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

announcement is two and a half hours away and I’m furiously batting off text messages from people who think the fact that I’ve done a mildly successful one-man show about Doctor Who means I’ve got a hotline to the production office. Irritatingly, they’re the same people who spent the whole of December shuffling up to me, sagely tapping the side of their nose, and informing me (with no little self assurance) that they had it on good authority that David Morrissey was the new Doctor. I genuinely have no clue who it will be, and am very excited indeed. So shall we kill a bit of time watching some Hartnell?
    R: Do you know, I think we should.
    The Dead Planet (The Daleks episode one)
    R: To state the bleeding obvious: this is the first episode of Doctor Who set on an alien world. It’s a funny thing, though, but whilst the series has often celebrated the sheer wonder of going backwards in time – companions from the black-and-white era to the present day beaming with enthusiasm to find that they’re either in an Aztec tomb or in Dickensian Cardiff – it’s much more mealy-mouthed about space travel. The Hartnell years almost seem to be deliberately avoiding the opportunity to show a contemporary character marvelling at the prospect of setting foot on a distant world – after Ian and Barbara depart, we’ll be given a whole stream of replacements from the future, to whom planet hopping is no more remarkable a concept than catching a bus. (Russell T Davies’ new series, with its emphasis upon wonder, surprisingly shies away from it as well – so much so that Rose Tyler, the first character to represent the audience’s point of view, first steps off Earth in an untransmitted adventure, so we never get to see her reaction to that locale.)
    It’s worth asking why that’s the case. It can’t just be that the programme makers are more comfortable showing off historical costumes and pageantry, so can do so with greater confidence. (Besides which, Skaro here doesn’t look that much more alien than the rocky wastes where Ian and Barbara first encountered the cavemen.) Instead, it’s that the settings of the past are much more familiar, and our schoolteacher characters are able to offer information and points of view which make them seem useful. Ian and Barbara are unwilling travellers – given the opportunity to walk around a petrified jungle and encounter strange horned creatures made out of metal, all they really want to do is complain about the journey diversion. It’s a dangerous game for the series to play, to turn its first alien world not into a place of magic and beauty, but instead somewhere no-one much wants to be. We’ll see in the 1980s, when Tegan Jovanka in Season Nineteen regularly reacts to mind-popping spectacle with sarcastic cynicism, how this approach can be a bit wearying. But it works so very well here, precisely because Barbara’s despair, and Ian’s over-cheery attempts to make the best of things, are so very realistic. We’re five weeks into this show, and yet none of our lead characters have yet given themselves over to the stereotypes demanded by adventure series, where the excitement of the chase and death-defying thrills are actively being sought. Here, we have a couple of ordinary people from sixties England being given a sight that no-one else on their world has ever seen – and they show more genuine enthusiasm at the bacon ‘n’ egg sweet they get from the TARDIS food machine.
    What the episode does, though (and most usefully), is put the Doctor centre-stage. For the last few weeks, the TARDIS crew have shared a common aim: run away from wherever their Ship takes them. (It’ll be a recurring plot point of most of these early adventures, and it’s telling that even when Terry Nation sits down to write Destiny of the Daleks some 14 years later, he includes in the first episode something which prevents the crew from just getting back inside the TARDIS and taking off, as if