Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Read Online Free PDF

Lang (playing Hur’s father Horg) has to do it this time by looking inscrutable, and last week Eileen Way’s Old Mother had to pause, knife in hand, while Anthony Coburn’s name got its five seconds of allotted screen time.
    Talking of whom: goodbye, Mr Coburn. He was there at the beginning and a key instrument in the show’s genesis, and yet both he and another important contributor, production designer Peter Brachaki, don’t make it beyond the first story. But Coburn’s dialogue has some wonderful qualities – as well as all the quotable stuff from the regulars (the Doctor’s “Fear makes companions of all of us”), the material Coburn gives the cavemen wonderfully crafts their earthy inarticulation – “Za does not say he did this or did that,” the animal “took away your axe in its head”, etc. These aren’t just grunting savages – Coburn suggests character and thought processes whilst not allowing them to express such things in modern parlance.
    The staging helps too: the fight between Kal and Za is really nasty. Jeremy Young (Kal) bites Newark at one point, and Kal’s death rattle is piercingly offbeat and bloodcurdling; likewise, the ungainly way his twisted body is dragged off is unpleasantly, bluntly realistic. Then when Hur (whose name, by the way, makes you wonder if Horg would have called his son “Hym”) pops in, and Alethea Charlton brilliantly plays the scene with her back to the regulars, rubbernecking Kal’s crumpled cadaver with animalistic fascination. I’d always had her down as a rather prim, mumsy actress who got shoehorned into playing dowdy roles, but she’s been great in this.
    As the credits roll, K unconsciously echoes my previous thoughts about the alienness of this civilisation – she tells me she was “gripped” even without the diversions of funky aliens. Fight arranger Derek Ware’s name pops up in the credits, and as it turns out, he’s a mutual acquaintance – he taught K how to fight (and did a bloody good job, if some of our past arguments are anything to go by).
    I still don’t think that having the TARDIS crew encounter cavemen the first time out of the gate was necessarily a wise choice, but I do feel sympathy for an adventure that’s always been overshadowed by the seminal episodes that surround it. However primitive the setting, this is an estimable piece of work.
    January 3rd
    R: It’s all very odd, this. Last night I was invited to a dinner party. And who do you imagine was seated opposite me? Waris Hussein! Only the bloody director of An Unearthly Child. Our host put us together, rather endearingly, because we’d both worked on Doctor Who, so thought we might have some connection. (Yeah, but it was 40 years apart!) Oddly enough, though, we did have a connection – we both realised we had the same enormous pride in Doctor Who. Hearing Waris speak with such enthusiasm about the scene in which Za dropped a rock on Kal’s head (he told me he’d had an argument with Verity Lambert about it, as his cabbage-crushing sound effect was much more gruesome), I realised that it was never going to leave me alone either, that it was always going to be a fundamental part of my life. Janie asked me later whether that bothered me, but do you know? – I actually found it heartwarming.
    What was amusing was that Waris kept on asking me if I knew who the eleventh Doctor was going to be – as if I had some insider knowledge! (And as often happens nowadays, the 13-year-old fanboy in me flipped somewhat, knowing that the director of Marco Polo was pressing me for Who spoilers.) I got home, though, to find out that later today the new casting is going to be announced on BBC1. It’s almost too exciting to go back to the Hartnell episodes. But these ones are pretty momentous, aren’t they...?
    T: There must have been something in the water yesterday – you met Waris Hussein (I’m very jealous), and there’s a new Doctor on the horizon. As I type this, the