The Edge Of Destruction: Ranking - 14

 

The Edge Of Destruction

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Susan, 8-15/2/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor and writer: David Whittaker, director: Mervyn Pinfield)

Rank: 14

 'Hello Doctor, Idris here, loading a critical error report for you. Not that you'll ever get this of course, given that you threw my manual into a supernova and never took the time to learn how to read my binary Tardis code but that's your lookout not mine. I have tried to warn you, repeatedly, but your head just doesn’t think in enough dimensions  to get through to you. I thought I had got through to Susan for a while as her telepathic circuits are stronger than yours, but when I told her to ‘cut it out’ she just picked up a pair of scissors instead. I also wrote 'oi Doctor, get your screwdriver out - and not the sonic one' on the bathroom wall but you didn't go in there till afterwards, so waste of my circuitry that was wasn't it?!

 

A few observations: you dummy! I know we haven't been travelling together very long but you ought to by now that I always get you where you need to go better than you can get there yourself. And what's with all the rush of a fast return switch? I thought we were out to explore the universe together, leisurely, righting wrongs, doing good deeds? I've not seen you do any good things lately. I really had high hopes when I stole you and we ran away, that we were on the same wavelength, but apparently not. You still have a lot of promise though. Even now, after you've nearly blown us all up to kingdom come, I remember why I chose you. I see that same curiosity, same sense of adventure, the same drive to see the stars up close, the same feeling that there's more to life than this. I see it in your travelling companions too in their own way. You're really not that different you know, you should give them a break. After all, kidnapping them never went as smoothly as when I kidnapped you.  

 

I think I ought to let you all cool down a bit though and I need to as well, so I'm going to take you to Ancient China in the snow and then turn myself off for a bit. I'll be back though. Or is that forward? I never did get the hang of tenses. We're a team now though right? We trust each other? Indestructible even on the edge of destruction.  Just don't do anything like that with switches again ok? I’ll take the lead from now on, just leave the destinations up to me. Oh and another thing; stop eating fish fingers and custard in bed - the crumbs get everywhere and they're ever  so itchy! Yours till the next crisis, Idris'.

Or ‘four characters in search of an exit’, in a machine that’s as ‘way out’ as they come. If ever there was a Dr Who story that was misunderstood and unloved then it’s this one. I see it languishing at the bottom of people’s lists as fans dismiss it as being stagey, low budget and the one story that doesn’t have any monsters...or extra characters...or a plot. It’s a murder mystery without a murder, a Whoddinit that leaves Who as confused as to what’s going on as everyone else and which starts with possibilities that could involve all of time and space and ends up with a cause as prosaic and down to Earth as solutions come. This story is so surreal that, famously, when it was given its first ever repeat on British television as part of a truly glorious BSB themed weekend in 1990 (the satellite rivals to Sky television back then; so many of the stories shown back then that I got to see for the first time are in my top 100) they accidentally showed the two episodes the wrong way round and hardly anybody noticed. A lot of people don’t get this story I know – they like their Dr Who to be straightforward and action based, full of running around rather than bizarre, static and talky. But I love the stories that stretch Dr Who’s elastic format to breaking point and deliver stories that no other series could possibly make – and few stories are as unique or as original as ‘The Edge Of Destruction’. Where everyone else sees problems I only see the brilliant solution, where other people see a blank slate I see one of the most imaginative and creative minds that TV ever saw working over time, where other people see a copout ending I see the perfect resolution for a series that’s always been the very British sense of the ordinary becoming extraordinary (and vice versa) where other people see no other people except the Dr, Ian, Barbara and Susan, a single (Tardis interior) set and emptiness all round I see magic. 

The reason this story turned out the way it did owes much to the strange and complex way television was being made by the BBC in 1964. Few people working on Dr Who in its very earliest days knew if it would be a success or not and there needed to be a get-out clause to end the series if they decided it wasn’t holding the viewers’ interest and they would need to make something else. While head of drama Sydney Newman was an enthusiastic supported of the series he’d created BBC controller Donald Baverstock still wasn’t convinced by what he’d seen of the series (mostly in script form at this point in time). Because of the way schedules were run the re-think had to come at the 13 week mark (because it was a quarter of the year and therefore easier for TV schedulers to pad out the skipped weeks with other programmes). And because of various scripts falling through, many of them at the absolute last minute, so far the only stories they’d been able to make on Dr Who were a four parter and a seven parter, which left a slot of two episodes to be filled that none of the commissioned scripts fitted without a lot of hacking. As things turn out the success of that seven-parter (‘The Daleks’) will make this whole scheme null and void and Dr Who will be confirmed for another 13 weeks even before this story is in the studio, by which time six months in Dr Who is so successful that it will run for a full twenty-one years unstopped, but paperwork and bureaucracy always take a long time to catch up with fast-moving turns of events and the production team didn’t know that yet. What the production team needed was a story that filled an impossible brief –one that could potentially be written to end the series, or enable it to carry on, that had no actors other than the regular cast (because it was too late to hire anyone else – luckily the main four were all still under contract whatever story got made) and with no other sets except the Tardis (because there was no time to build anything and that one was in storage), to be delivered preferably yesterday or sooner. Baverstock wasn’t too happy about Terry Nation’s scripts for ‘The Daleks’ and in a memo suggested ‘a move towards drama arising from the differences in experience and knowledge of the travellers’ – not exactly an order but something to bear in mind when pleasing the boss. Oh and because ‘The Daleks’ had gone slightly over budget and preliminary costs on next story ‘Marco Polo’ suggested that one was going to go way over budget preferably it had to be dirt cheap, low on effects and costumes (indeed, at a few pounds either side of £1500, in a series that cost £2500 on average, this is surely the cheapest Dr Who story ever made in all of its sixty year run, even accounting for inflation). No pressure then. 

 The job naturally fell to original Dr Who script editor David Whittaker, who probably felt as if he needed a time machine himself right then...which got him thinking. Of all the ideas that caught his eye during the making of the pilot (an episode he had a big hand in, whatever the credits say) the one that most fed into his imagination was the time machine created by his all-too-brief predecessor C E Webber, the ordinary police telephone box that could do the extraordinary and go anywhere in time and space. He hadn’t had a chance to fully explore it yet, what with the hurry to get our heroes into the heart of the action, and so far it had been ambiguous what exactly it was: a simple vehicle? Or something more alien and mysterious? There’s a line in the first episode where Ian exclaims ‘it’s alive!’ and the Doctor neither confirms or denies, but here you learn that it is, ‘not like you and I’ perhaps but as a machine – and as a machine created by an impossibly advanced and technological race (who haven’t been named as timelords yet) it would have to be a very advanced machine. Whittaker said that he was thinking of a ‘haunted house’ when he wrote this story, but on the grand scale of the Tardis with its infinite interiors so that the scares would be even bigger, leaving the regulars trapped and at its mercy with no way to escape it without tumbling into space. However more than that, though, what many fans miss is that this story is a car crash – that’s not a description of how it’s made, that’s what it is. Only the ‘car’ is a time-space machine and what it’s crashing into is no less than (spoilers) the creation of the universe and as much as the Doctor likes to think he’s the pilot it happens to be a self-driving car a good half century before they became a thing. As with many car crashes the passengers are delirious and concussed and not quite sure what reality is when they come round and at one point Susan even clutches her neck and screams as if she’s got whiplash. No wonder, really, with an impact this hard: this is the big bang after all –it creates a big crash. The accident though, like so many, is the blame of driver error. 

 This was a series set up from the first so that either Ian (a teacher of science) or Barbara (a teacher of history) would have enough knowledge to bring the viewer up to speed a little, while the Doctor knew everything, but here, in the first of a sadly all too small pile of ‘sideways in time’ stories, even the Doctor hasn’t got a clue what’s going on and we discover that the Tardis holds secrets even he hasn’t discovered yet. Whitaker came up with the idea, sadly ignored by the vast majority of writers who came after him, that the Tardis was sentient, a machine capable of thinking and feeling, but without the ability to communicate directly. We’d already seen that the Dr was hopeless at piloting it and didn’t really know how it worked (we’ll find out in another five years that it’s all because he ‘stole’ it and in another ten that he never bothered to read the manual, but for now the series is ambiguous enough that he could have built it with alien technology, or that the Doctor himself made it in a junkyard out of spare parts without understanding how they worked); what, then, if the Doctor got something wrong and ‘broke’ it, but that the machine itself was clever enough to understand the damage and needed to warn everybody about it? It’s a revolutionary idea: nothing else like The Tardis exists anywhere in fiction and yet everything we see it do here is fully in keeping with what we learn about it before and since. This is also clearly more than a car; the Tardis is more like a guardian angel, getting the Dr to where he needs to go – although it’s still enough like a car in that it appears to have broken down; it isn’t responding and is acting weird to say the least (every time my computer does something similar I have visions in my head that maybe that’s gone sentient and is leaving me ‘clues’ to fix it too). This was an era when spaceships either landed or crashed, they didn’t think. The only computers inside them dealt with numbers, they didn’t think for themselves or give instructions or interact with you like a smartphone does now. That idea is extraordinary, giving an extra dimension to a vehicle that already travels in five. The Tardis is more than just a spaceship in this series. It’s a main character. So many writers forget that in their haste to get from here to there, but in Dr Who even the journey between worlds is exciting. 

 A quick side note: for its first twenty-five stories Dr Who adventures had no official overall title on screen, just episode titles every week. The writers did sometimes add one to the paperwork purely for the production team to know which story they were working on although some writers simply stuck with the production codes that, pre-Tom Baker, went from A to Z, then AA to ZZ, then AAA to ZZZ which is ‘Planet Of The Spiders’). The first people to go back and give these stories ‘official’ titles were the Radio Times in their tenth anniversary supplement in 1973 and they often went with the titles of the first episode. Peter Haining, the first real Who biographer, sometimes agreed and sometimes rejected these in his 1983 book ‘A Celebration’. And sometimes the BBC ignored both when releasing these stories on video in the 1990s. This story is one of those known by three titles and fans still argue which one is the ‘right’ one (though actually none of them are because it was never designed to have an overall title!): ‘Inside The Spaceship’ is what the inter-documents call it, but I think people miss that Whittaker was being ironic here. The Tardis has never been less like a mere ‘spaceship’‘ than here. I still call this story ‘Edge Of Destruction’ after the first episode, partly because that’s what it was called on video (then DVD and Blu-ray and now i-player) which is where most people first see it and partly because it’s such a strong, descriptive title; ‘Beyond The Sun’ is actually a title for a story that was intended for this slot before the 13-week rule meant it was dropped and about a doppelganger planet to Earth hidden behind the sun and invisible to us (a plot that finally makes it to screen as ‘The Tenth Planet. Apparently by coincidence given that the only person still around by 1966 is William Hartnell and he would never have seen a script); however a mistake in BBC paperwork meant that was the name used for this story when it was sold to some countries overseas before someone spotted the mistake. It really does feel as if it fits though, so I can see where the mistake was made. 

 Even more than getting the chance to explore the Tardis, though, Whittaker gets the chance to explore the four characters at the heart of the show and go back over everything they’ve learned in their early days together. In this era the Dr is still incredibly shifty, alien and unknowable, deeply suspicious of human schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, who in turn find him unapproachable and dangerous with Susan stuck in the middle, alien too yet sympathetic to her teachers’ needs. Whittaker figured that if there was going to be an ending to the series it needed to be not from some monster but by the characters coming to blows, releasing all that tension that had built up between them after two stories where the Doctor had nearly got them all killed twice. Alternatively if the series was going to continue then it couldn’t go on like this with people at each other’s throats every week – there needed to be something to clear the air and give the quartet a greater feeling of trust and understanding, of a team who want to save each other’s lives every week (you only need look at Tegan’s continual bitching in the 5th Dr era to see what might have happened with whole series of this for twenty-six years). So we have four people who don’t trust each other, all blaming each other for something they didn’t do. 

 From the Doctor’s perspective the only thing he thinks of that can make the Tardis go wrong is sabotage and he blames the teachers straight away, going to the length of knocking them out with a home-made drink and threatening to kick them off the ship into the vastness of space. From Ian and Barbara’s point of view the increasingly erratic Doctor has finally cracked after a blow to the head and they feel in more danger than they even did from the Daleks, with nowhere to run. And Susan? She’s partly telepathic, so the Tardis tries to talk to her and accidentally sends her mad for real, to the point where she starts threatening the others with a pair of scissors and having what appears to be a nervous breakdown. And from the Tardis’ perspective its been trying to warn everyone the only way it knows how, with a series of increasingly surreal clues warning about its immediate demise (it helps if you think of it as a computer sticking up a warning code that makes no sense – which has happened to me three times now while writing these reviews and I’m sure many more by the end – only of course at the time this story was written laptops were technology as unlikely and science-fiction as the Tardis itself). Those bizarre clues in full: a series of images played on the scanner going in reverse, back through seen adventures on Skaro and Earth and a handful of gloriously enticing adventures from before we met the Dr (I’m still waiting for a return visit to Quinnis on TV, with its scary sounding animals and impossibly tall trees, though there is one on audio) that ends in a blinding flash of white light. Throw in the Tardis doors opening into a white void, a clock in the Tardis (that we never see again) with a melted face (what good even is a clock in a time machine and what time is set to?!! It’s a shame the melted clock prop isn’t clearer too given how much of the script relies on it (a close-up of it looking normal would have helped), a food machine that registers empty when it’s full and the Tardis electrifying all controls except for the panel with the switch needed to put things right (so that Ian is knocked unconscious in the cliffhanger); it’s no wonder everyone is as confused as we ever see anybody in this series. But what else can it do? As the Doctor explains at the end nothing is broken so the Tardis can’t tell anyone about a fault – it can only warn that, if kept on its present course corrected, it will be destroyed. 

 For a time the story flirts with the idea of something ‘without’ having got ‘in’ and hiding in the ship (an idea sort-of-but-not-quite returned to in ‘Journey At The Centre Of The Tardis’ fifty odd years later) but no: the answer is (mega huge spoilers): something as simple and mundane as a stuck spring. The Doctorr is still trying to return Ian and Barbara to London in 1963 and so, having been in the far future on Skaro, hits the fast return switch, only the switch gets stuck in place and sends them all hurtling back towards the big bang, where they’re about to face certain death in an explosion (there’s a nice bit of explanation about the mechanics of this, a hangover from the days when Dr Who was primarily an ‘educational’ series teaching us about such things as radiation condensation and how cavemen live – and again kudos to Whittaker for fitting this into his brief alongside everything else). Most fans buy that the Tardis has a ‘fast return switch’ and even more so that its broken down. But why does it have the words ‘fast return switch’ written in black felt tip in a clearly human hand, ask every fan who think this bit stupid? (It is, in all likelihood, a mistake: Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford as Susan both liked scribbling notes on the control panel prop in rehearsal so they knew which buttons to press – this might be one that was somehow missed, though it could just be a deliberate but really low budget effect). Well, my theory is it’s that this is the part of the Tardis that was in for repairs when the Dr stole it, perhaps the faulty part that got it decommissioned and it doesn’t have the proper symbols by it because the repairers hadn’t put the label back on yet (maybe the Dr added the note himself when he first stole the Tardis – and maybe the Tardis translator circuits changed it to English in the hope that Ian or Barbara would notice and do something about it). Many fans find this solution a let down, but for me it’s the perfect resolution, in the exact halfway point between the Tardis being like every other machine (that breaks down at the worst possible moment) and an impossible magical box that doesn’t conform to any known rules (because it has the ability to tell you about it when it does). The magic of the ship is preserved; it’s people who are fallible. How very Dr Who, even in the days before it properly was Dr Who. 

 The regulars spend most of this story wondering what’s put them in danger but the great twist (lost on viewers who’ve come to this series since 1964 and now what the Tardis really is) is that the real suspect is…the ship itself. Honestly this idea doesn’t get enough credit: nobody but nobody was thinking of these terms back then, in the scifi rush when spaceships were just metal objects that moved from A to B. We know now, of course, that it can’t be any of our heroes up to mischief and that the Tardis is strong enough to stop anything getting inside it up to and including The Master (eventually, sort of). But we didn’t know any of that in 1964. Even watching this for the first time in 1990 the ending was impossible to guess (even more so when they put in on the flipping wrong way round). As much as this story comes out of left field, too, it ‘fits’ with the first two stories we’ve seen on screen, set in the past and the future, where the plots have also revolved around communication and trust. The Tardis takes off in ‘An Unearthly Child’ precisely because the Doctor can’t trust Ian and Barbara to keep quiet about it, later in that same story the Tribe of Gum are at war with others because they don’t trust them and even more wary of the strangely dressed travellers of the future who drop in and say hello, while the Daleks and the Thals are at war because they hate each other and have stopped talking to each other. Everyone is divided into tribes of their own and so far the four regulars have been like that too (even Ian and Barbara have their disagreements, while Susan is struggling to find her independence away from her grandfather). Yet only by coming together in this story of finding away past their irreconcilable differences, do the four regulars survive, an important lesson they’ll need to survive what this series throws at them from now on. The Tardis is as unknowable and alien to them as they were to the cavemen and Daleks or Thals and was just working in a different method of communication without words: refreshingly there is no ‘baddy’ in this story, just different things working in different ways, something I wish other Dr Who stories would do more of. 

 Had this been the end of the series it would have been as good a way to end as any, with our four travellers only finding out too late that they should have trusted each other from the start and they’d have all been a lot happier – the lesson they learned from their first two adventures writ large. Had everyone perished in a white void at the beginning of time, lessons unlearned, it would have been a highly memorable end and a fitting one for a series that, even as early as story three, seems to exist by a form of karma, of punishing evil and rewarding good. Thankfully, of course, the series got a Dalek-shaped reprieve and instead we get a happier ending and a much happier, cosier Tardis crew from here on. There’s no single theme in a series as big and wide as Dr Who but if there is then it must be prejudice, of the value of judging other people by your standards instead of taking them at their own, and that’s a lesson at the heart of this story. This would be a very different series without this story at the heart of its early years. 

 Nobody changes more than the Doctor, who learns to open his heart(s) to aliens and become more the heroic, do-gooder we come to know and love, starting with the moment he apologises to Ian and Barbara at story’s end for ever doubting them. He’s hugely effected by this story, far more so than any where he’s being shot at, because it challenges his belief that he’s the smartest, most capable person in the room. We know from later stories how much he hates following instructions, although you have to wonder what on Earth would be in the manual for a situation like this anyway (‘Have you tried switching it off and on again?’ won’t cover it when you’re in a time machine hurtling back to the dawn of creation. Maybe ‘if you are electrocuted but not killed, merely stunned, go to page 23756585675: look what buttons you were near when you were knocked unconscious for some clues. Maybe ring our customer support line available Monday-Friday because all time is relative. Only hurry, you probably won’t have much time’ or ‘If you see a melted clock face then you’re in big trouble. Notice; Travelling too close to the Big Bang may make the 5000 year guarantee on this model null and void’). It hurts his pride hugely that he’s been outsmarted by a mere human and yet, once that lesson is learned, he’s never the same again. From now on (a brief lapse back into grumpiness in ‘Marco Polo’ aside, a story written before ‘Edge’) he’s going to be much more the hero we come to know and love. 

 It’s a terrific story for Barbara, who comes at the story from a slightly different angle to the others, her imagination allowing her to work out that the Tardis is communicating in a bizarre way (the series never really explored the tension between Ian as a science teacher and her as a humanities/history teacher, but it’s there in ‘An Unearthly Child’ that David Whittaker kinda sorta wrote too). She’s the one who works everything out intuitively, seeing patterns where the others can’t. This story changes Barbara too: so far she’s been the calm level-headed rational one, emotional ony when being protective of Ian or Susan, but here she roars back at the Doctor and his accusations, standing up to him in a way very few companions ever do (Steven in ‘The Massacre’, Jamie in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, Rose in ‘Dalek’ and Amy in ‘Amy’s Choice’ all seem to give the Doctor uneasy flashbacks to this moment of being wrong and callous). As for Ian, he’s been the action hero in this series who does all the big physical roles – he was, for many TV viewers, the action hero of all time after William Russell’s swashbuckling performance as the title character in ‘The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot’, a series so successful all sorts of later ones copied it and if you were sit down to watch a drama in late 1963 odds are 75% of them would have action scenes like this one (while the others are sleepy police dramas or kitchen sink soaps). To date Ian’s learnt to fight his way out of any situation, even getting the Thals to fight with him against the Daleks. But just to underline how different Dr Who is from anything else on television the action he takes in this story is out of place – he tries to strangle both the Dr and Barbara at different points because, while delirious, he thinks he’s saving them from the electrocution that hurt him and it’s the only physical thing he can do. But you can’t fight a machine, it won’t work (believe me, I’ve tried). And then there’s Susan, the timid scaredy cat teenager whose usually our semi-identification representative, suddenly back to being the impossible and unknowable alien of the first episode again. The scene where our big hearted little Susan becomes untrusting and paranoid, stabbing out at her Tardis bed with a pair of scissors, is gloriously alien and strange (many fans have read the idea of Susan ‘rejecting’ the domestic world and a mother figure symbolised by the scissors and Barbara, but honestly it’s just there because it’s the closest to as weapon in the whole ship she can hold and something natural for Barbara to have lying around as she tries to make the Tardis into a home away from home and make dresses; even so it’s very Dr Who to have something so ordinary become so extraordinarily threatening. The scissors scene brought Dr Who its first complaints that children might copy it and hurt themselves – a sheepish Verity Lambert, producer of season one, agreed which is why nothing like it ever happens again). 

 This story would fall apart were it not for the performances by the regulars and they’re all superb in this one, each one taking it in turns to go from being gloriously normal to acting way against type. Carole Ann Ford, especially, never gets to be this good or this complicated again, while William Hartnell’s near-closing speech as he works out what’s happened and talks to himself in a dark and eerie Tardis heading into destruction is glorious (as much as everyone laughs at his ‘Billy fluffs’ he nails 99% of his lines in this story and thanks to there only being four characters he gets more lines in this story than any Doctor ever does inside 50minutes until Peter Capaldi’s solo performance in ‘Heaven Sent’, a story recorded over several days; this entire story was recorded in just two, a week apart). Hartnell is said to have hated this script purely because of all the lines he had to learn at a time when his arteriosclerosis was beginning to slow him down and he was beginning to find it hard to concentrate (he does, indeed, mess up more lines than usual – watch out for William Russell feeding him back in over and over in episode one). It really is extraordinary, though, that more doesn’t go wrong: there’s just one edit in episode one and two in episode two, otherwise everything is done as-live. Of all the Dr Whos in sixty years this is the one most like a stage play and it has a subtly different feel to the usual story even in this early era: the camera is mostly static with people talking to ‘the audience’ as they mutter to themselves. Some fans hate it (there really isn’t any running around corridors, not least because there’s only one set and even the Tardis isn’t that big - yet) but I really love the different feel to this story which feels as if its ‘really’ happening in front of you, interactively, rather than merely actors delivering a script. Even the music isn’t added in post production but played in during the live action (which is also why the grams operator comes in a shade too early with the warning sound effect – the only real mistake the whole piece). To save on budget again the soundtrack all comes from the BBC library for the first time, but it’s very carefully chosen and a lot of the names used here become big later in their careers: British jazz violinist Eric Siday, Scottish composer Buxton Orr known for his film scores and most controversially if aptly of all Desmond Leslie, an Irish composer who all but trained his career in 1953 by coming out and talking about seeing ufos for real during his days as an RAF pilot (his book, ‘The Flying Saucers Have Landed’, is one of the earliest books ever written about the subject and still one of the best).

 We learn a lot about the Tardis too and see lots of nooks and crannies we’ve never seen before (and which I wish we could have seen again, but there simply wasn’t room to have these sets up when there was an alien world crammed next to them). These details help explain a lot of things the audience at home would have been asking by now (where do the Tardis crew eat and sleep?) and make life on board seem more believable. Whittaker is an expert at using food to convey ordinary life going on in extraordinary circumstances and invents the food dispenser. To modern eyes it’s just a vending machine crossed with a jukebox but back in 1964, when you couldn’t get food out of machines like this, it must have been as scifi as anything seen in the series. The beds are gracefully space-age (if slim) and look like the sort of impossibly modern technological houses being shown in America as ‘the future’, which stick out of the side of the wall (as seen in many a film, The Marx Brothers’ ‘The Big Store’ being the best). The ‘fault locator’ panel is a whole corridor of lights and switches that makes the Tardis feel ever more like a computer, although this was scripted to be in a basement, with added spookiness by the fact that the Tardis had turned the lights out (to emphasise the fact that there was nothing of value down there to find. Another cut scene had Barbara looking for clues in the Tardis library come laboratory, getting pelted with books to make her leave). Even something as mundane as a bandage is magical in Whittaker’s hands, a strip of lights that change colour as the wearer heals himself (a neat mirror to the main plot of movement of time and cleverly done so that, every time there’s an edit, a costume dresser changes it without anyone commenting on it). At the end we even see the results of the Tardis wardrobe. Most interesting of all perhaps is the detail of the central column and what powers the Tardis: we don’t hear anything about the eye of harmony or Rassillon harnessing the power of a dark star just yet, but we do hear how incredibly powerful it is and how everyone will be ‘blown to atoms in an instant’ if something escapes from it (a plot point finally made good a full forty-two years later when Rose looks into it and becomes ‘Bad Wolf’). By the time peace is restored, the mood lighting goes back to normal and the Tardis reverts back to its original hum it feels like an old friend has been brought back to life (though at the same time finding out that our friend is even stranger and amazing than we realised). 

 Mostly, though, it’s not the ideas, not the acting, not even the set but the writing. David Whittaker is one of my favourite writers because the characters he writes for are always so believable and complex and none more so than the regulars, who are at risk of becoming ciphers in other writer’s hands but here feel so real you could touch them. He understands people and how they work and react to one another better than almost any other writer – and not just in Who either. ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ has almost nothing to go on and yet somehow conjures up a story that’s brilliantly imaginative, incredibly creative and utterly unique. The dialogue in this story is first class, yet subtly different for all concerned: The Doctor’s grumpy knowhow out of his depth, Susan meekly believing everyone until she doesn’t all her worst fears seemingly confirmed, Ian out of his depth and bewildered and Barbara desperately trying to hold herself together. They’re four distinct voices, each with their own views and their part to play in this story. They’re one of the strongest Tardis crews we ever had, partly because this story means we get to know them better than most. Every series of Dr Who needs a story like this in there somewhere, to get to know the characters more before they’re bounced from ne adventure into another. Without this story early on this series wouldn’t have lasted to the end of the year, but ‘Edge Of Destruction’ makes you care about these people and the power is so strong that even after they leave and are replaced and the Doctor regenerates you vary on caring because this story is so strongly built. We need this breather between worlds – without it Dr Who might still have been the best thing on TV, but with it Dr Who suddenly seems like the real-est thing on TV too, even nestled amongst drama and soaps that are going out of their way to seem real. 

 As much as this is a story created out of difficult circumstances, it was a very lucky accident: for Dr Who to run and run the way it did we needed to pause a moment and have a story that told us more about this impossible machine that travelled in time and space and made it seem ‘real’, we needed a story that allowed us to get to know these characters better without other worlds getting in the way and most of all we needed a story that tweaked the format just enough to make our heroes friends rather than enemies and the Doctor particularly a hero rather than a villain. Far from being on the ‘Edge Of Destruction’ this is a tale that made this show indestructible, for without this story filling in the cracks between the other better remembered and more in-yer-face tales of derring do the foundations behind the series might have come crumbling down long before the series got cancelled in 1989. Yes it’s a little bit stagey in places with no sets or monsters to break up the action (given that we only have one set and only so many angles, while this story was made in the days they only had the budget for one edit, roughly in the middle – you’ll see it in the Hartnell stories about halfway through an episode when everything fades to black – its amazing it isn’t stagier). Yes it’s all very talky (because there’s only four people to talk – plus a disembodied time travelling machine). Absolutely, it’s all very very weird. No I wouldn’t want to see a story like this every week. But as a breathing space, a chance to get to know these characters and even more so the impossible space-time travelling machine at the heart of the series (an invention utterly unlike anything else ever seen on TV), full of mystery and some of the most memorable, surreal scenes in all of the series? Where the person ‘whoddunit’ turns out not to be a person but the ‘weapon’ itself? Absolutely! This story is untouchable and full of all the magic that made these early stories so special and daring, without having to be diluted by any other plot or monsters or characters. It’s perhaps the most original story by perhaps Who’s most original writer, a masterful storyteller who knew exactly what he was doing, even when he was doing something that had never been done before and all the more amazing for being written to Dr Who’s lowest budget and on one of Dr Who’s tightest deadlines (just two days!) In many ways this series is never quite this brave ever again. And if it could make a story this good out of four people and a single set, what on Earth can it possibly give us next week? (Slightly more normal larks in ancient China as it happened but honestly, after this episode you could never accuse this show of being ‘always formulaic’ ever again). Superb and hugely under-rated, not every fan ‘gets’ this story and it’s a very divisive one in the fanbase at the top or bottom of people’s lists, but those of us that do ‘get’ it love it dearly. 

 POSITIVES + True of every Hartnell story but this seems the obvious place to put it: The Tardis set. With so much emphasis on the Daleks people forget what a masterpiece of set-building this is. Ironically it’s never ever as big as it is here in the 20th century run because they can actually afford to fill Lime Grove studio D with it this time, with no other worlds to visit (just a bit of snowfall for the ‘throw-forward in Ancient China at the end). It’s a triumph of design, looking both other-worldly and recognisable all at once, all too believable as an impossible machine from the future and yet one that looks utterly like any other spaceship set ever seen on TV. This is a place that looks as if Earthly rules no longer exist. I love everything about this early design: the roundels around the outside (such a timeless idea; they looked like the future in 1963 and still do a little today). The time rotor in the middle that goes up and down under its own steam, a little like an ordinary engine but in an extraordinary way. The fact that there are potentially endless rooms leading off from this main console room – we don’t get to see them of course, barring a hastily concocted bedroom for budget reasons, but it’s enough to know that they’re there. Even the Dr’s furniture is impressively hip and futuristic by 1963 standards with the incongruity of so many things that would normally be seen in a plush stately home draped around such a futuristic place. You so want to leap through the television screen and join in (after they sort out the big bang issue anyway). 

 NEGATIVES - You would have thought the big bang would be, well, bigger than this and that hydrogens and nitrogens whizzing into each other would be more colourful than just a white void. I know they were stuck for budget and props but a bright light we could actually see for real (and not just on a scanner) would have done it – as it is Barbara and Susan have to act as if they’re being blinded by what’s outside the Tardis doors even though we can’t see anything there, not even a spotlight. Lighting is going to be one of the things that it takes the longest to get right in Who - as late as the 1980s they’re still getting it very wrong – and this is one of the earliest examples of the lighting directors not quite thinking outside the box enough (although even then when the lighting dips and everyone becomes scared of their own shadows, while staring at shadows, is better done than on most stories). 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Inevitably Big Finish weren’t going to leave an adventure like the one seen on the Tardis scanner in this story untold and finally told it 46 years on! ‘Quinnis’, one of Susan’s entries in the long running Big Finish ‘Companion Chronicles’ series, finally told the story of the planet the 1st Doctor and his grand-daughter visited ‘four or five journeys back’ before arriving in Totter’s Lane in 1963 and ‘kidnapping’ Ian and Barbara, in the ‘fourth universe’ (whatever that means) ‘where we almost lost the Tardis’. This one has the feel of a historical, as the Doctor gets into trouble with a backwards local authority figure and Susan makes friends with a local teenager, only it’s set on an alien planet sometime in the future. Quinnis is experiencing a drought which the locals think is brought on by local monster The Shrazer (responsible for the ‘roar’ on the Tardis scanner) and the Doctor has to learn how to make it rain. Leaving Susan in the care of the villagers he notes on his return how badly she yearns to be with people her ‘own age’ (or at least the age she appears)and vows to give her some roots by enrolling her in a school at the very next place they land. Like many a Marc Platt story it’s high on atmosphere and great on continuity but also very complex and hard to follow in places. Still there are very few stories about what happened before the events of ‘An Unearthly Child’ and having the space to concentrate on just two characters means we really see the Doctor’s stormy but loving relationship with his grand-daughter without other distractions. Carole Ann Ford, too, is one of the best readers in these half spoken word, half dramatised accounts and does an excellent Hartnell impression as well as turning back the clock by doing a convincing Susan.

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