The Tomb Of The Cybermen
(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 2-23/9/1967, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Victor Pemberton, writers: Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler, director: Morris Barry)
Rank: 45
'Cybermum's gone to Iceland, on Telos - she'll be back soon, just as soon as humanity's recklessly opened up her tomb and let her out! Now eat your cyber fish fingers and cyber custard'
There they lurked, entombed, in the dark, waiting for the archaeologists who were fated to awaken them and bring them out into the open, restoring them from a legendary folk memory to their proper title as their era’s most ruthless killers. The historians gaped in awe as they gazed upon their icy catacombs, sealed for decades and brought them out into the blinking light. And then one of them opened the film canisters and said ‘gosh, I wonder how this got here? I suppose we’d better send this back to the BBC right away’. Fandom spent the longest time assuming that this highly popular and much loved story, rated highly from the moment it was first broadcast, was one that we would never get to see again. It was, following the cataloguing that went on in the late 1970s and the return of a few stray lone episodes, the first big cache of returned missing episodes we’d ever had and certainly that fans could actually own (more or less) straight away thanks to the wonders of home video – one that was the best-seller in the Dr Who range for quite a few years afterwards (and remains one of the highest selling BBC home videos of all time). For anyone who wasn’t a fan or wasn’t born in 1992 when this story was returned, it was like the recovery of ‘Web Of Fear’ and ‘Enemy Of the World’ in 2013, but more so because it had never happened before in such a big way, like all your birthdays and Christmasses at once and sprinkled with a dose of fairy magic, a moment in time when all things seemed possible (after all, if this story could turn up out of the blue then what could turn up tomorrow?) After all, on audio this story always had a slightly unnerving ethereal feel to it, with a combination of dialogue, stock music, a new score and lots of silence, many of which seemed to overlap each other (yes even the silence – if ever there was a Dr Who story that was like a liminal space then it’s this journey through the giant catacombs of Telos).
Only of course ‘Tomb Of
The Cyberman’ is no longer magic, but a
real tangible object made on a low budget in a cramped TV studio by people who
have the audacity not to realise they’re making a bit of history but just doing
a difficult job as best they can with little time and not many resources, the
same as usual. There’s a divide within the fandom over ‘Tomb’, perhaps more
than any other story where those who saw it the first time round and still
remember it in detail would talk about in hushed tones, the feelings of fans
who watched it’s re-discovery in 1992 and liked it and the feelings of fans
nowadays who can measure this story up against other Troughton episodes is
usually ‘is that it?’ What they see are the wonky special effects (even by 1967
standards), the drab talky scenes of unrehearsed actors crashing their lines,
the rather odd pacing that speeds up and slows down and a story that’s great in
parts rather than gripping all the way through. Sometimes Telos looks very
cheap and nasty, with empty-suited Cybermen costumes dangling in the air and
actors a little too obviously held up with Kirby wire. But some of that magic
still remains: it’s easy to see why viewers from a quarter century earlier
still remembered so much of it, as there are some truly wonderful set pieces
not dimmed by time. The Cybermen were born for stories like these when the tall
actors get to loom over the actors in cramped settings with nowhere to run,
while the iconic moment of a whole army of Cybermen being defrosted in slow
motion at the end of episode two across five whole tiers (another of those
candidates for the greatest Dr Who cliffhanger of them all) is designed to
burrow into your brain and send you scurrying behind the sofa. As for me, I’m
in a peculiar halfway house – I’m not old enough to have seen this story the
first time around but I had already fallen in love with the script book
published two years before the re-discovery which I loved from the first before
finding out how revered and loved this story was and that’s still one of my
most treasured DW possessions even now I can see the thing and don’t need to
read it, so having this story returned in 1992 after it existed only on the
page and in my imagination was quite an experience. Other stories from the
Troughton era look a lot better than this one (not least other Cybermen stories
that make them even more of a threat like ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘The Invasion’)
and yet I read the novelisations of both those books early on and they never
quite gripped me quite the same way: for all its faults this story is special
because the ideas are so good.
The central idea is a
good one too, the first Dr Who story in a while that’s treated the series as if
you were channel-hopping. This time round it’s a riff on the hammer horror ‘mummy’s
curse’ films, which came about when Davies and Pedlar sat down to write a third
story and discussed what they’d been reading, finding that they had a mutual
love of Egyptology. Ice tombs are a very different idea to the South Pole or
The Moon, but unlike some of the later Hinchcliffe stories that barely adapt a
story to the scifi format at all this one is very different, set in the future
and in an ice tomb not a baking hot Egyptian desert. Like the ancient Pharaohs
the Cybermen have ‘disappeared’ overnight, leaving only their whacking great
architecture and a memory of what they once were, waiting to be taken into the
afterlife. Only in Dr Who the ‘tombs’ are really giant cryogenic freezers and
the ‘afterlife’ is simply being restored to full violent health in the present
day. The tombs themselves are full of traps of the sort designed to keep out
robbers in pyramids, but writers Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler seem to have had a
masterstroke partway through (so late on that they don’t seem to have gone back
and re-written the first half to suit) that maybe The Cybermen were setting
traps to lure Humans in, hoping to get the very smartest and the bravest left
to be converted. The puzzles work in much the same way the legends of Pharaoh
curses work (which, in reality, are more a warning saying ‘grave robbers hands off
or you’ll get a smack in the afterlife’ but make for a good story to gullible
tabloids), only being Cybermen it’s not a superstitious curse but pure
mathematics, a series of logic problems that mean only the very intelligent get
through to be taken over. It’s the original escape room where
the penalty is conversion and/or death. This is the closest Dr Who comes to having a ‘perfect plot’ in many
ways: it’s claustrophobic and sees our heroes trapped, and while a lot of other
stories have the monsters lumbering around in the shadows until the big
showdown in this one it’s hard to avoid the whacking tombs of them defrosting
and about to wake up, while the logic puzzles leave plenty of set pieces for
big nasty things to happen and for The Doctor to show off his cleverness, while
it’s not one of those forced or hackneyed ideas – it makes perfect sense for
the not-quite-Human Cybermen to build themselves a giant freezer on an ice
planet– a mainstay of scifi in the last half century it’s true, but still a
pretty unusual idea in 1967. After all, cryogenics isn’t that far removed from
the ‘transplant’ angle that caused Kit Pedler to come up with the Cybermen in
the first place. It also returns them to pretty much where it all began, in the
snows of The South Pole in ‘The Tenth
Planet’ where the fact they could cope with sub-human temperatures marked them
out as being so different and alien. So far in their chronology the Cybermen
have come to us, overpowering human bases at the South Pole and on The Moon,
but its here, in their third story, that we seem them on their world and have
to fight them on their terms, where they seem to have the upper hand.
These aren’t your
oven-ready Cybermen either, despite being defrosted so thoroughly – they feel
fresh in new ways they weren’t even in their last two excellent (even better?)
adventures, more of a threat now we meet them on their world and get to hear
them talk at length in those chilling electronically-treated voices (an actual
gadget used to help people who’d lost their larynxes through illness, usually
smoking, to speak, with a metal gadget placed against the throat: a lot of the
poor Cyber voice artists went dizzy by the end of filming). The baddies don’t
fully make an appearance until the cliffhanger at the end of episode two, but the
writers keep up the suspense in a number of ingenious ways, such as showing us
where the Cybermen do their training (in a very surprising and sudden first
cliffhanger that makes even a ‘dummy’ Cybermen look threatening, killing off
the person in the supporting cast we’ve got to know best), where the
cyber-stores are (poor Victoria ends up trapped in an airless sarcophagus that
makes this seem even more like a curse of the mummy epic) and we’re introduced
to the Cybermats, small deadly rodent-like electronic beings that can crawl
along the floor, the ‘scarab beetle’ of the tombs. They’re all new for this
story, written in partly to give the Humans something to re-act to before the
big reveal but also partly cynically, as Davies and Pedler saw all the money
going to Terry Nation from sales of Dalek toys and wanted in on the action with
a more child-friendly design (though the BBC, who learnt through nation to hang
on to their sales, claimed they owned the copyright as a corporation and no toy
manufacturers picked the idea up until as late as 2011, when they appeared in
the 11th Doctor story ‘Closing
Time’, actually set in a toy shop. Oddly even they didn’t sell that well,
despite as ‘Cyber head voice changer’ being the must-buy Christmas present of 2006).
The cybermats were popular with fans but
less so with the production crew, as the one main prop (the rest are mostly lightweight
dummies, though one was clockwork) was worked by remote control which happened
to be at the same frequency as the cameras in the studio and kept interfering
with the signals. Also Debbie Watling, who says she used to be chased by them
when the production crew were between shots! They’re also perhaps too cute to
be scary (but see the Bernice Summerfield story in the ‘prequels’ section below
for why they’re actually one of the most chilling of baddies). If you happened
to miss the earlier two cyber-stories then this one cleverly sells the threat
to you with all those incidents before we even see them cut their through their
ice tombs, in a combination of set and model work that looks astonishing now
and must have looked other-wordly in 1967.
The Cybermen never looked
better or acted more emotionless than they do here, utterly ruthless and close
to unstoppable (as with the two previous Cybermen stories this story is more
horror than scifi, with the incidental cast being picked off one by one just as
you get to know them well). Of course somebody was going to go
investigating some day and as with ‘The
Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Moonbase’
Davies and Pedler have put together a very multicultural archaeological team
from Earth, more like ‘Star Trek’ than most Dr Who stories. The Doctor’s
biggest weakness has long been his curiosity (something that will cause him to
come a cropper and regenerate by the time of ‘Planet
Of Spiders’) so he joins in, something that’s very interesting in the light of this story
following straight on from ‘Evil Of The Daleks’
where The Doctor seems to be going along with his metal meanie captives. As if anyone’s
a ‘baddy’ in ‘Tomb’ it’s the Doctor, leading the team on to their doom despite
knowing what’s going to happen – it looks as if he’s making sure these tombs
are opened while he’s here so he can make sure they’re sealed forever, but he’s
still partly responsible for all the things that happen as a result of his
actions, even slipping the humans the logic code to open the tomb when they get
it wrong. He could just as easily have told the archeologists to go home, or
warned them about what would happen in advance, or rigged up the doors to be
re-electrified the way he does when they finally leave, but no – The Doctor
needs to see for himself that The Cybermen are really there. Oddly the 2nd Dr
never really is this manipulative again (apart from a brief dabble at the end
of his 7th incarnation), perhaps because this story feels like one of his
closest battles – after three and a half episodes of all hell breaking loose
its one of this story’s negative points that it basically ends with everyone
legging it outside and the Dr electrocuting the doors shut again, as the only
way he can defeat the undefeatable. In between, though, you get the feeling
that this is a story where anything can happen, because it quite often does,
with a new twist and turn to keep your interest throughout, each revelation
topping the last.
Perhaps that’s because of
a change in personnel around this time. Behind the scenes Peter Bryant had just
taken over as Dr Who’s fourth producer in three years and was the most
inexperienced by far – he’d always wanted to be a producer but the only job he
could get was as assistant script editor, working under Gerry Davies before
taking over full time midway through ‘Evil Of
The Daleks’. Innes Lloyd, who’d never fully connected with the show, found
a better offer and left at the last minute so Bryant was given the job on a
three-month trial basis, basically a long period of work experience, with a
newcomer called Victor Pemberton (see ‘Fury
From The Deep’) as his new script editor. Bryant naturally wanted to make
the single biggest splash possible with his first story and spared no expense,
while this is also the first producer/script editor combo team since Verity
Lambert and David Whittaker who see the sales potential of Dr Who overseas and
think of it as more than just a quirky British children’s programme. So ‘Tomb’
becomes a sort of soft ‘re-launch’ of the show at the start of season five (note
the way Victoria randomly asks The Doctor about his family and how old he is, even
though her own dad was building a time-travel machine and she has no reason to
think he isn’t Human: he’s 450 by the way, the first time he ever gives his
age. It’s hard to imagine the Hartnell Doctor taking kindly to being asked!) pulling
out all the stops and budget (which might explain why the stories at the end of
the run look a bit ropier – particularly this story’s close cyber-cousin ‘Wheel In Space’), so that this story looks –
sometimes anyway, not all the way through – hugely impressive compared to the
stories around it. There’s a tonne of filming at Gerrard’s Cross Sand and
Gravel Quarry in Wapsey’s Wood, Buckinghamshire – quarries are by 1967 so
common that they mostly seem old hate, but there’s something different about
this one. Of course the Cyber-tombs are in the closest they can film in Britain
to an arid desert, with lots of establishing scenes of how alien and strange
this world looks rather than the usual ‘cut to the action quick’ moments we’re
more used to. There’s a vast quantity of filming at Ealing studios, which
tended to be bigger than the studio filming at TV centre and used for models
and explosions. Not in ‘Tomb’ though – it’s used for all the various special
effects and also the scene of a smoke bomb (because smoke would take too long
to clear in TV Centre and be a hazard), as well as the establishing Tardis set
which has never looked bigger or more impressive. Having so much on film also
offers the Ealing scenes an extra gloss that make it seem more like an
expensive film, because film was much more expensive than video tape back in
those days. Then there’s the model tomb, which looks so like the real life set
that you really do accept they’re one and the same, even when you know they
can’t possibly be, either frosting over or defrosting in stop-frame animation
with the addition of ‘frost’ added meticulously frame by frame. Usually the
join between all four can be irritating in Dr Who but it’s handled very
cleverly so you can’t see the join, with the actors often carrying continuity
from one to another even when they’re filming scenes weeks apart. The attention
to detail in Tomb is, for the most part, superb.
Everyone really pulled
together to make this story spectacular and none more than set designer Martin
Johnson. The tomb particularly is a thing of beauty, one of the best sets Dr
Who ever had, though really they’re two meant to represent the ‘top’ and
‘bottom’ rather than the usual side by side (no running down corridors in this
story, just legging it up and down a surprisingly flimsy hatch). In total there
are five levels to this set, though the highest one is an empty dummy, making
it one of the tallest sets ever built for the series even now. After all, it
has to hold enough room for 6”5 tall actors on each level. There are lots of
clever touches that make it seem like a ‘real’ place not just a set: the
Cyber-logos that adorn everything, the ‘film’ that covers each of the tombs
that they have to cut using their two-pronged fingers like scissors and the
ginormous dial for the ‘logic puzzle’ that looks like a cross between radar and
backgammon What’s really clever is how the
tomb comes in small bits, like Egyptian tombs, before leading into the final
big area underground. By doing this the jeopardy is increased little by little
bit as Who inverts it’s usual formula of a ‘base under siege’ by having the
humans uncover things it by bit and get nearer to the Cybermen. In a way this
is shot like a nature documentary for a vicious predator, only revealing a part
at a time: ‘Here is the corner where the Cybermen stalk their prey… and here is
where they practice for later kills...And here they are waking up, run!’ Of all
the Dr Who worlds we visit Telos feels one of the most ‘real’ even though we
never see it past a bit of ground surrounding the tomb - each roll of the dice,
each logic puzzle solved, each reveal by the baddies who’ve financed this dig
for their own ends, ups the stakes until by part four, when most of our heroes
are trapped down the tombs with the hatch shut fast behind them and tall silver
giant beings looming over them, all seems lost – few Dr Who stories can match
this one for pure threat. There are better cyber-stories both before and after
this one, more complex tales full of better motives greater characters and even
more impressive individual scenes, but there’s something about seeing the
Cybermen on their home soil, where everything is built for them and not for
humans, that makes this one special. They loom most magnificently in these sets
that seem big and airy to the Humans but cramped once they wake up.
It’s a great story for
the regulars too who shine even compared to usual. The 2nd Dr-Jamie pairing
seem to have put their arguments in the previous story to bed now and Patrick
Troughton and Frazer Hines add lots of little comedy moments that might seem
out of place in other stories but here adds to the tension: we know the 2nd Dr
is at his most scared when he’s alternating between cracking jokes and being
moody and highlander Jamie’s straightforward loyalty is a stark contrast to our
future human selves, the scared historians, the scheming financiers and the
impatient Americans (it’s always the Americans. Actually ‘Tomb’ is a rare
future-set Who story that even has Americans). The improvised scene where they
both think they’re taking hold of Victoria’s hand and grab hold of each
other’s, is so in character, while the one where Victoria asks The Doctor what
a cybermat and he replies impatiently ‘one of those’ is another ad lib (as
Troughton had forgotten his line – it sounded so in character that they left it
in). Victoria is having a rough day: this story follows straight on from the
last one so in a matter of hours she’s seen her beloved father killed by Daleks,
attempted to starve herself to death, been saved by a highlander stranger she’s
never met before and whisked across time and space by an alien in a phone box.
This is our first chance to properly get to know her (ditto The Doctor
actually, who barely had a chance to say a word to her and only met her in
‘Evil’s final episode) and Victoria is as interesting and rounded as she ever
gets. There are lots of sweet moments early on as The Doctor looks after her (she’s
even the recipient of The Doctor’s first ever on screen kiss…though it’s
probably not what you’re thing, on the top of her head like you would comfort a
younger sister. Still scandalous for an unmarried Victorian lady though!) and
she proves her worth being independent, amazingly so considering her
background. She’s wearing a mighty scandalous choice of costume from the Tardis
wardrobe, however – and it’s a bit uncomfortable that The Doctor asks Jamie to
‘show her around the wardrobe’ while the next moment she appears without her
Victorian dress of corset and pantaloons wearing a bra and (presumably)
knickers beneath her fairly low-cut dress (no wonder Jamie follows Victoria
around like a lost puppy for the rest of the year!) Strictly speaking Howard
Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s Tomb happened in Edwardian times, but
nevertheless having a Victorian lady on hand fits this story more than the
others somehow - it’s close enough for someone so clearly part of the
stiff-upper-lip British Empire for her to feel as if she belongs in this world
more than she usually does (plus Egyptian archaeologists often seemed to bring
their teenage daughters along on digs for some reason). Generally speaking once
a new companion arrives we never have any real feeling that they’re ‘new’ to
this world again, but there’s a lovely moment in episode one when the Dr thinks
to comfort Victoria and the death of her father she’s just witnessed at the end
of previous story, talking about how he misses his own family (notably he never
does this to, say, Zoe or Tegan later who both lose people close to them in
their debut story; interestingly given that for the audience at home there’s a
gap of ten weeks between the two stories even if technically this story was
recorded at the end of season four).
The problems in ‘Tomb’
come with the other characters, of whom the most interesting is Haydon, sacrificed
in that part one cliffhanger; otherwise they’re a series of ciphers an
caricatures: the boss out of his depth, his timid second in command afraid of
his own shadow, the gruff practical American pilot (who’s straight out of Gerry
Anderson puppet shows), the unlikeable conspirators Klieg and Kaftan, assistant
Toberman (who’s basically Marina from ‘Stingray’, but big and black and without
the tail...Or Kemel from ‘Evil’ again, given that it’s the same poor actor
getting his second thankless role in a row, though at least Toberman makes more
sense in thus story than in a Dalek-filled Victorian house. It’s a neat touch making
him deaf too, with the hint that he’s wearing a hearing aid too, a reminder of
the cybernetics that inspired the Cybermen in the first place and the author’s
fears that the inventions of the 1960s would lead to the Cybermen of tomorrow. If
you’ve seen any war film, or even any ensemble film from the 1940s and 1950s,
then you know what’s coming: the plucky Americans do all the shouting, those
with English accents are all terribly nice and polite and the other Europeans
are incredibly shifty.It makes the modern viewer a bit uncomfortable. Heck, it
made me uncomfortable as an eight-year-old reading the script book. You see,
the whole threat of The Cybermen is always that they take away our
individuality and make us all the same – Dr Who has long been a series in
support of multi-culturalism and Cybermen stories should do that more than
most. There were a few questionable decisions in Davies and Pedler’s earlier
stories too but at least they were trying to show a bunch of flawed but clever
men from different countries coming together for a common threat. Here this lot
squabble amongst themselves and only the English (of course) come through with
any credit (and even then Parry and Viner are played for laughs in many ways,
as cowards, even if they are the only characters with the sense to be scared). Ironically,
too, given that all Cybermen stories are really about the threat not just to
mankind (like other monsters) but our humanity, the Cybermen are better drawn
than any of the Humans and you can tell the writers much prefer writing for
them. The Cyber leader, played superbly by Michael Kilgarriff, is the most
‘personable’ Cybermen yet, stopping for a chat in between threats and doing
lots of looming. Though a radio actor used to using his voice (and upset that
it was overdubbed by someone else) Kilgarriff acts his socks off, even without
much to go on inside his silver suit.
Usually Dr Who stories
with great plots but poor characterisations aren’t my cup of tea, but yet this
story just works somehow as an example of everything that makes Dr Who great,
from the badness of the baddies to the goodness of the goodies and the Egyptian
tomb slant makes this story stand out from similar stories that try similar
things. It isn’t Dr Who’s deepest or most intelligent story, it doesn’t work on
multiple levels the way a lot of my top 100 stories do (well, only in set
terms) and there are a few effects that let the side down, even by other
Troughton story standards (no other story has an effect quite as comical as
Toberman flying through the air on hugely visible wires for instance, while the
‘dummy’ Cybermen isn’t anything close to threatening as it was in my
imagination or, indeed, the script). You also have to question the wisdom of an
archaeological team so thick that they’re shocked to find a tomb filled with
deadly Cybermen who were thought to be a ‘myth’...despite coming across dead
bodies beneath a wall with a whacking great big cyber-logo on it (bit of a clue
there, boys. Even the similar archaeological team in ‘Silence In The Library’ – who ate chicken
bones in a quarantined space where they’re worried about germs – weren’t this
thick. And forget the logic problems testing intelligence: if anyone is stupid
enough to open a tomb with this many clues around the outside they deserve to
be cyber-converted. There’s a massive plothole all round, too, that The Cybermen
need these Humans alive to convert them and start up their glorious army again
– yet most of their puzzles are deadly and without The Doctor there they’d
surely all be dead (remember this is a race that’s supposedly our twins from a
sister planet; they know humanity’s weaknesses better than most because they
used to be the same themselves). Not to mention the whacking great clue with
the electrified doors and the piles of bodies piling up (I wouldn’t go in after
finding those on the doorstep and most archeologists probably wouldn’t either).One
thing that’s always bothered me too: if no one has been in this tomb since the
Cybermen defrosted themselves, who drew the map that led Parry to Telos in the
first place and how did it get to (presumably) Earth for him to see it? We
really need a prequel to this story. Yep, another one. The sad truth has to be
said too: this was a much better story in our imagination, with only that weird
spooky soundtrack to go on, than the often hurried unrehearsed mess we got on
screen. Some of the acting in this story really is pretty dreadful too – the
only people taking this story seriously are the regulars and Kilgarriff. Which
is odd sandwiched in between two stories where the acting makes a couple of
strong stories so much better just by the sheer power of everyone’s
performances. You can tell that, for quite a few people working on this story,
this is the end of a mighty busy year and they’re all exhausted (it’s a bit odd
that 1960s policy of keeping stories left over from previous years in case ‘something
happens’, especially at a time when Dr Who’s position in the T charts was
precarious and it might have been axed at any time without warning).
However there’s also no
denying the TV archaeologists struck gold when they discovered this story
sitting unloved in a Hong Kong TV vault – not that the Cybermen would have
appreciated that analogy of course (one of the reasons they’re such a threat in
this story is that they’re unstoppable. I never understood why their allergy to
gold got added in later anyway, it’s not as if they’re vampires). This is still
unquestionably a brilliant story that delivers all the scares, thrills,
imagination and morals that Dr Who does at its best, even if it’s one of those
brilliant stories that’s brilliant despite its flaws. Certainly everyone loved
it at the time. Sydney Newman, who’d been low-key horrified at how his original
concept for Dr Who had been altered, actually rang up the production team to
tell Bryant ‘well done’ after episode one, while the story as a whole was
praised to the hilt at the next BBC review production meeting, singled out for
special praise by both Hughie Green and Huw Wheldon (this is more or less the
last goodwill BBC bosses ever have for the series). Of course not everyone
loved it, with Dr Who in general and this story in particular being picked as
the subject of the first ever edition of ‘Talkback’, a sort of ‘Points Of View’
programme hosted by David Coleman. The subject matter ‘is Dr Who too scary?’ –
something that had been muttered since ‘The
Daleks’ but starts to become a real ‘thing’ from here on in - saw poor Kit
Pedler get the short straw, picked to defend his views that children like being
scared in fantasy settings when they have their family at hand and that fairy
stories have been scaring children for longer than television has been around
(the rest got away with it, with Davies and Lloyd having just left the show and
Bryant and Pemberton considered ‘too new’ to be sent into the lion’s den. Sadly
since wiped, it sounds like Pedler held his own despite a very one-sided panel.
Mary Whitehouse will pick this theme of Dr Who scaring children as her own
personal crusade from this moment on, much to most late 1970s’ fans chagrin).
So everyone was talking about Dr Who again in September 1967 and even a lot of
people who didn’t sit down to watch this story caught bits of it. For Dr Who
fans this discovery of a story so many people remembered and loved was on a par
with Tutankhamen’s tomb (and not every discovery in that tomb was a ‘treasure’
either), a moment when everyone remembered where they were when they heard the
news, a bit of magic from that day still lingering every time we look at our
DVD shelves and collectively go ‘wow – that really happened, this story really
does exist’. Is it as great as we hoped? No. Do we love it anyway? Of course we
do. Just as Tutankhamen’s tomb made him the most recognised and well known
Pharaoh in death when he wasn’t in life, so ‘Tomb’ was the only story from the
ever-popular season five discovered complete for another decade and there are times
– even long stretches – when its every bit as fabulous as people always said it
was.
Oh and one last bit of
trivia: to all fans of ‘Box Of Delights’, the 1980s BBc extravaganza that
starred Patrick Troughton as an impossibly old magical pagan punch and judy man
with special powers (typecasting at its best), complete with a Roger Limb soundtrack
and lots of friends from 1980s Who, this is the only time Troughton ever shared
lines with a co-star from that series in Dr Who. One of the Cybermen is Charles
Pemberton, then just starting his career, who will go on to play the police
inspector who tells young Kay Harker to ‘eat your bullseyes lad’. Note too that
Klieg refers to ‘Whitehead logic’ at one point – this is an injoke tribute to
the one extra who’d been in all three Cyber stories so far and was quite ‘protective’
of his monsters, Reg Whitehead.
POSITIVES + The Cybermen
logo appears on everything: every wall, every ice-tomb. You suspect that in the
Cyber-bathroom off-shot it’s on the cyber-toothpaste and cyber-toilet rolls
too. What should be silly (I mean, what dying race takes precious time
inventing a personalised stencil and adding it to all the walls – especially if
they’re trying to keep what’s inside the tombs a secret to lure people in?) is
one of this story’s strengths simply because it looks so good, the silhouette
logo of a cyber head one of the best and most striking images in the whole of
the series. It makes sense too, fitting the hieroglyphic-logo ‘vibe’ of the
story and being very cyber-friendly, providing information descriptively
without the emotion or depth of words. There was a time, following 1992, when
it was printed on everything connected with Dr Who - and rightly so. I’m amazed
new-Who hasn’t brought it back so far, especially with an ‘updated’ version of
how the Cybermen look now.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Very much ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’
where the 6th Doctor returns to Telos in the distant past and meets
their pals The Cryons.
One story that’s as obvious as sequels get is
‘Return To Telos’ (2015), part of Big Finish’s ‘4th Doctor’s fourth
series. The plot follows on from the cliffhanger of the previous story ‘The
Fate Of Krelos’ when the Cybermen have possessed K9 by placing a cybermat in
his brain and made him pilot the Tardis to Telos seeking revenge! Frazer Hines
re-appears as Jamie (and does a rather nifty Troughton impression!) while
Bernard Holley slips back into the role of Haydon after forty-two years (sadly
we never go ‘upstairs’ so we don’t see Kaftan, Klieg or Victoria). It is of course a trap to bring The Doctor to the
home of The Cyberman’s army at its peak, only The Doctor manages to manipulate
the Tardis to crash-land instead when the army is asleep; in fact the very same
day he woke them up! Apparently the tombs on Telos have a ‘back door’ that the
2nd Doctor never noticed. Leela is right at home fighting a scary
army of silver giants and Louise Jameson has fun pairing Leela off against
Frazer’s Jamie (both are loyal and brave and often wrongly considered stupid
rather than just inexperienced); it’s the fourth Doctor who doesn’t quite fit
in this world, his flippancy somehow undercutting the threat rather than adding
to it as with his own stories. It seems very odd, too, that Jamie never goes
back to the 2nd Doctor and mentions ‘here, you’ll never guess who I
just met - you look good in a scarf you do!’ The overall feel is of a clever
idea with lots of things going for it that somehow comes off as a bit
pointless, never really finding its own identity beyond simply being nostalgia.
Still kind of worth it for hearing Tom Baker, Louise Jameson and Frazer Hines
in the same room all at the same time, though.
Not to be outdone Colin Baker had his own adventure
‘Last Of The Cybermen’ (2015), number #199 in Big Finish’s main range, in which
he meets Jamie again too alongside Zoe. Ten years on from ‘Tomb’ and Telos has
fallen silent once more. However The Cybermen left a calling card at the edge
of the galaxy: a giant sculpture of a cyber-head much like the Telos tomb logo.
The second Doctor has left Jamie and Zoe while he goes to investigate it –
they’re pleased to see him return, only to see him replaced by the 6th Doctor
in a flash of light (something that happens a lot to poor Sixie in these audio
adventures!) It’s a sweet reunion until Zoe gets kidnapped by a half-man
half-Cyberman convert although even he turns out to be rather nice, aware of
what’s happened to him and trying to stop the conversion. Zoe ends up tagging
along with an archaeological party while the Doctor and Jamie end up captured
by the real Cybermen, a hidden group who escaped before the tomb was sealed and
have been living in the wilds for a decade. Colin and Frazer have great fun
reacquainting their friendship from ‘The
Two Doctors’ whilst Jamie is quite genuinely scared
to be back on Telos again, with an insightful peek behind his usual brave
façade, while Zoe gets a nice lot to do too – her logic is perfect for
exploring the Cyber tombs, with lots of room in the script for her worries
about her own upbringing on the space wheel and how it makes her think like a
Cyberman. Unlike the other stories in this section this also works as a great
story in its own right though: The Cybermen are as wild and desperate as
logical emotionless beings can be and feel like a real threat across this story
now their great masterplan has been foiled, while the people we meet
mid-conversion, faced with the horror of what they’re becoming, works so much better
than all the times they tried this afterwards on telly. The trio sound great
together too, with a really poignant goodbye when Sixie senses he’s about to
change back and knows his friends will lose their memory of him but that he in
turn will never ever forget them, no matter how many regenerations he lives
through. One of the better Big Finish stories around.
Previous ‘The
Evil Of The Daleks’ next ‘The
Abominable Snowman’
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