Doctor Who - The Time Meddler

Fair To Meddling

Doctor Who
The Time Meddler
Airdate: 3 July - 24th July 1965
BBC  Region B Blu Ray
Four Episodes

Just a very brief review of the last story in the second season of Doctor Who, The Time Meddler... one which I’ve always wanted to see. Okay, so following on from the events of the previous story, The Chase (reviewed by me here), The Doctor (William Hartnell) and Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) are discussing the departure of Ian and Barbara from the crew of the TARDIS, only to find that Peter Purves’ character, Steven, made it out of harms way by, somehow (let’s not get into it), stowing himself away. Actually the chemistry between him, Maureen O’Brien and Bill Hartnell, thanks to a script that really works well, is excellent and I’m surprised this team is not better remembered. But then, I believe a large proportion of the stories in the next few seasons are lost to time so, perhaps that’s why.

Anyway, the TARDIS lands in Anglo Saxon England in 1066 but, their movements are being watched by a mysterious monk, played by famous British comedian (and Carry On film regular) Peter Butterworth. Vicki and Steven soon find themselves separated from The Doctor (of course, that’s how these dramas work) and it’s all shenanigans befriending the locals and trying to dodge a Viking invasion scouting party. But, something’s not right because, why was the monk checking his wrist as though looking for a watch? A watch that Steven finds later in the episode. Not to mention the church is lit with a simple flick of a switch. And are there really a lot of monks in that Abbey... no, it’s a recording playing on Peter Butterworth’s gramophone. Wait, what?

As the story suggests, the monk, or The Meddling Monk as he came to be known, is someone who is deliberately interfering in time. It’s mentioned that his anti-gravitational lifts helped build Stonehenge, for instance. ‘The why’ is of no concern to The Doctor, who shuns the idea but ‘the how’ is very simple. At the end of the third episode, Vicki and Steven follow an incongruous cable leading into a door in the side of a big tomb... they go through and it reveals they are standing in another TARDIS! The Monk’s TARDIS, a much later type and improved model with, obviously, a chameleon circuit that is not stuck as a 1960s Police Box. Although the show hadn’t yet come up with the idea of Gallifrey and the Timelords yet, The Doctor acknowledges that The Monk is from the same race of people as he. My thinking is that he’s a much more benignly mischievous prototype for The Master character who was created for the show against the third incarnation of The Doctor. In fact, The Meddling Monk was the show’s first recurring ‘villain’, in that he was in a couple of episodes of the next year’s 12 part story The Dalek Master Plan... although all but two episodes exist (I think I might have seen one of The Meddling Monk episodes of that on a compilation DVD of incomplete Doctor Who serials, a couple of decades ago).

And there’s not too much more to be said about this other than, perhaps, that the backdrop skies on some of the ‘studio as exterior location’ shots are much better than previous attempts. And there are a bizarre couple of shots of close up, bloodless but nonetheless intense stabbings which were not in the copy of the episode found in Nigeria (and presumably redubbed with the original audio recordings) because they were cut. I’ve not yet watched the documentary on this one to see how the BBC managed to restore them for this release but, for a children’s programme, even in less ‘nanny state’ times, it’s pretty intense. You feel those ‘trick theatrical blades’ go in.

The end titles are also pretty remarkable on the last episode, where the BBC have superimposed white, posterised faces of the three main characters over a starry background. The show had not yet got to the stage where The Doctor’s face appeared in the opening titles so, I guess this closing title was Hartnell’s one time where he was represented in a graphic form during a credits sequence.

And, yeah, The Time Meddler is not a bad story... I kinda enjoyed it and, it packs a lot into the four episodes, for sure. Apparently, a good time was had by all during the shoot, with Butterworth milking the cast and crew for laughs between takes. It’s a nice way to end the second series, for sure.