Marco Polo: Ranking - 52

 

Marco Polo

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 22/2/1964-4/4/1964,  producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: John Lucarotti, directors: Warris Hussein and John Crockett)

Rank: 52

      After playing Kublai Khan at backgammon the Doctor played chess with Alexander The Great, snakes and ladders with Cleopatra, Monopoly with Napoleon, Hungry Hippos with Caligula, Hide and Seek with Hannibal and his elephants and then played 'Guess Who?' with himself

 Marco...Polo!’ Time is a funny thing – as much as Dr Who historicals are ‘about’ the time period they’re set in, they also tell you a great deal about the time period they were being made in and the show’s changing audience and their changing expectations. Had this been the 1970s then a story like this would surely have been about how 13th century explorer Marco Polo was really an alien/robot/hybrid that single-handedly managed to stop an invasion. If it had been the late 1980s they would have been some sort of ancient God. Had it been the 2000s the Dr would have saved Marco personally and restored the timelines while getting his autograph and dropping heavy-handed hints about all the things he hasn’t had time to see yet. In the 2010s we’d have had the Dr telling us why Marco Polo was so important, before roping him into a plot where he or she ended up creating everything they’re remembered for while the hero was just along for the ride, with an epilogue about the importance of multiculturalism and appropriation just to rub it in. In 1996 the Doctor wouldn’t have had time for Marco, what with all that kissing. In the 2020s the Doctor would have been kissing Marco. If this was season 24 we’d have had an underwater hide and seek game of ‘Marco Polo’ between two differently coloured armies of Silurians and Sea Devils and a pool cleaning robot, with Bonnie Langford screaming Marco’s name in the cliffhanger sting (Marco would, of course, have been played by one of the Chuckle Brothers). Even later in the 1960s the story would have been more about the Doctor and companions being separated and having their own adventures in this time period and trying to get back to safety, possibly with another timelord having fun inventing the pogostick and giving it to Marco to accelerate the course of human history.

But this is still February 1964 and the fourth ever story. Dr Who is so new the paint hasn’t finished drying and the rules aren’t set yet on what this show can be. This is the first ever historical involving people who can actually string sentences together, and the rules haven’t been written yet – and indeed this story couldn’t be more different to ‘An Unearthly Child’ because everyone talks at length, fluently and poetically. This isn’t a story about one setting in one time but lots of them, a travelogue that takes us from one end of Asia to (near enough) the other, over the course of several days, meeting several different groups of people along the way. Even though it’s a story filled with much jeopardy there are no monsters as such, just differences of opinion (even the closest, the warlord Tegana, has a really good speech about how in a world where everyone is always prepared for war it’s only sensible to outwit them and be first). The Doctor and co don’t play a part in shaping history or making sure it travels on the train tracks set by history – instead, of all the Who historicals, this is the one that’s the most plausible, without any change to established history at all (just a bit of tweaking in the grey areas that might not have been written down: indeed the original draft ended with the Doctor accidentally walking off with Marco’s ‘lost’ diaries covering the events of the story and going ‘oops’ before unleashing a tirade when reading what Marco calls him – I really wish they’d kept it, as it’s so in keeping with the story!) It’s a story propelled not by the real historical events so much as the Tardis crew’s desperate need to win their time and spaceship back from Marco (who wants it not for some evil end but so he can present it as a gift to the mighty Kublai Khan and earn the right to go back home to Venice; he has after all saved the travellers’ lives and doesn’t quite understand that they can’t just make another one). It’s probably the only story where the characters from history are the driving force, not the regulars who are the passengers not the drivers (though ‘The Massacre’ has a claim to that too). Compared to pretty much all Dr Who stories that come after this one nobody learns anything in what will become in future the usual way of these sorts of stories (although there are a lot of little educational nuggets dropped in along the way) and nothing changes from the Tardis arriving to when it leaves – and yet that’s not quite true either, for everyone learns a lot about each other – and about themselves. ‘Marco Polo’ remains Who’s most travelogue of stories, one that’s about the surroundings and the characters more than the plot.  

   
For the one and only time, too, in the 20^th century the story is narrated not by the ‘Doctor’ or the neutral third person that happens to be choosing which events to ‘show’ us at home (the last time this happens until Rose starts babbling about her death in 2006) but Marco himself. Many of the words come from Marco’s actual memoirs (a 13th century bestseller still in print today!) lovingly recreated on screen and – unique to all of Who – there’s a map showing us just how far exactly we’ve come. Most Dr Who stories take place within a couple of hours, with some lasting overnight, but this one goes on for days and unfolds almost in real time across the seven weeks (episode two alone takes place across ten days), with the real speed of the travel by horse and yurta (a period caravan – there you are you see, you learn a lot from this story) worked out to be realistic. It’s quite the journey too, audaciously re-creating in a corner of the single cramped TV studio in Lime Grove some of the most amazing sights ever seen in the series, all different to the last: The Himalayas, the Gobi dessert, the creepy cave of 500 eyes, a bamboo forest and even Kublai Khan’s majestic palace (they can’t quite re-create the famous palace of opulence and 10,000 white stallions but they get a lot closer than any TV production with a BBC budget in 1964 really ought to).

‘Marco Polo’ is, on the one hand, an astonishing feat of plot engineering: the cast has to be small, the sets have to appear only one per episode (because that’s all they can fit in) with designer Barry Newbery cleverly re-using the same one, dressing it with drapes and curtains and pillars to hide doors and windows and it can’t deviate from details that, back in 1964, a sizeable chunk of the audience at home would have read (and, unlike the 1970s onwards, Dr Who would have been in trouble if it had contradicted). The costumes, by Daphne Dare, are beautiful, full of gorgeous detail and colour that seeps through the screen even in monochrome. They go to such lengths to make this world come to life that it even features real live horses and a monkey (not from stock footage either but really there: the monkey reportedly hated the cameras and became incontinent). The market stall we see beats anything we see in, say, The Rings Of Akhanaten’ despite being made on a budget so low the entire seven episodes wouldn’t pay for even a single set in the modern age. Yet you never feel as if this story is being manipulated or written to a formula: it unfolds naturally, at the speed it ought to and even the cliffhangers seem a natural progression to the story rather than the interruption they often seem like. Writer John Lucarotti was a friend of BBC drama head and show creator Sydney Newman’s (and the only person the ‘boss’ ever actively pushed on the production team) and a huge history buff who’d long been fascinated by the tales of Marco Polo since he was a boy (since reading the full book ‘The Description Of The World’). Lucarotti knew this world inside out, having written a full eighteen-episode re-enactment of the full diaries for Canadian radio in 1955 (sadly long since lost) and unlike some later Who writers who have to research at speed was happy to add period details he knew would be right. The writer was matched in his enthusiasm by William Hartnell (whose widow, Heather, claimed after his death had been his suggestion in the first place). The Dr Who version only features a fraction of the diaries, with Marco’s notes apparently lost for the years 1275-1292 (this story being set in 1289) but they fit historical fact very accurately: we know that Marco must have travelled to Lob Nor (where the Tardis lands) and on through the Gobi desert, arriving in Shang-Tu. We also know that he travelled with Tartar barons (we don’t know their names but ‘Tegana’ seems as good as any) and while Ping-Cho is pure fiction she is very similar to one of Marco’s jobs escorting Princess Kokachin, a teenager in an arranged diplomatic marriage on a long trek to marry the elder Ilkhan (ruler) of Persia a mere year before (close enough for recorded history to be ever so slightly wrong). And given that we don’t know the details, whose to say the Tardis wasn’t part of the journeys too? It’s not as if anyone would have written them down: Marco would have been concerned about a ‘flying caravan’ not being realistic and Kublai Khan doesn’t seem likely to have wanted it on record that he could be beaten at backgammon! Also, what with all the competing translations of Marco Polo’s diaries out there and confusion over which bits he actually wrote and what were edited out or added by someone else, whose to say this isn’t the truest account of how his journey went, in the same way that later Dr Who stories exploit real gaps in the history of Agatha Christie and Shakespeare? (an idea that, remember, is being invented for the first time here: there was no other series like DW that played around with history like this back in 1964). ‘Marco Polo’ seems the odd one out now as there’s no alien invasion, no scientific gobbledegook, nobody from the future trying to sell Kublai Khan a toaster, no sudden scifi moments of peril and the only thing that’s even remotely space-age is the Tardis – and for the vast majority of the story being separated from it is the entire plot (Marco, who thinks of the Tardis as magic, reckons it would make a fine gift for The Mighty Kublai Khan, who in another sign of how unusual this story is, doesn’t arrive till part six despite being the most famous ‘character’ in it). However it’s still very Dr Who, the past come to life in a way that for all we know might have really happened that way. 

It’s a clever angle on history to take too, putting the Doctor with another traveller far from home: the only thing really that’s known about the Doctor at this early stage is that he’s a ‘traveller’ who can’t go home (for reasons we won’t know until ‘The War Games’ in 1969), finding a temporary home in all the different places they travel through. Ian and Barbara, too, the audience identification members, are cut off from home and trying to get back to it,  the over-arching theme of Who’s early days the need to see them survive long enough to get home in one piece long enough to see London in 1963 again. Here Marco is in a similar position to both of them, earning a living travelling for the Khan as his envoy so successfully that his boss refused to let him stop and go home, leaving him a curious and adventurous traveller but one who, like the Doctor, also secretly yearsn to go home and stay put, without the dangers and obstacles of being always on the move. ‘Marco Polo’ ends up being  story about the perils of being cut off from home, possibly forever, with three different lots of motivations to get things sorted and get home in one piece going on at once and like many travellers facing adversity together it unites them to a degree despite the different centuries they come from (many viewers too will have recognised the Tardis’ malfunctions, losing heat and water, from travels in their car on holiday, although thankfully even the AA and RAC are easier to deal with than warlords out for sabotage). Of all the many Dr Who stories this is, you could say, the closest to Newman’s original vision for the series, as a place where the past could come alive and seem every bit as ‘real’ as the present. There are no sonic screwdrivers here, no bits of science masquerading as magic to get everyone out of trouble and absolutely no robot dog with blasters: every twist of the plot comes from real things that would have been in the environment for real. Most of all, though this story is educational in the sense that it’s about people, who never change despite the different costumes they wear and different surroundings they live in, with all of the people we meet united by a theme: wishing they were back home. Back in the days when nobody quite knew what Dr Who was ‘about’ yet the idea to make it about the one thing these   disparate characters have in common – a longing to be back home, something surely all the audience watching could identify with too – is a very clever idea that makes for lots of drama. Lucarotti was something of a traveller himself too, having moved from Canada (where he met Newman) to England and on to Majorca, which is where he got the commission (writing this story’s episode about the chilly desert nights in an environment about as opposite as you can get!) 

This is a story though that’s only really ‘about’ the Venetian explorer’s travels in the same way that previous story ‘Edge Of Destruction’ is ‘about’ the Tardis breaking down; really both stories are about the regulars and how they cope with being stranded in an adventure that doesn’t belong to them. It’s a story all about trust and having to put your life in the hands of strangers when you don’t have all the same information, of what lengths you would go to in order to survive and how long the veneer of civilisation lasts when confronted with disaster, of finding your way when the people you’re asking for directions might not have your best interests at heart (weirdly enough, then, it really is like the ‘Marco Polo’ game of calling games when blindfolded, a game that didn’t exist till 1965, a year after this story went out. A coincidence? Most likely, though I’d love to think that a nation’s schoolchildren picked up on the theme of missed communication in this story and re-enacted it on the playground). ‘Marco Polo’, originally intended as the third story of the first season, might well have inspired story editor David Whittaker to write his two part story in fact: both are very similar in all ways but the setting, about the culture shock of being stranded away from home in a place that doesn’t play by the same rules you’re used to. Both start with a mechanical breakdown and then move on to being about a communications breakdown, as people all have their own motivations, none of them necessarily bad but all of them confusing to 20^th or 21^st century eyes. Marco has been trusted by the Khan to keep Ping-Cho safe, but it’s for an arranged marriage neither she nor her husband wants – she’s a mixture of sorry and sad when she learns that her elderly suitor has killed himself rather than put her through the strain of appearances (and while they understandably don’t quite say ‘consummation of their marriage’ given this is a children’s programme on at Saturday teatime that’s clearly what they mean). Tegana has been hired to make sure Marco never makes it to Kublai Khan’s palace and has been trusted to make sure he doesn’t get there. Marco saves the Tardis crews’ lives on trust, despite his servant’s pleas that they are demons who should be killed on the spot, but makes them in turn promise that they won’t enter their ‘magic caravan’  thought to be the source of their magic powers and intends to give it to the Khan as a gift in return for his freedom. It’s all a bunch of misunderstandings: Marco would never understand what the Tardis really is even when everyone tries to tell him, he wrongly puts his faith in Tegana’s protection, Tegana wrongly tries to kill him because that’s the job he’s been hired to do and a poor man in need of money can’t afford to have scruples when other people would do the job instead. You understand all points of view at different times and sympathise with Marco’s anger and betrayal when he finds the Tardis crew have tried to deceive him, even when we know what he doesn’t: that what they tell him is the truth and all they want to do is go home. Marco is shocked too when Tegana betrays him, while he lives on blind trust that Kublai Khan will give him what he wants based on a half promise the old man can’t even remember making, being such a straightforward and honest man himself. Matters come to a head when Ping-Cho, the only one who knows where Marco has hidden the Tardis key, is torn between helping her new friends and obeying her protector Marco, forced to betray one or the other. It is, in a sense, one big chess game: the pieces of the puzzle are forever moving across the board re-acting to each other and this is the first (of many) Who stories where the characters actually play chess during the course of the story. In a story broadcast to the backdrop of the recent Cuban Missile crisis (a misunderstanding on a much bigger scale) its message of working out who to trust and trying to accept cultures on their own terms because we’re not that different deep down would have hit home even more than it would today (Dr Who is such a cold war baby it’s a theme lurking at the back of even stories set centuries before). A lot of fans find the ending, where the Tardis is given as a gift to the Khan, then won back by the Doctor in a game of backgammon, a cheat after seven weeks of travelling, but actually it’s the perfect end: only by being direct, with a game that isn’t about stealth or chance or tricking your opponent but equal skill, are things put right and order restored. The fact that everyone (bar Tegana) get what they want, with Ping-Cho free to marry who she likes and Marco free to go home, makes it an even better ending after all that time spent in their company.   

It is one of Dr Who’s simplest plots so the fact that it’s stretched to seven episodes (the equal third-longest of any individual story) ought to make it quite dull and slow. In some places it is (the action sags in the middle rather, when Tegana tries to come up with increasingly desperate ways to kill everyone and yet still these otherwise intelligent characters fail to see through him) but somehow the plot doesn’t matter. It was a genius move (perhaps one suggested by script editor David Whittaker, who was obsessed with it) to make the Tardis the driving force of the plot, a ‘flying caravan’ the Tardis crew need but Marco wants just as much for different reasons. To so many later Dr Who stories it’s merely transport but, on the back of ‘Edge Of Destruction’ where it was practically a fifth character, it makes sense it should be front and centre. This is really   more of a character piece than a plot piece anyway, with Lucarotti’s characters impressively strong and rounded. That’s especially true of the regulars who haven’t had an awful lot of time to simply be themselves over the opening few stories. This is the grumpiest we ever see the Doctor, affronted that Marco has taken his ‘caravan’ for his own reasons and in the single best use of the regular’s week holidays (brought forward when Hartnell fell ill)  the Doctor spends the entire episode sulking in the Tardis, refusing to come out. They’ll soften the 1st Doctor a lot after this (the hastily written ‘Edge Of Destruction’ being the point when the Doctor goers from being an alien every bit as scary and unreadable as the monsters we meet to being a benign grandfather with a grouchy streak) but for now William Hartnell spends most of this story in a state of apoplexy, the one person here who stays rigid and doesn’t adopt to his new surroundings (usually such a character trait of the Doctor’s) despite travel being all  about adapting to a life different to yours. Ian, though, feels right at home as an explorer and history teacher Barbara is in her element at seeing history she knows up close for the first real time (you can’t blame her for not being up to snuff with the history of the cavemen of her first encounter, given how little anyone knows about them). Susan gets to be more than just a peril monkey too by gaining a friend in Ching Po and showing us that teenagers are the same in any era and on any planet (give or take some deeply weird customs. And indeed costumes). Susan doesn’t make many friends in her travels – even when we meet her in a 1963 classroom she’s the butt of the classroom jokes and a lone wolf – and it’s as important a part of her characterisation that she can freely mingle with people from other times as it is the Doctor in later stories (by contrast he looks down on everyone in these early days, be they from the Palaeolithic age, 13th 20th or the 26th centuries).

What’s most changed, though, is that this story is actually a lot more about Marco Polo himself than anyone we’ve got to know. Mark Eden – by far the biggest name to appear in the series to date (he even got a Radio Times cover for this story alongside William Hartnell; albeit probably more on the back of The Daleks’ success than anything else) – plays him subtly, as trusting but not gullible, brave without being foolhardy, kind and sympathetic but stubborn enough to demand getting his own way. Partly because he’s a real person and partly because Lucarotti knows him so well he’s one of the most rounded three-dimensional one-off characters we meet in the series, different in every scene yet still recognisably the same. He’s an explorer, seeking out new continents and treating every alien culture he meets with respect on their own terms, not a pirate like so many travellers we meet in the series out to make the worlds they meet just the way they want it. He has all the fight scenes we usually associate with Ian, out-thinks and out-manoeuvres the Doctor for the most part and has all the calm fortitude of Barbara, with just a dash of Susan’s innocence. Marco’s also a weary traveller we can relate to, cut off from home, running on fumes and the hope of getting back to his family before he dies, but with a curiosity to see the world that keeps him travelling...sounds familiar? For Marco is the Doctor’s parallel in the same way that ‘An Unearthly Child’ used parallels with how primitive Ian and Barbara seemed to the Doctor as the cavemen seemed to them, a wanderer exiled by events beyond his control having to make do in a strange world.

Most of all, though, he’s the 1960s viewer’s idea of Marco Polo rather than the ‘real’ explorer taken direct from the diaries: he’s actually as English as anyone we ever meet in the series down to the tea-drinking, an unruffled unflappable Victorian gentlemen in every way but the whiskers, a folk memory of the days when Britain had an empire and all the best explorers (many of whom grew up reading Marco Polo’s diary) were all just like him, civil and gentile and full of manners even in the face of certain death, before people pointed out all the brutal killings of such eras meant they probably weren’t as benignly educational as our lessons made them out to be. All this even though Marco was Italian and born six hundred years before Britain even had an empire! You can kind of see where Lucarotti is coming from though: he embodies that sense of curiosity and exploration that used to be such a part of the British psyche so it makes sense that a programme about the ‘originator’ of such ideals should act like them. Mark Eden might be best known for his late-middle-age stint on Coronation Street nowadays but you can see why at the time he was regarded as one of our leading stage actors: his Marco Polo is brimming with barely concealed passion (much like the Doctor) and an open mind that believes in all the stories of the far East that seem like folk tales to us now (also like the Doctor) but keeps it hidden behind a gentile exterior (well alright then, not that much like the Doctor...yet). Even though misser Marco’s the main antagonist who separates team Tardis from their trip home his is a different reason to the Daleks or the Zarbi: its not out of malice but his desperation to go home and the hope that he can impress the only person who can possibly give him the freedom he craves (Ian and Barbara, especially, can’t object too much as going home is all they long for too, while to anyone who doesn’t believe in time-travelling spaceships its a more than reasonable return for saving their lives out in the desert sands). He’s unique, really, in being someone who stops the Doctor getting his way without being painted as ‘bad’; indeed, technically it’s the Tardis regulars who lie and cheat their way across the story, albeit for reasons of survival.

The real villain is Tegana, the first outright boo-hiss baddy Dr Who ever had (following survivalist cavemen, scared Daleks and, umm, the Tardis’ fast-return switch) and Derren Nesbitt sets the tone for a lot of what’s to follow, making the warlord nasty and evil without crossing the line into being silly. And of course everyone suspects the regulars of the sabotage and chaos Tegana causes; they’re strangers who arrived out of thin air after all, while Tegana has been trusted for years (although really he’s been binding his time waiting to kill the Khan). Ping-Cho is a very clever character. Despite being both Chinese and 700 years dead she’s the one the audience of children watching are meant to identify with most, a giggly teenager whose just like them in so many ways and who gives Susan an equal to bounce off for a change. Like all good friends they bond quickly despite their differences and they have each other’s backs almost immediately, Susan helping Ping-Cho stand up for herself and Ping-Cho easing tensions when Susan accidentally speaks out of line. You really feel for her when she’s powerless in events that see her married to someone she’s never met (odd how often that idea crops up in the series’ first year) and when she’s torn by her loyalties, before she becomes a forceful pro-active character by siding with Susan over Marco despite knowing the trouble it will get her into. As for the Khan, well, he might be the most interesting character of all and the first instance of Dr Who giving us something very different to what we see in the history books and against expectation: far from being a cruel and wicked tyrant, worse even than Tegana, we get a nice little old man whose disinterested in his job and Marco’s exploits and fed up of people treating him with such respect (he only gets excited when the Doctor treats him as an equal). The start of Dr Who meddling with history? Well, not quite right. You see Lucarotti was convinced from his research that our views of Kublai Khan were wrong and wrote his radio adaptation partly to put this ‘right’ – there, too, his Khan is a sweet old man who would rather live and let live, driven by the demands of his own people. The Dr Who story is merely following his own lead and at least some of today’s historians agree (though you might have been hard pressed to find too many people saying so back in 1964). None have true control over their lives, their actions dictated largely by other people: Ping ho’s marriage, Marco’s desire for freedom, Tegana’s wages, even the Khan’s need to be seen to be a powerful ruler to keep his people safe, all of them privvy to the whims of something outside their control. Only the Tardis crew have free will being modern travellers – and the danger in this story is that theirs is taken away from them in episode one. All are perfectly cast and exquisitely played, with no sense of dumbing it down for children’s telly (as there was in ‘An Unearthly Child’ and even ‘The Daleks’ before that story became such a hit the supporting cast of Thals upped their game). 

  
What this story does best, though, is show how similar yet alien the past can be. There’s a sense of scale and space and a subtly different set of social rules that makes China (sorry, Cathay) feel as far away as Gallifrey and shows how, for a European, being plonked here against your will feels like being lost in an alien world. The fact we’re in a different time period doesn’t change that sense of culture shock, merely exaggerates it. I love the fact that this, of all stories, was given to the BBC’s only Indian director (and one of the few not of pure English heritage) Warris Hussain, famous amongst fans for being the first director to ever work on the series (and who was responsible for shaping a lot of the lore of the series in the adjustments made from the pilot to the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ proper). A very English director might have exaggerated the Englishness but Warris gets the multiculturalism just right, the elegance of another world and with the same sense of seeing a culture through different eyes. You can tell, in short, that the writer-director team are not only well read, as usual for early Who, but well travelled too. The result is a story where, admittedly, not a lot happens but not a lot happens quite brilliantly, with poetic dialogue that lolls off the tongue so easily and fluently and beautifully that it could easily be spoken by arguably the 13^th century’s most famous writer. There are sets and costumes that are lavish and beautiful even by Dr Who historical standards, with the attention to detail in the telesnaps that have survived (from Hussain’s own collection, our regular source John Cura not having been hired to take them yet) are extraordinary: of all the ‘fake’ studio-bound worlds Dr Who has created past present or future this is the one that looks most as if you’re watching real events take place (though I use ‘watching’ in a loose term given that nothing, not even a censored clip, from this story survives; it helps that some of the most stunning photos are in colour, revealing a detail we don’t see in any other story pre-1970 when Dr Who productions were never as lavish again. How they fitted it all into a studio that was smaller on the inside than in any other era is beyond me.

Sadly we’ll never quite know just how good this story was because none of it exists in moving form, with not even a cut censored scene existing in the archives and indeed episode one of this story is the earliest missing episode in the Dr Who canon (which is a surprise actually: Dr Who’s first season did so well on the back of The Daleks that it was sold abroad to more countries than any others from the 1960s and this was a popular show even at the time). There’s a reason so many fans long for this story to be returned: those who saw it still remember it well and it had a big impact on many (including Walt Disney, who bought up the film rights from Lucarotti with hopes of making a live-action version a few months before the Peter Cushing Dalek films were even talked about), whole for those of us who didn’t see it the audio and surviving photographs both are hypnotic, suggesting a believable world that lives long in the imagination. This story isn’t some cheap filler by a production team earning a crust it’s a true labour of love, in a programme so new that it can do anything and is still exciting and stimulating the imaginations of the people making it as much as the audience watching it.   There’s also no other story in the canon quite like this one – by the time we meet The Aztecs two stories later Dr Who has been re-written to be ‘about’ jeopardy happening directly to the regulars and monsters, but this one is arguably the closest in 327 stories that we ever came to BBC director Sydney Newman’s remit of what Dr Who was supposed to be for: to educate as well as entertain (it did feature teachers after all), with plots that didn’t rely on bug-eyed monsters and B movie ideas but real people and real situations. Amongst other things pertinent to the plot and explained at length are the way the sun melts snow and makes footprints look bigger (boo! I was expecting an elephant!), how condensation works, which science teacher Ian gleefully explains in great detail (saving everyone from dehydration when Tegana wrecks the water supply in the desert), the origin of the word assassin (it comes from the Hashahin culture, the hashish-eating hired killers of Asia, the last mention of drugs in the series until as late as 1979), a debate about the properties of quartz, why altitude sickness works (and why the Doctor as an old man gets sicker quicker because he can’t take enough air into his lungs, back in the days when he was thought to be an impossibly old Human rather than an alien) and that bamboo can explode (a key decoy). There’s even an in-joke for BBC aficionados, when the Doctor tries to fix the Tardis with ‘circuit 2LO’, the call-sign for the BBC back when it was purely a radio station (surely a David Whittakerism, following on from the half-theme in ‘Edge Of Destruction’ that the Tardis worked just like your telly, shrinking the people inside it and every bit as temperamental). Of course it seems slow by modern standards, stopping for a lecture every episode or so. There’s a sag in the middle when you long for something to happen (to some extent the story goes to sleep in episode two when the Doctor does and doesn’t wake up till Susan gets lost in the cave of 500 eyes). There are little things that seem curious and odd to modern eyes (though they wouldn’t in 1964): the way some of the words and place names are translated for us and others aren’t (nobody should understand the word ‘China’ for a start – it was Cathay), the way some of the supporting cast are genuine Asian actors and others are Caucasian Europeans in wigs. However I would gladly put up with all of that for the rich detail of this world and the way even the smallest realisations and character developments are given room to breathe, while this is possibly the least racist bit of 1960s telly specifically about other races that certainly I’ve ever seen (even the later historical Whos can’t quite match it). 

After all, its designed to be slow. It’s meant to be as real to life to an actual travelogue as they can make it, including the amount of time travelling, and the episodes were stretched out to seven so that they could pay for it all without too much cost cutting. Maybe, just maybe, Sydney Newman was right to push the education aspect, all but abandoned from this point on, as this story is positively gorgeous: a tale that’s if its about anything is about exploration, both Marco Polo and the world of 13th century Cathay that we get to explore as thoroughly as we ever explore anywhere (it helps that at seven episodes this is the longest DW historical, give or take The Daleks interrupting the Victoriana of ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ as early as episode two) and even better the way we get to explore the psyche of the regulars, who are all settling down after the shock of being whisked to different planets and times. Like the best dramas it really does feel as if you’ve fallen through the screen (or, nowadays, your speakers) into another world for real. Like all the best travelogues ‘Marco Polo’ lets you get to grips with a weird and strange world that’s very different to ‘ours’ – and yet like the very best travelogues ends up revealing that, beneath the colour and the costume, beneath the spoken and unspoken rules of the day, people really are the same the whole universe ever. Even the aliens. And like all the best travel stories by the time the Doctor gets his Tardis back and everyone says their goodbyes after seven weeks it really does feel like a wrench to say goodbye to the characters we leave behind. Why they ever thought getting rid of the historicals two years down the line from here when they did them so well is a mystery: ‘Marco Polo’ feels like the future for a series that was trying a bit of everything but not always this successfully, by going back to the past and bringing it into the present. I can see why things changed: ‘Marco Polo is the sort of story that was only going to happen once and if the production team had kept trying to replicate it, in different centuries and countries, then it would have got boring fast and the series would never have stayed as long on the air. But I wish that other stories had as much ambition and been given as much love as this one: it seems wrong to say that it was all downhill from here as early as the fourth story, but in some ways Dr Who was never quite this beautiful or this believable ever again. Maybe, if it really was William Hartnell’s suggestion to do a story like this, they should have asked him more often?

POSITIVES + Fresh from arguably their greatest ever score (for ‘The Daleks’) the radiophonic workshop come up trumps by re-creating the sounds of the Gobi Desert at night and its famous ‘shifting sands’, an early gig for Tristram Carey. Maybe it’s because we can’t see it, but boy does it sound atmospheric and sounds every bit as alien and believable as Skaro or Mondas. Especially the cave of 500 eyes where, for once, you’re totally on side as Susan screams the place down: it sound scary and alien enough to make Skaro seemed like Skegness by comparison. I’d love to know if the visuals came even close to matching it: Warris certainly didn’t think they did, regretting the storm effects added in post-production that ‘made it look as if everyone’s TV aerials had come loose’, but even that sounds terrific coming in the middle of a story all about control and staying civilised, with the images of lush palaces and posh caravans swapped for a moment of pure chaos.  

NEGATIVES - By contrast we can’t see Ping Cho’s five minute mime about her home, which makes for one of the most boring stretches of Dr Who soundtracks of them all. For all I know it’s the single greatest Dr Who scene ever the way it’s played, but even by ‘Marco Polo’ meandering standards it seems a deviation too far and runs way longer than it needs to. It feels suspiciously like Lucarotti was struggling to pad out his scripts to seven episodes and went ‘you know what we can do here? Have one of the characters mime – that’s ten pages of script I don’t have to write!’

BEST QUOTE: Marco Polo: ‘At the Khan’s court in Peking I have seen Buddhist monks make cups of wine fly through the air unaided and offer themselves to the great Khan’s lips. I do not understand it, but I have seen it’.

 Previous ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ next ‘The Keys Of Marinus’

Terror Of The Autons: Ranking - 53

 

Terror Of The Autons

(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo and UNIT, 2-23/1/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Barry Letts) 

Rank: 53

   'I'm an auton girl in an auton world, 

Made from plastic - I'm fantastic! 

I'll hand you a flower - you'll be dead within the hour 

Unless you meet my Master. Then it'll be faster! 

Call me on the phone when you're home alone 

When you'll suffocate - baby I can't wait! 

I'll send you a doll who looks just like a troll 

He's dreamy - till he gets steamy! 

And then you'll wake up dead with something wrapped around your head 

And only then you'll have caught on - you're dating an Auton!'

  

 Another story with a simple plot about plastic mannequins taking over the world a year after ‘Spearhead From Space’? Did they think we wouldn’t notice they were recycling plastic? What do they take us for? Dummies?!? Only ‘Terror Of The Autons’ is much more than just a facsimile of what happened just four stories earlier and the characters we meet this time around are much more than just mannequins. This is effectively another re-boot for the series now that the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era feel more comfortable and the producer is firmly in charge rather than playing catch-up, taking the elements of the ‘Earthbound’ format they feel are working (most of the same writers and actors, with a few important new additions) and dropping a few things that aren’t (the longer stories and the more adult cerebral feel). Mostly, though, it’s a victory lap: Dr Who was due to be cancelled following ‘Inferno’ if the viewing figures were still as low as they had been by season six but they’ve doubled and in some cases tripled and there’s a growing sense of confidence that this relatively new to TV production team know what they’re doing. Oddly enough the show becomes more contradictory: more child-friendly yet also more immediately scary, with an Earthbound format that features a new timelord in a central position and even though there are some of the most adult themes ever in the series coming up, that can match the intelligent horror of anything happening over on the BBC’s big new rival ‘Doomwatch’, the show has never been closer to its cartoon appearances in ‘TV Comic’ and it’s new home ‘Countdown’ (aka ‘TV Action’). Indeed even The Radio Times picked up on this, advertising the new season of Who with a ‘cartoon’ version of the story on the front cover (with The Master’s picture largest, much to Pertwee’s chagrin as his co-star hadn’t even been on telly yet and a lot of fans only half paying attention saw the Dr Who logo and wondered if his part had been re-cast). As happened last time the Autons are a nice easy concept we can understand straight away so we can be introduced to all the new toys that have been added to the box. The 3rd Dr’s still there of course, but he’s re-written as a cuddlier, friendlier figure, a benevolent uncle rather than a stern grandfather. The Brigadier is still nominally in charge but he’s more of a partner in crime from now on than an obstacle who puts saving his planet by any means before listening to timelords. Benton is the one fixed point in a changing world, but is getting more space to be Benton than he ever had before. And there are no less than three new characters to meet.

There’s a new captain to replace the sundry interchangeable ‘Jimmys’ that the show has kept giving us. Mike Yates is a slightly more complex Benton, a dashing hero who’s more capable of thinking for himself and doing the dashing around the Brig used to do. He doesn’t really work as a character until he becomes (spoilers) an unlikely betrayer a couple of years later, something they couldn’t really have done with the Brig or Benton, but he adds to the feeling of ‘family’ in the UNIT era, the gawky teenager finding independence. Yates seems an odd sort of character to introduce in retrospect, given that he doesn’t actually get to do much with so many characters sharing the limelight and the intended romance with Jo is a non-starter. I never understood why they didn’t simply try that dynamic with Benton, who has more chemistry with the new companion that Richard Franklin ever will. Officially Yates was introduced after Letts saw some old stories and thought the Ian/Barbara Ben/Polly and Jamie/Victoria/Zoe dynamic worked well, though it might well be to have a ‘senior officer’ in play to cover Nicholas Courtney’s occasional bouts of depression and take the pressure off him if he needed it (it’s at its worst in this story, with scenes re-written when Courtney was at his worst – losing his best friend at filming, Caroline John, and having new members of the cast probably didn’t help his often shaky confidence as an actor. To his credit Pertwee realised this and started spending more time with him, the pair becoming firm friends from this era on – despite all the story’s about Jon’s vanity and ego, he was a sensitive soul with a big heart who was loyal to the people he admired. Other stars would have tried to get him sacked for showing weakness; Tom Baker for one).

Then there’s Jo Grant, someone who’s the opposite of Liz Shaw’s feminist from the last series in so many ways, inexperienced and enthusiastic, loyal to a fault and automatically taking the Doctor’s side from the second she meets him. To some she’s a backwards step after Zoe’s massive intelligence and Liz’s university credentials, but Jo Grant is our ‘eyes’ and ears’ inside UNIT, asking all the questions everyone else knows the answers to already. She plays up to the ‘paternal’ side of the 3^rd Doctor’s character and allows the writers to give him some softer moments, starting with the moment he tries to sack her and finds he can’t.   More out of her depth more than anyone we’ve seen on the show outside Jamie (who she’s like in more ways than people realise) Jo could so easily have been irritating, a backwards step in a series trying to reach a new level of sophistication and keep up with the children who’d grown into adults during the 1960s, but instead she’s endearing: Katy Manning is too warm and likeable for anyone to be annoyed with. She’s no drip either: usually companions in Who get less interesting as time goes on and writer’s make each one more generic, but Jo stays true to her goofy hippie principles from first to last and keeps surprising us, with sudden moments of being tough or independent or sudden abilities we haven’t seen before (she’s even better at escapology in this story than The Doctor!) She’s as clumsy as Ryan will be later (before he came along I had her and Harry down as the first dyspraxics on the show) but she’s a lot more independent and fiercely courageous, usually when someone she cares for is in trouble. To an extent Jo is entirely Katy’s creation: the draft scripts for this year were written with a tougher ‘Emma Peel’ type of companion in mind, a cool blonde bombshell (which is why Jo suddenly has these moments of power and toughness) but after a full day of auditioning actresses who all looked and sounded the same Letts was tickled by Katy’s audition where she was the archetypal dizzy blonde who turned up late, walked into the table and improvised her script as she’d left her glasses at home and couldn’t see. She was always accident prone: she deserved some luck after losing a promising five year contract with MGM films by having a nasty car crash before filming was due to start, when she got dropped (you can still see her leg scars in some shots, though not in this story). By chance Jon Pertwee had seen her in the BBC foyer working on another job and had suggested his producer ‘get someone like her’ for the role, little knowing she’d already applied for the audition. Even so Katy had a rude awakening, falling over during a running sequence on her first day of shooting and tearing a ligament (talk about method acting!), which is why Jo is randomly sits down across a lot of this story, with a line added about Jo hurting herself during her fall from the coach (although she’s limping way before this, poor thing). Pertwee took to her immediately, rounding on the production assistant who joked they’d have to replace her (which, had he known it or not, happened to be Nicholas John, her predecessor Caroline’s brother) – that sense of protection never left for the rest of their time on the show together.Although she’s also capable of being protective to The Doctor, seeing past his extra centuries and authoritarian ways to realise he’s as lost as she is sometimes (this sets her out as different to Liz, who acted more his ‘equal’ but yet seemed more in awe of him; Jo sees him as a superior in most things but happy to take charge where he isn’t, such as knowing how to handle people). She’s instantly perfect – not for UNIT of course, having the first day from hell (it’s not everyone who nearly blows up their bosses on their first day of work hypnotised or not, while her first scene sees her upsetting the Doctor’s experiment with my second favourite insult in DW that I use more than I should: ‘You ham-fisted bun vendor!’, a line beaten only by ‘Brain Of Morbius’ ‘Chicken-brained biological disaster’) and not for the Doctor (who spends their first episode trying to break it to her that she’s hopeless as his new assistant), but perfect for us at home, a warm-hearted character we can love and root for in amongst the straight-laced soldiers. Even The Master (the black sheep of the UNIT family) develops a soft spot for Jo and will later ask after her, without the taunts of other companions the way he does, say, Tegan, Peri or Bill.

Then again this first Master, making his debut here too, is not like the other incarnations, he’s a gentleman who’s just pretending to be gentle, not a ranting psychopath or borderline insane like the others. We know the Doctor is predictably good, but The Master is never predictably evil (not yet anyway); instead he’s the Doctor’s mirror opposite because he is unpredictable and you never know whether he’s going to charm, snarl or hypnotize his way out of trouble.  The threat of The Master comes from the fact that he always feels in control and can schmooze anybody, while The Doctor struggles to keep his emotions in check, ruffling feathers of people in power that The Master knows just how to charm. Roger Delgado is instantly perfect too, the Doctor’s mirror rather than his equal and full of all the qualities he doesn’t have, there to destroy the establishment while pretending to uphold it as The Doctor (trying to save everyone) is seen as outside it. The Doctor’s response to hearing The Master has followed him to Earth is that ‘that jackanapes causes nothing but trouble’, but The Master is someone who can join in with the status quo and disrupt it from the inside in a way the 3rd Dr never could. That makes him the perfect foe for this particular Earthbound Dr, whose fought off interchangeable bureaucrats till now without any of them really sticking in the memory – The Master, though, is impossible to forget (its all too easy to empathise with the people he hypnotises left right and centre, especially in this story – I can’t take my eyes off Roger Delgado either). The Master knows when to keep quiet and be subservient when he has to be, to blend in, to hide in the background which the most flamboyant of all Doctors could never do. His character was invented after Barry and Terrance met to discuss the next year and realised that, rather than trying to introduce a similar but different baddy each week, they could have one versatile character who could team up with anyone. Barry knew just who to play him too, an old friend he’d once crossed swords with during his acting days (literally in the series ‘Francis Drake’; one of the reasons Barry’s stint was such a happy one was that he saw actors as fellow creatives rather than people who got in the way of deadlines and budgets like other producers) and who he’d reluctantly turned down for one role already for not being quite right (we don’t know which one but I’d like to think it was Channing from ‘Spearhead In Space’ – The Master is the same character exaggerated and more ‘Human’, if that’s not an odd thing to say about a timelord). Delgado was only too happy, having worked with Pertwee before too and keen to get away from his typecasting as ‘shifty foreigners’ to play a ‘shifty alien’ (actually Delgado is an East End Londoner, the only Londoner in this era of the show, but his Spanish dad and Belgian mum have him exotic looking genetics. He isn’t Turkish, as some guidebooks assume though he played many Turkish roles). Letts encouraged Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes to write the character around him rather than find an actor to fit. Roger was a truly sublime bit of casting, with moments of pure evil and great anger and frustration with the universe that peek out behind the curtain of civility just enough to keep us and the Doctor guessing. Strange, too, that The Master should signify a first move away from the most ‘Quatermassy’ period of the show, even though Roger Delgado was the only Who actor who was actually in it! (he’s the journalist in ‘II’, the one set in Carlisle).

Interestingly we first meet The Master in a circus, which seems odd compared to his usual roles as Vicars, Scientists and Examiners where he’s generally high up the social pecking order. It still kind of fits though: this first incarnation is a showman, a ringmaster, one who’s firmly in control of his acts and pulls all their strings with a combination of titbits, whips and brainwashing. The fakeness of this carnival world reflects the way The Master can blend in with the real world by hiding his real self, which is why the plastic Autons are such a good fit for him – they’re different sides to the same coin, as he’s an intelligent Auton who can think for himself but is never ‘real’ and authentic in this world the way the Doctor always is at his core. He’s a plastic Doctor if you will, a mannequin dressed up in similar clothes but who’s warmth is all for show. Circuses in literature tend to be the ‘opposite’ of modern industrial life; they’re the romantic image that people run away to, where you work just as hard but t something colourful and bright rather than grey and drab. It’s the sort of place people look down on but secretly want to be in, ‘separate’ from society with its own set hierarchy and roles, often used by satirists as a metaphor for the ‘real’ establishment with its fake roles and the seriousness with which it takes daft jobs like lion-taming or throwing custard pies (woe betide anyone who doesn’t pull their weight in the circus, except the boss who is stereotypically lazy but too high up the ‘food chain’ to criticise). It’s very much the opposite of the establishment that The Master pretends to come from, with some nice sub-plots from a typically anarchic Holmes that it’s all a con anyway, that all people in the ‘establishment’ are clowns and circus freaks who ran away in a different direction. The civil servants in this story are even more out of their depth than usual and try to stop The Doctor at every turn, before he reveals he’s one of them (with lots of blackmailing digs at ‘Tubby’ Rowlands, the very nickname suggesting a life of comfort and excess, cut off from the ‘real’ world). Jo is a nepo baby foisted on The Brigadier because of her Uncle at the United Nations even though she’s patently hopeless and the last person who should be there (a typically clever Holmes line has Jo protest about taking general science A level in episode one then admitting she flunked it a few episodes later. Holmes, who always had a bee in his bonnet about how poor Britain’s education system was and how it was who you know that got you decent jobs rather than what you know, even plays this theme out between his two timelords, when The Master gets a better grade in ‘cosmic science’, even though The Doctor clearly understands how the ‘cosmos’ works better than The Master ever will). Even for Homes this script is stuffed with brilliant one-loners designed to cut the pomposity of authority down to size, from The Doctor moaning to Jo that ‘sometimes I think ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms’ to his cutting description of the upper classes obsessed by money, although the best scene might be when The Doctor, despite four stories and counting of butting heads against The Brigadier, praises him to his bosses and wishes they’d work as hard.
The Master’s plan is to take over a radio telescope and a plastic factory where he’s been in league with the Nestene consciousness. Characteristically it’s as convoluted as all future Master plans to come (like I say, a showman). While plastic is everywhere and by rights the Nestene could take over everyone in one go they’re really a distraction, with humanity in such a panic at the sudden death of 50,000 people that they don’t notice the mass invasion. The nestene just need to warm up the plastic (which Dicks changed from the original plan that they would be kick-started by rain, adding a note to Holmes that any alien race intelligent and observant enough to be a threat would know not to rely on British weather!) Oddly (for character reasons if not plot purposes) this Doctor who has happily wiped out Daleks, Cybermen and Ice Warriors never quite got round to destroying the nestene consciousness last time, feeling it would be ‘tantamount to murder’ (has he learned nothing from leaving the similar Great Intelligence spheres intact at the end of ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ and causing ‘The Web Of Fear’?!) Once more the Autons are a more plausible substitute for The Yeti, deadly killer mannequins who make sense in ‘our’ world. While there’s no single scene as iconic as the one of the Autons breaking through the shop windows in ‘Spearhead’, this story ups the ante with several new deadly inventions: plastic dolls that come to life, plastic daffodils (like the ones religious movements liked handing out to travellers at airports and train stations), a even killer phone cords (a real shame the Dr didn’t bring one of our era mobiles back to his laboratory or he’d have been spared a cliffhanger). Once again Homes writes a story that juggles a general feeling of despair at how much plastic tat is ending up in society and making life seem artificial and false with the jumpscares that this story could happen to you – every home would have something plastic nearby to the person watching this on TV. In fact we even have a plastic sofa that suffocates its victims (you see kids – even your hiding place behind your sofa isn’t safe! Holmes, who has by now properly caught up with the history of a series he barely knew existed when his debut script  ‘The Krotons’ was passed on to production team by ‘Out Of The Unknown’, throws in another injoke, of having part of this story take place in an actual quarry being an actual quarry for a change).

While, presumably, the bodyless Nestene consciousness is asexual, this one seems to identify more as a 1970s kind of girly girl given that its swapped playing around with 1970s boyish past-times like, umm, playing with balls for trolls. The starting point came when Holmes was given a Christmas present that really left him scratching his head: one of the Danish ‘good luck’ trolls that had been all the rage across the 1960s. They’d been created by John Dam in 1959 when he couldn’t afford to buy his little girl a present so made one instead, but all her friends wanted one too so he created a business that spread across Denmark to the rest of the world (where they tended to be better known as ‘Those Dam Trolls’). To their fans they were a sort of anti-doll, an ugly baby that fitted the 1960s (and very Dr Who) idea that everything was worthy of love and they became quite popular with boys as a ‘toy’ to care for that didn’t necessarily mean they’d be teased for being feminine (‘Look at this ugly mug, my toy’s going to eat your doll up! No don’t cry Mr Uglymug, here’s a hug when nobody’s looking….) Holmes, though didn’t understand the appeal of something so ugly and claimed it wasn’t the sort of thing you gave someone you liked so much as someone you wanted to kill. Having got this first idea, in quick succession he found his detergent had come with a free plastic flower he hadn’t asked for, he spotted a hideous plastic chair in a local furniture store and saw a warning on a TV advert about the dangers of plastic bags and children. So, after a story about plastic mannequins, this is a new twist on the old idea of Dr Who making the ordinary extraordinary, only this story goes a stage further than pretty much any other and makes ordinary household objects deadly. Some of the deaths in this story are gruesome indeed (Poor Farrel! Michael Wisher is superb in his second DW appearance, in a humane part the complete opposite of Davros) and one of two times Dr Who maybe goes a bit too far (alongside ‘Deadly Assassin’s drowning). These deaths aren’t poignant cerebral horrors that happen at a distance: the camera lingers on each and every one, as we see the suffering up close and having them be household objects come to life rather than something obviously ‘fantastical’ made them a new level of scary to viewers of a certain age. The Dailys Mail and Telegraph both ran campaigns about how scary the show had become, instigating a deluge of letters (there had only been two before the articles were published), Scotland Yard wrote in protesting that children would now be afraid of approaching policeman after one turns out to be an Auton and for the first of a handful of times Dr Who was even mentioned in the House of (time?) Lords, in a debate about mass media, Baroness Bacon (no, seriously) raising the point that Dr Who was on too early for young children. Letts admitted they’d gone too far after getting a letter from an anxious parent concerned their children had stopped going to bed with their dolls in case they tried to strangle them in the night and never tried anything quite like this again.
There’s a place for visceral horror in Dr Who though and scaring children is good for them, as long as it’s done in the right way and surrounded by a comforting family (as Letts always emphasised Dr Who should be seen). All drama series need dramatic tension and having something come to life that a child understands is far more immediate than something happening on an alien world. It’s a way of practising how to be safe, of recognising peril and what to do about it and being aware that the world can be a scary place, but with an element of ‘fun’.

 After all, the violence in this story is never gratuitous; it’s always a natural part of the story and the evil that The Doctor definitively defeats. Despite the ‘real’ location too, this story is also more obviously a fantasy cartoon, full of larger than life characters in a setting that never feels quite ‘real’. Putting all this against a circus is a masterstroke, as children are already inclined towards the idea that the normal rules of life don’t apply there (or did in 1970s when circuses were still relatively common), where everything is topsy turvy and you can see animals up close that are kept behind protective cages in zoos. There isn’t one in Tarminster by the way, if you were thinking of running away and joining up -  actually it’s Barry Roberts’ Travelling Circus, which let the production team film during a special ‘extra day’ or two after a performance at Ley Bridge Road, Leyton. Pertwee had worked with Barry before and took him out for ‘extra lunches’, wangling just a basic fee and a credit for the circus that was sure to get fans flocking in return for cameo appearances by most of the circus -  only the ‘Strongman’ is an actor, Roy Stewart who’d been ‘Toberman’ in ‘Tomb Of The Cyberman’ (though Katy, for one, was horrified at the state of the animals and complained to Letts, who secretly agreed – they talked about ‘accidentally’ setting the animals free at the end of filming but never did). The Master’s very cartoony threat, of the tissue compression eliminator’ (not that it’s called that by name until ‘Time-Flight’) is the perfect horrible ‘death’ for this character to bring too: he can take even leading authority figures and tear them down to size, his ego bigger than anyone and the scenes of Humans shrunk to dolls and abandoned in lunchboxes is a memorably gruesome image. 

Also few stories deliver such horror with quite so much brightness and glee as this story does: one of the things Letts wanted to change was the relative drabness of season seven, figuring that Dr Who would be a great series to exploit for the new colour TV craze. This isn’t some lurking shadow in some dimly lit basement but an invasion in full daylight and technicolour, it’s a horror that’s brought out into the open and seen in all its glory. And what glory! There are reds and oranges and yellows and greens galore and it’s arguably the first time Who has been this in yer-face about being colourful. Ironically, even though the ‘real world’ is in colour, somehow this makes it far more cartoony than half-seeing something in shadows in black-and-white. Sometimes it feels there’s a bit too much colour in fact, as if the series has been given ‘artificial flavourings’ that have exaggerated it, like it’s a pencil drawing that’s been coloured in by a madman (to an extent it has: technically what we have today isn’t quite what went out on air as this story was the second of three Pertwee stories to be re-colourised in 1992-93 using black-and-white copies and ‘dots’ left in the original that point to the initial colours and feels like witchcraft to me. While ‘The Daemons’ looks good in some scenes and less so in others and ‘The Mind Of Evil’ looks better in black-and-white anyway, ‘Terror Of The Autons’ is screaming out to be in colour and looks nothing in monochrome). ‘Terror’ is a colourful story full of images designed to stamp themselves into your memory banks long after the story finishes. It might not be the deepest or most thoughtful story, but boy is it imaginative and exciting. Even as a big fan of the more intellectual season seven, coming to this story after three fairly lengthy and slow talky stories in a row it’s a revelation, a reminder of just how vibrant Who can be.

Talking of memories there’s a lot this story recycles, not just from ‘Spearhead’ but from ‘The Invasion’, where the baddy bites off more than he can chew and had to get the Dr’s help to put things right again (whose the dummy now then, eh?!) This story also shares those two story’s use of radio technology and a memorable showdown around a telescope, a tiny battle on an insignificant planet against the backdrop of mankind’s vision of just how big and wide this universe is, rightly becomes such an iconic image in the series they try it again with ‘Logopolis’ (the sadder, older, wiser, pastel version of this story where The Master comes back from the dead). That’s in the future though: for now, in the present, this is a cracking story where the stakes are high, the baddy is the greatest evil genius around, the goodie is pushed to his limits trying to stop him and there are some terrific lines from Robert Holmes at his funniest, delivering the wry sense of humour for which he’ll become famous after a few false(ish) starts with easily the best of his first four scripts. There’s a real joy and verve to this script in fact which seems at odds with all the horror, but the script walks a thin line between the two: the comedy enhances rather than detracts from the death we see, while without it the horror would be too much (I reckon that’s why Mary Whitehouse picked on this show as much as she did: she didn’t have a sense of humour, so couldn’t see the fine balance Who was playing the way 99% of viewers could). This is Dr Who at its most glam rock – it’s too colourful and surface to be the punk show this series will become and not rebellious enough for the rock it’s just been, while steadily moving on from the psychedelia it used to be. While glam wouldn’t normally be an era that’s to my taste, full of silly surface nonsense after years of proper thinking, you can also see where it came from and why; after so many years of so many earnest stories its breezy brightness is like a breath of fresh air. Dr Who seems fun again for the first time in years, give or take the dead bodies, something you can’t wait to tune back in to see.

In time this formula will get as restricting as anything it was replacing, but here everything is new and shiny and everyone has a bounce in their step. ‘Spearhead’ was already a great story but this sequel has less time to spend on the ‘old’ timelord and lots on the promising new one, with lots of extra clever ideas that help sell the dangers of plastic even more. There are many, many scenes that stay with you – more than all but a few other Who stories – from the doll woken up by the cold to The Doctor being strangled by his own phoneline, to The Master’s unruffled air, to the shock of the policeman driving a police car who turns out to be an Auton to one of the best stunts ever in the series (stuntman and Pertwee double Terry Walsh being hit by a car and crashing down into a quarry an impossible distance only to get up again and start walking, something that sells The Auton’s indestructableness so much better than before). Very little goes wrong: usually even the best Who stories lose out on some effect or monster costume or ‘Dr Who acting’ but here the most that goes wrong is that The Auton’s new ‘standardised’ look isn’t as strong as the ‘old’ one when all the shop dummies looked different (complete with silly boater hat, though even that fits a story partly about seeing through authority figures). the title is a tad silly, smacking of a 1960s B-movie (though still an improvement on working title ‘The Spray Of Death’, dropped when the sub-plot got shifted back from being the original focus to episode three). It’s maybe a bit of a sudden finale too, The Doctor working on his solution, dimethysuphoxide (something he should have worked out quicker, really, given that it’s been in constant use for dissolving carbons including plastic since the 1860s and usually used in medical procedures as it can be absorbed through the skin). Perhaps another is that this story passes by in such a rush, as if you’re watching it on fast forward – but even that’s a delight in context following the lengthy talky stories of season seven, a cartoon to their film noir that instantly grabs your attention and never lets go. For the most part its remarkable how watchable this is, another one of those stories often used by fans to show non-fans because of how many things it gets ‘right’ and how little it gets ‘wrong’. It’s a story brimming with confidence in script and on screen in a way that few other ‘classic’ stories share. Yes there are better, deeper, braver Dr Who stories than this one but few are as purely entertaining, with ‘Terror’ a real highpoint of the 3rd Dr’s era. Recycling plastic, it turns out, isn’t just good for the environment but good for Dr Who too. The only real shame is that it will take another 34 years until our 3rd Auton encounter (and by contrast a whole week until The Master shows up again, but that’s another story...)

POSITIVES + One thing that’s always intrigued me about the story is how consistently great the CSO (Colour Separation Overlay – the era’s analogue version of CGI) is, while on many of the other stories across the 1970s it will be Dr Who’s Achilles heel. Some fans say it’s terrible in this story too, but to these eyes it’s pretty good and called on to do all sorts of things, from laboratories to circuses to moving toys (the colourisation helps maybe, removing the fuzzy blue lines there on the original which I was too young to see). There are shots of the troll-doll growing inside a very 1970s family home until it’s full size that seem impressive now, never mind in 1971, despite the problems shooting it (reportedly the costume designer for the Troll actor turned up late, drunk and with the material still smelling so strongly of glue that, under the hot studio lights, it made the actors pass out). The shot of a shrunken scientist, left to rot inside his own lunchbox, is the sort of shot they’d have a hard time pulling off today. This is such an effects heavy story that it could easily have been torpedoed by shoddy FX taking you out of the reality and showing that you’re just watching a TV programme, but instead they’re so good they heighten the drama and makes you feel The Master and Nestene really can do anything. Weirdly enough the closest to a ‘bad’ effect in the whole story are the scenes of the countryside outside the various car windows, which seem rather obviously painted in (yet ought to be the simplest to do, simply because they’d done before – everything else is being ‘invented’ on the spot now all this is so new in colour).

NEGATIVES - Did this episode over-run slightly? It’s not just that this story feels like highlights from season seven sped up and with the duller more talky bits taken out, more like someone has hacked into it with a pair of scissors. Some dialogue overlaps scenes it doesn’t belong in, characters leave one room and suddenly appear in another with no sense of how they got there and people in one place are reacting to events in another without us always seeing how they found out about them. Just take episode four: The Doctor complains to Mike and a short scene later he’s nattering to Jo, almost mid-sentence, without the usual ‘I’ll go and get the Brigadier’ or ‘wotcha Doc, whatcha doing?’ dialogue. To some extent that’s great – this is such a modern method of storytelling that ‘Terror’ seems more like new-Who than any 20th century story made till Ace turns up – but like many a modern story you can’t help but wish they’d slow down just a little bit and let us keep up with the plot before they throw more stuff at us. Sometimes boring can be good if it allows you to get your breath back between the ‘big’ scenes (amazingly ‘Colony In Space’ comes only three stories after this – and that goes too far the other way; they really should have switched the four and six parters around this season).   

BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘How much are they paying you?’ Rossini: ‘Come, come, Doctor. Gentlemen don't discuss money’. Dr: ‘Nonsense. Gentlemen never talk about anything else’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: That was it as far as ‘classic’ Who goes for the Autons – two appearances a year apart. They did make an appearance over in the Dr Who Magazine comic strips, however, with  ‘Business As Usual’ running between issues #40 and #42 across July 1980. ‘He thought a killing was only something you made on the stock market’ runs the tag about its lead character: you can probably where see this tale of plastic replacement is going. Notably the current Doctor (the 4^th, unless you were reading the re-print in DWM issue #184 in 1992 when it was the 7^th) only appears to top and tail the strip: mostly it’s a prequel to ‘Terror’ in which Winston Blunt, ex-plumber, ‘a man with no family and few friends’ discovers one of the Nestene Consciousness spheres and is hypnotised into founding Galaxy Plastics. Winston has time to nominate his successor, the shadowy Mr Dolman, before committing suicide. An industrial spy named Max Fischer then starts snooping around the warehouse, uncovering action man type toy soldiers, little knowing that they have been infused by the Nestene consciousness. He reckons they’re a new toy that can walk, but is shocked to then be mown down by gunfire. Stumbling to the main office for help he’s astonished to meet the ‘real’ head of galaxy plastics, a growing pulsing brain (one that looks so like the one in ‘Rose’ a quarter century later that Russell T must have had this strip in mind for that scene: this is, according to some interviews, the year he started making up his own Who stories). Fischer then saves the world with a smartly timed spanner in the works, causing an enormous explosion, in a scene not unlike that of ‘The Pirate Planet’. However, there’s quite a gruesome final panel as a melted Dolman informs a fleeing Fischer ‘be certain of one thing…it’s not over yet!’ A pretty decent strip all round, more adult and serious than the average ‘Weekly’ ones. Interestingly the story is set in 1989 despite being a ‘Terror’ prequel, adding to the confusion of the UNIT dating controversy by suggesting that those stories must have taken place across the 1990s! Graphic novel fans more generally as well as film goers might want to note the names: this is an early collaboration between comic legend Alan Moore and David Lloyd who would go on to create ‘V For Vendetta’.

‘The Dark Path’ (1997) is one of the second Doctor ‘Missing Adventures’ by David A McIntee and is a prequel of sorts, featuring as it does the ‘first’ appearance of the Roger Delgado Master. It’s an odd little book, which despite featuring the 2^nd Dr-Jamie-Victoria trio is more in keeping with a late Pertwee era ‘space opera’ story, with Draconians and interstellar wars set on a ‘bubble’ inside a neutron star named ‘Darkheart’ used by a race known as Chronovores to heal their sick. Our heroes and their usual silly banter and rescuing each other from getting into scrapes seem totally out of place in this story with such big and dangerous stakes, especially the Doctor who’s usual ploy of keeping to the sidelines and watching things fall apart is the opposite of what the 3^rd Dr would do and what the plot ‘needs’.  The Master, incidentally, hasn’t adopted that name yet and refers to himself as ‘Koschei’ – at first he seems a ‘goodie’ from the way he saves Victoria from certain death, only going all Masterish near the end. Indeed, this feels so utterly unlike ‘our’ Master that it would be tempting to see him as an earlier regeneration, despite the Delgado likeness on the front cover, while that would also hint at the sheer length of time it takes The Master to escape from ‘Darkheart’ and why he has such a burning need for revenge because of it (even though, in true Master fashion, he really brings all his problems on himself). Despite the importance of the plot, it’s a bit of a slog to get through to be honest.

‘Synthespians’ (2004) is a ‘Past Doctors’ novel starring the 6^th Doctor and Peri, written by Craig Hinton. Notable as one of the last Dr Who anythings published before the series came back to telly it’s quite the nostalgia fest, one that puts the very different character of the 6^th Doctor in very much the same sort of situation encountered by the 3^rd in a story that’s a cross between ‘Terror Of The Autons’ and ‘Vengeance On Varos’. The Tardis has landed on another planet obsessed with telly, with series from the 20^th century enjoying a timely revival in the 101^st, as the Earth’s initial television signals spread into space and create an entire culture by accident. The fake plasticness of celebrity culture and 1980s soap operas obsessed with appearance is a good match for the Autons and there are lots of pithy comments on the emptiness of fame, while the very real no-holds-barred honesty of the 6^th Doctor let loose in a place this artificial is a joy to behold. You long for a sequel where The Autons get lost in a world based on telly from the early 21st, all plastic implants and scripted reality TV! It’s the plot that lets this one down slightly, as it has nowhere to go after that great central idea and even the villain behind The Autons, Walter J Mathieson, is as plastic and one-dimensional as they are. I have to say though, I came to this novel having heard of its less-than-stellar reputation and was surprised how much better it was than I feared.  

 ‘The Home Guard’, part of the sixth box set of Big Finish’s ‘Early Adventures’ (2019), also features a pre-‘Terror’ appearance by The Master (an earlier one than Delgado, played by James Dreyfus, who was once a rising star with Big Finish but lost his job by going on rants about the Trans community) and the 2^nd Doctor. It’s a bit of a silly story though, hard to take seriously, seeing as most of it is ‘The War Games’ crossed with an affectionate parody of ‘Dad’s Army’, down to the character of the other soldiers and some similar dialogue (inevitably poor Jamie is referred to as a ‘stupid boy’!) The Master’s deliciously evil though disrupting the Doctor’s timelines in a Meddling Monk type way (Polly is married in this timeline…to Jamie, much to Ben’s misery!) and hypnotising people left right and centre. It’s a nice idea that doesn’t quite work.

‘Return Of The Autons’ (2020) is the official name of the season eight blu-ray trailer, one of the shorter yet also one of the better ones. Jo and Cliff are back in London now, living in a house very Like Sarah Jane’s on Bannerman Road in fact, and are still enjoying a cosy happy romantic life, with mention of twins preparing to ‘zoom call’ mum and dad with their latest music demo tapes! Cliff is handed a plastic flower on his way home and is appalled at the waste of companies who invent plastic flowers when the real ones are so beautiful and moans about it to Jo, who is even more aghast than he is, angrily asking where he got it. Turns out there’s a carnival on and ‘guys in weird masks are handing them out to people’. Jo runs out the house to see a whole sea of people dressed like the Autons in the same oversized plastic heads and boater hats from the TV episode. ‘Aliens?’ asks Cliff ‘Are we ever going to have a normal weekend?’ The answer seems to be no, as UNIT call on the phone and Cliff dashes to answer it, but clever old Jo knows what might be about to happen and uses her twins’ zoom call music to block the Nestene radio transmission the same way The Doctor did all those years ago, arriving Autons bursting through the front door now lying twitching at her feet. Cute, especially the chance to see Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan back together again, Pete McTighe nailing the feel of both characters in a fine farewell for the couple before Stewart’s untimely death about eighteen months later.
There’s another variation on how Mike Yates joined UNIT in ‘Vengeance Of The Stones’ (2013), part of Big Finish’s epic 50^th anniversary set ‘Destiny Of the Doctor’ which we’ve included under ‘The Stones Of Blood’, given the similarities between the two plots. Yates is a junior army officer posted in Scotland whose calm head under pressure and acceptance of weird orders so impresses the Brigadier the older man remembers him when setting up UNIT.   

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