’t even invade us technically, it’s the lone survivor from a crashed spaceship preserved intact inside a glacier for millions of years and discovered due to shifting temperatures, the way Mammoths are occasionally are today. Only thanks to the best Martian technology this one happens to still be alive. And he’s a bit angry at the frosty reception he gets from planet. The idea, inspired by the ‘Sutton Hoo’ dig of 1939 that discovered a Viking burial ground on Britain’s East Coast and a recent (and sadly wiped) TV series ‘Hereward The Viking’ which featured helmets just like the ones the Ice Warriors wear (and also, quite possibly, ‘Adam Adamant Lives!’, the series original Who producer Verity Lambert made after leaving the show about a Victorian detective who wakes up in swinging London after being entombed in ice) is a plausible one: all Varga wants is to get home but he’s spooked by these weird hairless warm-blooded mammals and frightened of being dissected by scientists, while he’s desperate to help his four similarly unconscious buddies in the ice survive alongside him. I mean, these Humans are positively alien – they even like hot weather and there’s no telling what they might do to the Martians if they’ve been this reckless with their own planet. Though built for battle and not scared of a fight, with built-in armour and far bigger than the Humans (all the actors cast are well over 6 feet tall, with Bernard Bresslaw as Varga 6’ 7”), they’re also honourable: they only fight when cornered and when they feel there is no other choice. The Viking comparison is an interesting one actually: like The Vikings they know how to fight and won’t let any puny humans threaten them or their resources but they also have a culture beyond mere fighting full of beauty and grace (not that we see a lot of it till the ‘Peladon’ stories written by Hayles in the 1970s but it’s already clear these warriors have time for more than fighting). The result puts a neat spin on the many ‘base under siege’ plotlines in the 2nd Doctor era that were already getting repetitive by the middle of season five, an early version of the ‘Silurians’ plot that we don’t go to them or them come to us, because they were already bloody here!

Of all the ‘monsters’ in Dr Who ‘The Ice Warriors’ are the ones I love the most. They’re a bit of everything: they’ve got the tall threatening gait of the Cybermen, the ruthlessness of the Daleks, the gadgetry of The Sontarons and the clever quick brains of The Master, but more than any of those four they have a code of honour and – for lack of a better word – a humanity other alien races don’t have, which makes them more like the occasional benevolent races we see in the series too, like the Rills or The Sensorites (future stories in the 3rd Doctor era have – spoilers – a twist that The Ice Warriors turn out to be nice, which makes a lot more sense with them than it would with almost any other Dr Who monster). After all, look at what Varga does in this story: his response to waking up on an alien world is to stomp around a bit hissing, making diabolical threats and kidnapping Victoria (without ever actually harming her) which if you’ve ever been woken up suddenly after a long nap by some noisy neighbours seem quite reasonable to me. Even by the end, when Varga finally goes into out and out war mode, it’s provoked by a human technician whose turned mad – its a last resort from a lone being fighting for survival, not the wicked deed of a psychopath (which if you come to this story from the colour era makes for a very refreshing change indeed). Hayles, who’d never really written a straightforward monster foe in his earlier twin stories (the very different ‘Celestial Toynaker’ and ‘The Smugglers’) was inspired by the tales in his youth of speculation about whether there might be life on Mars, back in the days when astronomers still half-believed that the thick heavy lines we saw from Earth were artificial structures like canals rather than the random dot of craters. There was much speculation that water might exist on the planet somewhere, considered to be essential for life; even after that was proved to be false it was hoped there might yet be ice under Mars’ surface. Even as late as 1964 it was hoped the Mars pioneer probe might find some sign of life somewhere – ‘The Ice Warriors’ sounds like Hayles’ hope that the scientists might yet be wrong and that the Martians had simply learned to duck when the probe arrived.  It seems unlikely, given all the things we’ve learned about our nearest neighbour in space since 1967, that Mars really is inhabited by giant green reptiles (though as the Mariner probe that gave us the vast majority of our info on the planet was only launched in 1971 it wasn’t yet a totally foregone conclusion when this story went out) but even then they make more sense that most alien races in Dr Who: if intelligent life is to take any form out there in the vastness of space it makes sense that it would be on the planet with the conditions closest to the one planet we know that has life on it (Earth, if you’ve somehow forgotten what planet you’re on!) and even with all our extra knowledge about how dead it is Mars is still the planet most like ours, just a little colder. 

Hayles thought it an oddly-Human centric view that life had to resemble us in some way though and got thinking: what sort of creatures would evolution have created on such a world and what would be most likely to survive? And what form would such an alien take based on what we know of that world, a tiny bit further over from our sun? Well, they would have to be cold-blooded to survive; they would have to be reptilian and they woud most likely be bipedal to better move around. Originally he envisaged something vaguely electronic, like ‘The Cyberman’. It was designer Martin Baugh, hot on the heels of designing the yeti, who added so much to the design though: he picked up on the ‘Viking’ like description in Hayles’ script and he took out the Cybermen aspects to create a cross between an upright crocodile and a turtle, complete with a head that could ‘pop’ back inside its shell. Very very occasionally, usually when Dr Who is super popular(so circa 1964, 1973, 2005 and 2013), there will be a report in the more lurid British newspapers about how ‘a Dr Who like life form has been found on an alien planet’, which usually turn out to be an exaggerated headline about the potential possibility of microbes (if anything the closest we’ve come to actually finding alien life like Dr Who out there in the universe, it’s the germ-sized prawn of ‘The Invisible Enemy’. Which is depressing). If they ever do find truly sentient life though I guarantee you it will turn out something like either the Silurians or the Ice Warriors. Which is a bit of a worry given how badly things turn out for the Humans in both stories. Interestingly, despite being cold-blooded The Ice warriors are a very touchy, emotional race not born out by cold hard logic (like Clent’s computer) but passion and feeling. The Ice Warriors don’t have computers to lead them astray after all; they don’t need to rely on anything except their instincts and while mankind is running up and corridors like headless chickens, sitting ducks till the Tardis arrives and helps out, Varga is a calm steady solid being who seems to have the upper hand right the way through to the end. Even when they’re forced to kill they do so impressively gracefully compared to the shot ‘em up and strangulations of other monsters: the ‘rippling’ effect is one of the cheapest trick effects in all of Who but so effective (the camera films a ‘reflection’ of real life action on a sheet of mylar – clever baking foil – that a stage hands shakes and shimmers until the picture distorts then the camera cuts back to the live action just as the actor collapses on the floor: it’s all done live without any post-production). 

One of the reasons the ‘Ice Warriors’ are my favourite race is Bernard Bresslaw, the ultimate in unlikely stunt casting; known as the ‘gentle giant’ for his tall frame and comedy persona (you’ll never see a ‘Carry On’ film the same way again after this story, though sadly he’s not in the ones William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee did; he is, however, in ‘The Army Game’ with the former) Bresslaw’s the lovable ditsy one in everything else he ever did in his entire career, all except here where he channels his inner Martian and turns Varga into one of the scariest, most threatening forces of nature to ever be in the series. The Ice Warriors were already one of the best written monsters in Brian Hayles’ script but Bresslaw adds a whole layer on top of that, picking up on lines in the script about the Ice Warriors finding it hard to breathe in our atmosphere and adding the Martian’s distinctive hissing and sibilance in rehearsals. If ever you felt pity for a Dr Who monster, even when it was unleashing hell on all the supporting cast, then its here (either that or 2005’s ‘Dalek’ anyway). He’s unbelievably scary and all too plausible: if it had turned out Bresslaw really was an ice warrior all this time in a Human disguise I’d have been happy to believe it and I still think that despite the many behind-the-scene shots we have of a smiling Bresslaw being bolted into his costume. Talking of which, one of my favourite Who stories is that Bresslaw said yes to the part back when Varga was still scripted as a mostly Human Viking; he was most shocked when he was called in for his ‘costume fitting’ at a builder’s yard to have his fibre-glass shell fitted. He joked in interviews it was ‘the first time I’d ever been measured for a costume not with a tape measure but with callipers!’ At first perturbed that nobody would see his face and therefore cast him in similar roles (his main motivation to take the part) he soon got into it and realised he could do what he liked with no fans likely to recognise him! It remains one of the greatest guest parts in the entire series and the other four Ice warriors are pretty darn great too. Bresslaw was very short-sighted without his glasses and spectacles didn’t seem right on an ‘Ice warrior (besides, the ‘head’ is actually resting on the actor’s shoulders) so Bresslaw had to be led round the set by the other actors, mostly Deborah Watling with whom he shared most scenes (good job it wasn’t similarly short-sighted Katy Manning or they’d have taken so many wrong turnings they’d have ended up on Mars for real!) He couldn’t hear any better either and guess when his cues were by counting silently in his head, though mercifully all the Ice warrior dialogue was pre-recorded and played back in the studio anyway.  

The Ice Warriors are a big part of the reason I love this story so much, but they’re far from the only one. Just look at the plot: the main idea of the goodies stopping the baddy is simple and straightforward enough, albeit with the added complexity that this is a monster capable of kindness and tenderness. But beyond that there’s a complex sub-plot about mankind’s ability to be the vehicle of their own destruction, making things worse for themselves by meddling with natural forces they can’t control (Hayles got the idea of a man-made exaggeration of a natural crisis spot on – he just went the wrong way with the temperature gauge that’s all; I guess it was more suitable for TV to have the cast in warm jumpsuits rather than bikinis anyway).  The tension between the Ice warriors and Humans is tense but that’s nothing on the Brittanicus base who are totally unequipped to deal with an emergency, in a state of civil war over how best to survive. The idea of ‘outsiders’ living out a frustrating but free existence compared to the safe but restrictive world inside the base isn’t the only time Dr Who ever did such a thing but it is by and large the first (‘The Sensorites’ has a claim too I suppose, but not quite done like this) and by far the best. Even before the Martians are defrosted this is a world in trouble and it feels as if the base has been around a lot longer than when the cameras arrive to film them.   

The human characters at this base are some of the best of the many (many) small colonies of Humans appearing in the series too – Peter Barkworth’s Clent is one of the best ‘base under siege commanders’, angry and stroppy and stubborn, but still capable of feelings and the actor’s decision to add in a gammy leg and a walking stick in order to emphasise his vulnerability makes him more than just your one-dimensional bureaucrat. After all, he’s not a ‘monster’ either: he really believes in what the computers tell him and he’s based his entire life on their directives – you can tell the moment, around the middle of the story, when he knows in his heart of hearts he’s wrong to have put his faith in a machine, but he can’t admit it even to himself because to do so would be to unravel his life’s work. He has to be right, even when the evidence is staring him in the face (I know more than a few people like that in the ongoing covid pandemic). It was a big deal for the show getting Barkworth, star of ‘The Power Game’ (this story is effectively a ‘who would win?’ fight between ‘The Power Game’ and ‘The Army Game’!): the script said Clent was a Barkworth type and added that there wasn’t a hope of ever getting him and yet the actor yes straight away! His romance with Miss Garrett is one of the most believable in the series too: Wendy Gifford is one of the most obscure actresses to get a decent part in a Dr Who story and doesn’t seem to have done much other TV, but goodness knows why: her slow decline from ice maiden loving Clent from afar to a ball of warm-hearted emotions is done really well (so much for Humans being warm blooded!) And then there’s Penley: if you come to this story from ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ or ‘Wallace and Gromit’ then you might not have realised that Peter Sallis was more than just a cheery if slightly thick Yorskhireman. Here, before he was well known enough to be typecast, he’s a scientist who has eyes beyond the science and so turned renegade, scratching out an existence in the wilds, every bit as stubborn as the commander who kicked him out – which is a pity when he ends up being the only person who can help. He is, if you will, the Doctor in human form, impossibly bright, insatiably curious and frustrated in the extreme with an ordered lavish lifestyle that doesn’t feel ‘real’ enough for him (albeit more like the 1st Dr than the 2nd in his grumpiness; in the days before anniversary stories it felt like this was the closest we came to seeing the two Doctors together on screen, except for the fact that they both clearly admire each other here instead of endlessly bickering). 

Or maybe it’s the metaphors that’s more your thing? Well then, how about the running theme of warmth and cold? Varga starts off as just another cold-blooded killer until you get to know him and see how he keeps his warmth concealed within. By contrast the Humans are the opposite: they seem warm-blooded but can act quite cold towards each other, wrecking their chances of survival with petty squabbles that, all too literally, find them pushing the people they love out into ‘the cold’. One odd thing though: if the Ice Warriors truly are cold-blooded then they should survive regardless of the temperature – turning up the heat, the way the Doctor does in so many of their adventures starting with this one, really shouldn’t work. And how come the base has a handy thermostat any passing alien can fiddle with – or one that can both cook and freeze them? It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you! Anyway, the base’s reliance on logic, too, is robbing them of the warmth humanity needs to survive in more ways than just the temperature (Penley’s damning discussion of Clent: ‘he’s got a printed circuit where his heart should be!’, another reminder of how much like the Cybermen the Ice warriors originally were). It takes a two-hearted timelord to bridge the gap between them and even then the Dr’s noticeably madder at the humans for relying so much on technology as he is Varga for threatening his companion. Or maybe its the dialogue you’re after? Well, there’s a lot of that too, with Hayles giving most of his characters the gift of sarcasm (so under-rated as a form of characterisation), making them seem more rounded and ‘real’ than usual. Hayles is also one of the best writers around for the 2nd Doctor, making him an intelligent clown who can get everyone out of trouble but likes them to realise the error of their ways and ask for help first. A lot of it is improvised by Patrick Troughton, such as the brilliant bit of schtick when he tries to save the world and finds he can’t get the top of his stink bomb bottle off or freezes in horror in close-up at the point where a ‘monster’ reveal would normally be…only for the long-shot to reveal that Jamie has just knelt on his hand! It’s in the script too though: the 2nd Doctor’s quips at times of fright ups the tension because we know how worried he really us (‘I don’t think much of your hospitality!’ he huffs when Varga threatens to cut off his air supply). 

If there’s a fault, well, Jamie and Victoria are pretty hard done by in this story: he gets injured midway through and she gets captured, which doesn’t leave them a lot to do (it doesn’t help that Deborah Watling had a prior engagement – quite what is lost to the mists of time – so just disappears at the start of the sixth episode, sent back to the Tardis which, quite honestly, sounds a harder feat than being locked in with The Ice Warriors given that it was the wrong way up the last time we saw it in episode one). Jamie tries hard to be brave and dashing but there are too many people running around so he gets sidelined early on, with maybe less to do than any of his other twenty-two stories. Victoria is a pain too with not much to do except go ‘oh dear’ cry and scream which really doesn’t make the most of Deborah Watling’s acting talents: Varga shows a lot of patience after kidnapping her not simply killing her straight away as she blubs through most scenes (and the one she doesn’t the Doctor has her sob as part of a ruse!) There is at least one nice scene early on, when Varga is busy defrosting, where Jamie comments on the very 1960s miniskirts worn by the ladies round the base and asks Victoria lustfully if she’s wear a skirt like that rather than her usual Victorian dresses: she’s scandalised and warns him off with the line ‘changing the subject!’ just like a proper Victorian lady should! A few more lines like this to brighten up the talkier bits and it could have been better still. Storr, too, is a very lazy stereotype, an unlikable Scot whose miserly and only thinks of himself – putting him together with Penley (the serial’s closest to a three-dimensional character) and Jamie (a Scot whose brave and selfless) for so much of the story only emphasises what a wrongful depiction of a true Scot he is! 

The ending is a real letdown: we’ve had five episodes of intelligent people out-manoeuvring each other, motivated by real feelings we can understand, and then Varga starts talking about taking over the Earth like every other monster and the Doctor has no choice but to blow them sky high. The story is all a bit talky without much action too: the Humans clash using their voices and Varga doesn’t attack so much as loom, which means that the dialogue is doing most of the work: that’s enough for a four-parter but a little boring across six weeks. I do disagree strongly with all the fans who declare the story ‘boring’ though. It’s one of those stories that’s plainly a marathon not a sprint, where you get to know these people slowly in their natural artificial habitat before seeing them gradually squeezed out of their comfort zones, like an overgrown wildlife documentary you’re watching in real time; after all, it’s hard to build a set of action sequences around a monster whose scariest feature is his height (this is one of those monsters even I could outrun; incidentally walking sticks haven’t got very far in the future given that Clent’s looks flimsier than mine). It doesn’t help either that the crux of this story, the bit where things start unravelling at speed in episodes 2 and 3, are missing so that what we have is a slow opening episode and the glacial build-up to a rather rushed climax (while the animation just makes this grown-up drama feel like a bright cartoon, without the subtleties and shadows of the live action parts – this was one of the first stories to be animated given that only two of the episodes were missing and they hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet). 

Although I’m just grateful for the four episodes we do have, which only survived by chance, in a freak discovery on a par with the Ice warriors themselves. Back in the late 1980s the BBC were moving to new bigger headquarters from one of their storage properties, Villiers House in London (its captured on screen as the whacking big building with all the windows surrounded by guards in ‘Enemy Of The World’ - the following story after this one, funnily enough). A last bit of stock-taking revealed a hidden shelf that had never been properly processed before. The BBc staff, in something of a hurry, could have been forgiven for junking it all: after all the film canisters were all clearly twenty years old plus when licensing rights were long gone and we’re only just outside the company’s policy, which started really in the days of home video, to keep everything ‘just in case’ it could ever be useful. The film cans were stored haphazardly too: when the news that these episodes had been uncovered the Dr Who fanzines mostly reported that it was episodes 2 and 4-6 rather than 1 because that was the number on the outside label (whether the film had been placed in the ‘wrong’ one or simply mis-labelled by accident we’ll probably never know). The recovery in 1988 was the last big Dr Who find before ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’, but got far less fuss (it didn’t even get a video release till 1998, given that it was still incomplete, with a CD containing the soundtrack of the two missing parts). Even so, I love this story even more and even with the missing middle parts: ‘The Ice Warriors’ is one of the most rounded and satisfying in all of Who that points out mankind’s flaws but has us put our differences aside and work together by the end, with an intelligence and sophistication few other bits of British scifi can match and an alien race that’s brilliantly written, perfectly played and (for 1967) pretty well realised on screen too. In other words, it’s very n’ice indeed!

POSITIVES + This is, to date, the only time a Dr Who score has been lifted wholesale from an existing classical piece of music you could actually buy in the shops (and for now I’m ignoring the ‘radiophonic workshop’ CD ‘symphonies’ you can buy nowadays in that definition). And it’s a great choice: Vaughan Williams’ ‘Sinfonia Antarctica’, which started life as a smaller piece for the soundtrack of the ‘Scott Of The Antarctic’ film in 1948 (and as such was made for the visual form). Conjuring up images of penguins, huskies, sleds, fortitude and above all icy winds, it adds to a lot of this story’s atmosphere. I’m only sorry they didn’t use Vaughan Williams’ great friend Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars’ from ‘The Planet Suite’ while they were at it! The ‘new’ score specially made for the episode is one of regular composer Dudley Simpson’s better ones too, interspersing wordless wailing (singer Joanne Brown, whose a lot more effective than her lose cousin who sings the theme on ‘Star Trek’, a show that still hadn’t been broadcast on UK TV just yet) jazzy drumming and a very 1960s Hammond organ in a decidedly more ‘contemporary’ sound than we usually get (very fitting for a story about grown-up hippies, even if they seem to be down the jazzier end of the spectrum than what people were really listening to in 1967, a few Byrds fans aside) and it works very well, adding to the feeling of discordant technology going wrong (Simpson’s work hasn’t been mentioned much so far on this website simply because of how reliably good it is and how it manages to enhance the mood without drawing your attention to the fact music is playing, but most of his scores are great – in many ways he’s the unsung hero of the series, particularly in the 1970s when he writes 99% of the music you hear). Dudley also seems to click that this is a pro-hippie story and wheels out the Hanmond organ (the sound of 1964 but close enough to 1967 by adult standards where fashions move quicker than your sense of time) and goes as mad as he ever gets. It must have been amazingly contemporary for a TV score at the time. 

NEGATIVES - You think fashions are odd now? Well, apparently they get weirder in the future – perhaps its a relief this story was made in the days of black and white because they look suspiciously like the neon monstrosities everyone was wearing in the 1980s twenty years early. Even they have a certain internal logic though: basically they’re tie-dyed shellsuits that recall both the ‘what will become of hippies in the future?’ theme and complements the reptilian body armour that Varga’s wearing, hinting that the two sides really aren’t that different after all (we won’t see an Ice Warrior outside its armour until 2013). For the sake of the characters in this icy setting I hope they get thermal underwear on underneath too!

BEST QUOTE: Clent: ‘There is no hope’ Penley: ‘You mean help is inconvenient – it interferes with our precious schedule!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There’s a whole host of sequels in all medium, far too many to list here, though ‘The Seeds Of Death’ ‘The Curse Of Peladon’ ‘Cold War’, the un-made 6th Doctor and Sil matchup ‘Mission To Magnus’ and 8th Doctor Big Finish audio ‘Frozen Time’ (2007) are all well worth seeking out. 

In an unusual move both this story and the next had their own specially shot trailers broadcast which were tapes as part of episode two, ones that didn’t simply recycle footage from the episodes, both of them sadly long since lost. The one for ‘The Web Of Fear’, with the Doctor speaking, is the more celebrated (lovingly re-created in animated form for the DVD using an off-air copy of the original sound) but ‘The Ice Warriors’ is the more interesting. Starring peter Barkworth as Clent and Peter Sallis as Penley, the former introduces himself and the situation with the glaciers before calling his former colleague ‘a scavenger; a useless non-productive waste of talent’. Penley replies telling us that Clent has turned into a machine that no one can argue with and that ‘I demand the right to be an individual’. Then Penley speaks of a different threat and the camera cuts to shots of Varga being defrosted while the announcer tells the audience when and where they can watch it. A bit of an odd idea, with characters breaking the fourth wall and talking to camera directly, I can see why they never tried it again but it would nice to see it or even hear it (this is one of the very few broadcast bits of ‘classic’ Dr Who for which not even the audio soundtrack survives). 

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