Doctor Who - The Romans

Lyre, Lyre,
Rome’s On Fire

Doctor Who - The Romans
Airdate: 16th January - 6th February 1965
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray Two Episodes

Carrying on from the end of The Rescue (reviewed here), the story that introduced Maureen O’Brien as new companion Vicki, The Romans was the first real attempt add some comedy in Doctor Who. It was also one of the two educational/historical stories in the second season... something which was originally the intended brief for the show but, already the producers were realising that the purely historical shows suffered more in the ratings. When Verity Lambert saved the show by going with the Daleks in the second story of the first series, the genie was out of the bottle so to speak. Consequently, this season brought not one but two Dalek stories with it.

Okay, so it was played slightly for laughs and writer Dennis Spooner, who wrote a lot of great television shows in his time, delivered a pretty good script but, I have to say, unless I’d known beforehand that this was supposed to be a comedy, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. Although there is a nice moment when The Doctor deliberately misremembers Ian’s name to set up a joke which is pretty clever. But it’s not wild humour like the writers could get away with when Patrick Troughton joined the show, for sure.

So we have William Hartnell as The Doctor, Maureen O’Brien already firmly established and, of course, Ian and Barbara played by William Russell and Jaqueline Hill. This one is odd in that it replays the moment from the end of the last story where the TARDIS materialises and promptly falls off a cliff edge but then, we rejoin the four characters fully kitted out in Roman clothes and enjoying a holiday at a villa which they have taken over while the owners are out. So the action jumps a month from that first scene and The Doctor is not worried about heading off in the TARDIS again when it’s time for the holiday to end, mentioning it can dematerialise from any angle.

Then, in true serial fashion, the main characters get separated. While on a jaunt to Rome, The Doctor and Vicki come across the body of a murdered lyre player and The Doctor poses as him when a Roman centurion goes to find the man who, it turns out later, he knows should be dead. So The Doctor and Vicki end up in Nero’s palace as entertainers, where they get involved in a conspiracy to kill the emperor. Meanwhile, Ian and Barbara get kidnapped as slaves. Ian finds himself on a Roman Galley while Barbara is, luckily, sold to Nero’s palace. Ian escapes the galley and goes looking for her and, by the time of the fourth episode, shenanigans ensue as the main cast are once again reunited in one way or another.

And, yeah, it’s not a bad story actually. It was a lot more painless than I’d imagined the historical ones of the time would be and there were, it has to be said, some eyebrow raising moments. Such as a fight scene which takes place in the second episode between The Doctor and a would be assassin. I certainly didn’t expect to see the elderly Hartnell throwing himself and his opponent around and even, without the aid of a stuntman that I could detect, throwing someone with a Judo move. Pretty good stuff.

There’s also a scene right at the end when Vicki, after it’s clear that The Doctor accidentally burning Nero’s plans by hiding his glasses behind his back and magnifying the sun’s rays is responsible for the Emperor’s idea to set light to Rome, tries to make him understand that it’s his fault Rome (and presumably many of the people in it) is burned to the ground. The Doctor at first rejects this theory (and would continue to reject that notion in the 2008 story The Fires Of Pompeii) but then embraces the idea with much laughter... so, yeah, for future versions of The Doctor that may seem a little out of character but, you really don’t get the sense of it here.

There’s lots of unintentional humour in the things too, as is made much of in this disc’s Behind The Sofa extras, where the three teams of past companions watching this story are in fits of laughter that the Centurion’s helmet keeps bobbing up and down on his head whenever he’s talking (with Bonnie Langford laughing so hard I thought she was going to pass out) and there are also a lot of places where you can tell, in the days when re-takes were an expensive rarity, that Hartnell is forgetting his lines and ad libbing while the other actors try to accommodate.

All in all, though, I quite liked The Romans and I’m warming to Vicki as a companion surprisingly quickly. Next up, though, is The Web Planet, which I remember trying to watch in my teenage years on VHS and never managing to get through it. I loved the Target novelisation when I was a kid but the quality of the footage when I tried to watch it was alarmingly bad, from memory, So I’m hoping the new Blu Ray version will look a heck of a lot better than that. Time will tell, I guess.