Endless Night

Fragment Rock

Endless Night
Directed by Sydney Gilliat
UK 1972
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Endless Spoilers.

I almost didn’t bother writing a review for this one because, although I found the film entertaining, I also found it rather slight in substance. A conclusion which was obviously similar to UK audiences at the time, where it didn’t receive a great reception. Apparently it fared considerably better in Italy on its release. 

Based on a book by Agatha Christie, Endless Night is the last of three films made co-starring Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills, two of which, including this one (and the slightly better known Twisted Nerve) were scored by the late great Bernard Herrmann. And, as I say, it’s not got a lot going for it storywise... it tells the tale of Hywel Bennett’s young chauffer Michael who makes good by accidentally falling in love with and marrying the sixth richest young lady in the world, Ellie (played by Hailey Mills). An architect friend, Santomix, played by Per Oscarsson builds Michael’s dream home for them in Wales (with a location in the Isle Of Wight standing in for it) and things go alright for a while, apart from the inlaws and the former housekeeper who kind of moves in with them... Greta, played by Britt Ekland. Then things start to go wrong and Ellie is found dead under mysterious circumstances one day.

The whole thing is made slightly more interesting than it sounds by the use of a fragmentary structure and a slightly experimental playfulness with some of the editing and stock treatment. It’s told as a kind of fragmented flashback by Bennett’s character and various false starts and other narrative stammers are fought against and overcome to get his story out into the open. For instance, foreshadowing at the start of something revealed in more crucial detail from his childhood only at the end of the picture and an odd scene of repeat edits where he comes upon a faceless woman in a forest, rapidly repeated as a smooth camera movement three times, but treated slightly different on each stammer, with a different colour on each pass having, what looks like, a single colour missing from it... so green and red on one pass, blue and red on another and so forth. It’s quite striking but only lasts a few seconds. 

It’s filed with a whole host of wonderful supporting actors too... Peter Bowles, Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny herself), George Sanders (he killed himself a few months before the release of this film), Walter Gottell (who was in From Russia With Love and then as a regular reoccurring character in Roger Moore’s stint as James Bond) and even Windsor Davies. Plus, in a completely uncredited role, I spotted an auctioneer played by Nicholas Courteney (who was the long running character of the Brigadier in Doctor Who). 

Herrmann’s score is fine but it’s not what you’d be expecting for one of his thrillers, although it is appropriate to the movie. Although there are a few typical Herrmann moments of ‘fright’, using stabs of colour on a Moog synthesiser (Herrmann obviously thought the guy playing it did a good job because he let the musician share a credit on his card at the start of the movie... which I suspect he did because the producers wouldn’t give the musician his own credit and so offered space on his, like he did with the soloist on the film On Dangerous Ground... reviewed here), the score is much more in his lesser known romantic idiom, which aligns it much more closely to his scores for such films as The Ghost And Mrs. Muir than it does to any of his thriller scores. But it is good stuff, it has to be said.

The biggest problem with the film is that it telegraphs the killer from very early on. Hywel Bennett’s fragmented voice-over narrative really does point the finger very early on due as much to what is not said as much as what is initially seen. His general personality traits (and his relationship with his own mother) kind of flags his narrative as ‘not to be trusted’ and, I think without the framework that the director went with on this film, it would have been a far duller affair but with less chance of guessing the killer in the first five minutes, for sure. 

And that’s me done with Endless Night, I think... although I shall return to my CD of the score on occasion. Indicator do their usual nice job of including some extras, many of which on this Blu Ray focus on Bernard Herrmann... I haven’t explored those yet but I certainly intend to do so. 

Doctor Who - The Three Doctors

Real 3D

Doctor Who
The Three Doctors
UK Air date:
December 1972 - January 1973
Four Episodes.
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

And so it came to pass it was time to crack open the Doctor Who Season 10 Blu Ray box set and, the first story in the box is the much loved fan pleaser The Three Doctors. This show must have been a nice Christmas present when the first episode was first broadcast in the holiday period between Christmas and New Year in 1972 and it was the programme’s ten year anniversary story. Of course, only the last three episodes were in it's 10th year and in January... the show itself wouldn’t reach that 10 year marker until November but, nobody seemed to care much and it’s an entertaining story.

This one tells of the Timelords on Gallifrey trying to save themselves and the rest of the universe by teleporting in previous incarnations of The Doctor to help himself fight the threat of the famous, 'missing presumed dead' Timelord Omega, who sacrificed himself many centuries before to give their race the power to master time travel... and who now lives in a black hole of his own making, out for revenge.

This was the first time in the history of the show that two or more incarnations of The Doctor had met each other and, to date, this has only happened four other times (not counting CGI trickery of half glimpsed running feet etc). This marks the first time that Patrick Troughton’s wonderful second Doctor would appear in one of these crossover stories (also his first time in colour) and he would go on to do the same in 1983 and 1985 (although his 1985 appearance, reviewed by me here, is perhaps best left forgotten). Also, because of the failing health of first Doctor William Hartnell, a small ‘limbo’ set was constructed at his home and his few brief scenes, roughly one per episode, were relayed as communications to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee’s Doctors by video screen... the excuse being that the timelords didn’t have enough energy to fully transport him to rendezvous with the others.

And for an obvious, celebratory gimmick episode it’s actually quite well written, at least in terms of dialogue and the story isn’t too bad either. The show also features the then current Doctor’s companion Jo Grant, played by the inimitable Katy Manning (this would be her last season until she returned for two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures opposite Matt Smith’s Doctor in the next century), Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge Stewart (played impeccably, as always, by Nicholas Courtney, who again made his swan song in a story from The Sarah Jane Adventures) and also a bigger part than normal for John Levene as Sgt. Benton (this is due to the part originally being earmarked for Frazer Hines to reprise his role as Second Doctor companion Jamie but, alas, he was busy doing Emmerdale Farm at the time... or Emmerdale as it seems to be known as today).

The chemistry between all the players is very strong and the humour coming from the dialogue is great. This one has probably one of my favourite scenes where, at UNIT HQ in the first episode, where the situation is already dire, the Brigadier asks The Doctor if there’s anything he can do to which Pertwee’s Doctor asks him to hand him a carbon rod. When the Brigadier does this, Pertwee uses it to stir his cup of tea... good stuff.

The really good decision the writers made in this was to not have the two primary Doctors, Troughton and Pertwee, who are present for all the episodes... get on with each other all that well. Just because you’re both the same person doesn’t mean you will agree on things and a great source of the humour and entertainment of this story is the constant bickering between the two of them, both put in their place by Hartnell at one point who calls his ‘replacements’ a dandy and a clown. Yep, there’s some good writing here. Such as the explanation of why so much stuff is pulled into the black hole when Omega is just after The Doctor... “Rather like taking a pill with a swig of water.” There’s even a joke reference in this, made by Katy Manning, to The Beatles song, I Am The Walrus.

I also liked the breakaway sets that were whisked away into the ‘quarry’ landscape of the planet in the black hole and the way bits of man made items are scattered about seemingly randomly in surrounding landscape... UNIT HQ even gets completely transported as the cliff hanger ending of one episode.

The special effects, though, are... not great. The electronic jelly that beams everything back to the black hole is a pretty rubbish looking video effect and the iconic gel guard monsters are actually quite awful and unconvincing suit creatures when you see them moving around. Quite disappointing for monsters who were never used again but whom everyone seems to remember (they even made it onto Weetabix cards, if memory serves).

Omega himself, a completely masked up figure, looks fairly impressive, a little like a golden pre-Darth Vader type presence. Alas, camera angles being what they are, especially when restored to Blu Ray, when the creature is revealed to have been eaten away with, as much of a surprise to him as to everybody else, nothing actually inside the suit, the illusion is ruined a little later on when you can clearly see the actors eyes behind the slits in the mask at one point.

About the Blu Ray... the transfer is pretty good but, for some reason the externally shot scenes, especially those at the beginning of the first episode, look fairly blurry and foggy still. I am guessing this is because the cameras weren’t quite in focus, maybe and, bearing in mind the way these episodes would have been received on first broadcast, probably nobody minded much. It wouldn’t look very different on those old TV sets compared to the rest of the footage, which on this new Blu Ray looks very sharp in comparison.

And that’s me about done on The Three Doctors. Omega would return in a different form for a Fifth Doctor story in the 1980s and the other thing that’s very important about this episode is that, as a reward for helping out the Timelords and saving the known universe, The Doctor is gifted with the components and memory needed to be able to control his TARDIS and travel in time again. His exile to Earth, brought in at the very end of the last Troughton episode and designed to make the show cheaper by not having to constantly make unrealistic looking alien sets, was over. Of course, this meant a very reduced role for the Brigadier and the rest of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (as it was in those days.. I’m not having any of this new Unified stuff, thank you very much) officers in the show but they wouldn’t disappear completely... not yet anyway. Overall, one of the more enjoyable stories and a cracking set of scenes with the Second and Third Doctors working together and bickering their way through the story. An entertaining celebration of a series which, I’m sure, had already run far longer than the show’s original producers had expected it to.

Doctor Who - Robot

First Of The Fourth

Doctor Who - Robot
Airdate: 28th December 1974 - 18 January 1975
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Four Episodes

I would have been two years old when I first started watching Doctor Who. I know this because I remember being laid on a table, for whatever reason... and watching television as the Autons crashed through the shop windows in Jon Pertwee’s debut story Spearhead From Space. So when, in 1974, Pertwee had left the show in a situation which was mostly of his own making (and which I believe he regretted), Tom Baker wrote the BBC a letter and was soon employed, somehow, as the new incarnation of The Doctor. Now I had no idea, at the age of 6, that the character could regenerate and I had to have it explained to me when, at the end of the previous series, Pertwee dropped down effectively dead and regenerated into the new guy. All I knew was that I’d been watching Pertwee’s Doctor and been frightened by such creatures as The Sea Devils and Giant Maggots for, what was then, most of my life. Not to mention reading magazines about the character and doing jigsaw puzzles. So it seemed a bit strange but, I kinda warmed to Tom Baker from very early on. Even had the action figure and accompanying TARDIS (although, unfortunately, the budget didn’t stretch to buying any of the monsters for him to battle... I had to make do with using my Dalek shaped bubble bath). My dad hated him until, of course, he came to love him in the role but... he’s always like that with every new Doctor. He’s going through exactly the same thing with Jodie Whitaker now but, trust me, he’ll really miss her when she’s gone.

Baker’s debut story, Robot, is actually quite good and although he maybe seems a little arrogant at first (as perhaps every incarnation of The Doctor is to some degree) he is also confident and self assured and, I think it comes across very well that the little group of regulars working with him... Elisabeth Sladen as the legendary Sarah Jane Smith (in her second season in the role), newcomer Ian Marter as Dr. Harry Sullivan and, of course, Nicholas Courtney continuing as UNIT Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart... all loved doing the show and it does inject the series with a certain joy which, dare I say it, was somehow a little bit lacking on Pertwee’s last series (after Roger Delgado who had played arch nemesis The Master, had died in grim circumstances while filming in Turkey when his car went off a ravine, leaving all his colleagues heartbroken).

Baker is brilliant and, it has to be said, channeling Harpo Marx just a little bit as, being the youngest actor to play The Doctor at the time, he brings some much needed humour back to the role. Pertwee was , of course, very humourous but he was somewhat drier by the later episodes and Baker’s Doctor is much more harkening back to the days of Patrick Troughton, it seems to me.

The story here is not bad either, if unoriginal. It’s the tale of a political group of scientists who want to take over the world and, by using a big robot,  they steal plans to build a disintegrator gun and eventually take Sarah Jane hostage... the only one who’s been really kind to the robot previously... while they almost succeed in blowing up the world with nukes. And, although, as I said, it’s not exactly original, it does work in a nice tight manner with all the different plot elements and characters all doing things which enlighten certain story elements to the audience while advancing the plot in a way which... I dunno, just doesn’t seem as well done these days.

Of course, you’ve also got some really rubbish stuff too. The Robot itself looks pretty good for a ‘man in suit’ creation but when it finally grows to giant size (the Target novelisation of this one was called Doctor Who and the Giant Robot) the amount of bad, unmatted video screen backgrounds in the thing are really an eyesore. Then there’s the hilarious moment where The Brigadier says he’s got something that he thinks will stop it and the BBC attempt a ‘forced perspective’ shot as they wheel in what I’m pretty sure is an old Action Man tank, into the foreground of the shot. And don’t get me started on the ridiculous, plush puppet which we’re supposed to believe is Elisabeth Sladen, with it’s overly comical dangly legs wibbly wobblying all over the place when the robot supposedly picks the actress up in its giant hand. This looks pretty bad but Doctor Who has always had this home grown, ‘make do and mend’ approach to the special effects on the show and it’s one of the things that makes it so charming (even today, it’s not that state of the art, as regular readers will know I’ve pointed out on more than one occasion over the last decade).

Also, another good ‘I did not see that coming and certainly didn’t remember it from seeing it in 1974/5’ moment is the revelation that one of the ‘good guy’ characters is in league with the villains of the piece. It took me by surprise which, these days, is honestly hard to do. So in that way, at least, the writing is better than it is these days and, since this is Tom Baker’s version of The Doctor, the almost surreal, almost slapstick writing is in abundance and there’s some nice comic interaction going on with all four regular characters (and even with John Levene’s ongoing portrayal of Sergeant Benton of UNIT, too, who does a fine job here).

There is an attempt to inject a little King Kong style sympathy towards the robot at the end, when The Doctor finishes its ‘living metal’ body off with a metal eating virus and I’m not entirely sure this is successful but they do really go for it here and lead up to it throughout the series from the second episode onwards. The music is still very much what you’d expect from the Pertwee era too... which is not a bad thing, I guess.

All in all, Robot is not a bad attempt as the debut of a new and, after not very long, much loved incarnation of The Doctor. I think it would be fair to say that David Tennant is the only Doctor Who actor who has ever come close to enjoying Tom Baker’s popularity in the role and, to this day, Baker is the person most people will think of when they hear the words... Doctor Who. The already, blink and you’ll miss it, out of print Blu Ray set is loaded with extras too and the transfer is actually pretty good for a Blu Ray of a show which never really looked all that great to begin with. Really looking forward to watching the other stories in the season soon. If memory serves, the TARDIS is somewhat jettisoned for a bit and the remaining stories have a kind of thematic link to them after the next story... The Ark In Space. And also, a very budget conscious reason for that link in terms of two of the stories, if memory serves. I’ll get to it all soon. In the meantime... Doctor Who - Series 12 Story 1, Robot, is a good place to jump on if you’ve never seen any before.

For many more Doctor Who reviews, classic and modern, go to the index link top right and then scroll down to the TV section.

Doctor Who - The Green Death: The Special Edition

For The Larvae The Professor

Doctor Who - The Green Death: The Special Edition
UK Airdate 19th May - 23rd June 1973
BBC DVD Region 2

Warning: Slight spoilers in this one.

I last saw The Green Death when it was first broadcast in 1973. I would have been five years old and I remember the giant maggots, which are a big feature of the episode, being a talking point around the house and a thing which would invoke both fear and playful memories of big, wiggly things coming to get ya! I wasn’t expecting it to be half as good as I remembered when watching it now on this special edition version of the DVD but... well... it surprised me in more than one way.

I’ve noticed over the past few years that the Doctor Who stories featuring Jon Pertwee don’t seem to age as badly as the ones starring Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy... I don’t know why it is and the special effects are still quite shoddy, though not as shoddy as the ones utilised in the programme during the 1980s and 1990s... I can say with some confidence. The stories and, certainly, the dialogue and scripts, are all pretty top notch and tackle issues in exactly the same way that all of the best science fiction does... head on and by exaggerating certain elements to be able to explore the issue to a degree it would be less able to do without a science fiction context.

In this one, the big issue is ecology and the environment. It centres on a computer who has taken over the employees of a global oil company which is dumping toxic waste... it’s seeping into a local coalmine in Wales. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) and the always brilliant Jo Grant (Katy Manning) go to investigate the deaths of people who come into physical contact the sludge, infecting them with a virus which turns them into a cheap 1970s TV effect... glowing green before claiming their lives. Jo declines going with The Doctor on a quick jaunt to the planet Metebelis 3, where he acquires a blue crystal which will cause him trouble later in the history of the show, because she believes the environmental work being done by Professor Jones and his group of ‘Eco Hippies’, combatting the global company who is responsible for the toxic sludge and the giant sized maggots who are breeding and infesting the coal mine, is more important... good for her. It also heralds the fact that this will be Katy Manning’s last TV adventure as Jo Grant until her brief return to the role in a two part story, The Death Of The Doctor, opposite Elisabeth Sladen and Matt Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures almost 40 years later (and reviewed by me here).

Now, although Jo Grant was always a well admired character by me, when I was a toddler, my recent rewatches of a few of the old Jon Pertwee stories have made me realise that her character wasn’t all that well fleshed out or given that much interesting dialogue. Here, however, it’s clear that by this point she is really being written in a more useful manner and the focus on her and the dialogue/scenes she is given are all absolutely marvellous. And, of course, Katy Manning really makes the most of it, displaying great chemistry with all her co-workers, including Stewart Bevan as Professor Clifford Jones (she was engaged to him in real life, at the time, although I understand that didn’t last too long) who she goes off with to get married and travel down the amazon at the end of the last episode here.

Now the show is not without its weak moments...

There’s a loose end of a character when one of the principal actors had to drop out of the show due to ill health. The special effects are quite good in some places (the miniature work of explosions is good although the white action figure driving the model of The Doctor’s car Bessie in one shot is hilarious) but utterly abominable in others when it comes to the blue-screen work. Whenever any of the characters goes down the lift shaft in the coal mine, for example, they are quite clearly standing against a superimposed piece of back projection footage. Similarly, although there’s a lot of location work in a fair bit of it, there are a fair few terrible shots when the people at UNIT are walking or standing around a studio, superimposed against a backdrop of the open country. Now I’ve got no idea why this was needed and all I can think of was there wasn’t enough time to get all the shots required and, instead of going back out on location to reshoot, the decision was made to go with a studio solution. In all honesty, it really is quite noticeable and surely hurts the scenes when this is done.

However, everything else in this story seems right on the money and it even involves some scenes of Jon Pertwee returning to his comedy roots as he dons two ridiculous disguises to penetrate the security at Global Chemicals... one is a “funny milkman” personae and the other is the old “dressing up in women’s clothing” routine where he impersonates a cleaning lady. This is all quite amusing, if a bit clunky, but I can’t imagine what young fans of the show might make of all this dressing up shenanigans these days, to be honest. That being said, the costumes Pertwee wears as The Doctor are, as usual, absolutely brilliant and I just wish I could get the crushed leather jackets and the frilly shirts that he got access to on these things... I’d be wearing them all the time.

Not too much else to say on this one. The score by Dudley Simpson is lively and typical of the show in that era, the giant maggots are actually fairly well done but when one of the larvae hatches, the resulting, dragonfly like creature is quite badly handled. However, when The Doctor steps off the TARDIS on Metebelis 3 and a tentacle suddenly whips out from the front of the screen and goes straight around his neck... I have to say that it was so effectively done that it actually made me jump. Something these kinds of shows don’t really do to me that often... at least not since I was a kid, at any rate. The end is quite poignant too and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the last scenes with Pertwee and Manning didn’t bring a tear to the eye. Overall, I’m really impressed that The Green Death has held up as well as it has and I think it’s certainly one of the best Pertwee stories and also, I would say, one of the best of the stories in the history of the show. Now I just have to figure out which Pertwee story to acquire next.

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear

Where Snowman
Has Gone Before

Doctor Who - The Web Of Fear
UK Airdate 3rd February - 9th March 1968
BBC Region 2

I’ve wanted to see this serial for most of my life and certainly never expected to see the bulk of the episodes that are on this BBC DVD release from the end of 2013. You might remember the news story at the time? Five out of six of the episodes of The Web Of Fear and all of the complete serial to Enemy Of The World, two Patrick Troughton Doctor Who serials which had been, like many, purposely wiped out from the BBC archives in the early 1970s, were found and quite quickly released onto DVD. There are no extras on the discs (apart from a reconstruction using the original sound recording and surviving stills for the missing third episode on The Web Of Fear) but the DVDs still managed to hit the top of the DVD charts for weeks and there was a lot of excitement about the releases.

This is an important story for two reasons... the first being that this is the second appearance of the Great Intelligence and his robot servants, the Yeti. This is actually the sequel to the original Doctor Who adventure The Abominable Snowmen but we only have one surviving episode, to date, of that first Yeti story. The Great Intelligence was later to return a few times in the form of Richard E. Grant during the Matt Smith era of the show but the only other time the Yeti were seen after this was, of course, the anniversary story The Five Doctors, when Patrick Troughton’s second incarnation of The Doctor and Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart briefly took one on although, if memory serves, not much more than an arm was seen on that occasion.

And talking of the Brigadier, although this is not actor Nicholas Courtney’s first appearance on the show (that was in a part in the William Hartnell story The Daleks’ Master Plan), it is the first appearance of him playing his most famous character, Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart... although this is before the character was the Brigadier of UNIT and was, at this time in his chronology, a Colonel in the army.  Unfortunately, and as luck would have it, the third episode of this serial, marking his first appearance, is the one missing episode which has been “reconstructed” using stills so, alas, you can hear his first episode but you can’t see it. He is in the next three episodes too, though, so at least we can get a proper look at Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart in his earliest story.

So The Web Of Fear starts off with Professor Travers, played by Jack Watling, and it must have been strange for audiences who remembered the character from the previous year to see him playing the part in “aged up” make-up at the start of this serial because, in the 1967 serial The Abominable Snowmen, he’d played the character as he was 40 years before this second adventure takes place. He is seen at the start arguing with his daughter and a private collector, who has the one surviving Yeti robot shell in his personal museum. However, Travers has been doing some experiments and the Yeti control sphere he is working on has disappeared. We see it break into the museum and activate the Yeti which, because of the impracticalities of the original costumes (if I’m remembering rightly), suddenly transforms before our eyes into the Mark 2 Yeti which, in all honesty, don’t look all that great compared to the original creatures but... hey, I’m really not complaining.

The Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Victoria, arrive some time after this in the underground system in London, which has been locked down and is one of the places where the army is holed up because the Yeti have taken over London. Once The Doctor and his companions arrive, after some fair amount of shilly shallying back and forth among the tube tunnels for a couple of episodes, they lend their assistance to the Army, Travers and Traver’s daughter Anne. However, while his on screen daughter is played here, very nicely, by Tina Packer, this serial is also noted as being the second time that Jack Watling has also played opposite his real life daughter on Doctor Who (the first time being the aforementioned serial The Abominable Snowmen). Victoria is, of course, played by his daughter Debbie Watling and, towards the end of the serial, she shares a fair few scenes with her father. This, of course, wasn’t the last time a parent and child actor would be playing opposite each other on Doctor Who... the Matt Smith era story The Crimson Horror (reviewed here) also featured Diana Rigg and her daughter... but it’s certainly interesting to see how the chemistry between father and daughter works here.

All in all, I had a lot more fun with this serial than with the one I’d watched a few weeks before (The Ice Warriors, reviewed here) as it’s very much a fun romp typical of serials which use a few locations and lots of running to and fro between them as new plans to conquer the alien menace are introduced and tried. The writing continues to be more interesting than a lot of modern era Doctor Who stories in that the B-characters are more fleshed out, even when they have only a very subsidiary role to the plot, and the actors playing those kinds of parts have more to do, with the writing allowing them to bring more of their personality out in the roles. Of course, this is partially because the story and characters have more room to develop in a multi part serial, rather than trying to cram everything into 45 minutes in one hit like they usually have to today, so I guess I’m comparing intergalactic apples to Gallifreyan oranges here... but either way you cut it, the minor characters also have room to leave their mark in these shows.

The Yeti are still a great creature, even if they’re not as pleasing to the eye as they were in the more cumbersome costumes of the previous serial, making nice growling noises and being quite lethal and dangerous, despite suffering from ‘they’re moving so slow they’ll eventually catch up with you through sheer will power of plot function’ syndrome for most of the time. The ending of the story is cool too, in that things don’t quite go as The Doctor had originally planned and, to cap it off, you have everyone running around in what look like genuine sections of the London Underground like Covent Garden, Holborn and various Circle Line locations. I’ve always kind of liked the idea of stories set on and around the London tube system but they’ve mostly managed to let me down. The studio sets on this one are so well done that apparently the BBC received complaints from London Transport at the time, saying they’d filmed in their tunnels without their permission... so the sets are that good.

One thing, however, really puzzles me and it’s something I am hoping one of you readers might know the answer too. As Troughton is running around in a station in the last episode, he passes a movie poster which says it’s starring Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier and it’s definitely the same graphics from the advertising for In The Heat Of The Night from the previous year (although The Web Of Fear itself is set in the ‘future’, in the early 1970s... which makes me wonder about the continuity between this story and the UNIT stories later in the show... up to and including the Brigadier character’s last appearance as a cyberman in the Peter Capaldi story Death In Heaven - reviewed here). However, instead of being called In The Heat Of The Night, the film is called BlockBuster... which makes no sense to me because I can find no record of In The Heat Of The Night being retitled to that in any international territories and, definitely, not in the UK. Now it may have been that the BBC, who wouldn’t be seen to have any advertising on their channels at that point in time, had changed the title to avoid advertising the film. Even the cartoon show Top Cat was always announced on air and listed in the Radio Times as Boss Cat to avoid having the same name as a recognisable brand of cat food. However, if that’s the case, why use a clearly recognisable and famous movie poster and leave the actors’ names on it? And why change it to a term like blockbuster when, to my knowledge, that particular generic term for an extremely successful film hadn’t slipped into usage yet in the late 1960s, when this thing was written? I’d be interested if anyone has got the definitive answer to this unusual “guest appearance” and, if you do, please leave it in the comments section below.

Despite suffering a little from not having a proper third episode... which is a great shame but, you never know, it may turn up some day... The Web Of Fear is a really nice little Troughton serial and I’m delighted to be able to finally watch the thing at last. Fans of Doctor Who, and the Second Doctor in general, will love this one and, with so few of the Troughton stories surviving the whole “missing presumed wiped” scandal, it’s one of the few stories we have to remember this Doctor and these specific companions by. Definitely a nice addition to the Doctor Who library and I’m very much looking forward to picking up the preceeding serial, Enemy Of The World, sometime in the course of the next year.

Doctor Who: Death In Heaven

Carry On Up The Cyber

Doctor Who: Death In Heaven
UK Airdate: 8th November 2014
BBC 1

Warning: Yeah, I suppose there will be spoilers here, if anyone’s still holding out for a good season finale.

Not sure I have too much to say about this episode, following on, as it does, from last week’s overplayed Missy as The Master subplot which, to be fair, didn’t leave much breathing space for anything else. That being said, there were some excellent ideas and concepts which were, mostly, nice additions to the world of Doctor Who. My real gripe about this is that, for all its many parts, many of them good but equally tempered with things which were either dreary or compromising to good drama, this episode, like this year’s series, never seemed to become anything greater than the sum of its parts. Which is a shame because when some of those parts are somewhat broken or ill-advised, you’re left with a vehicle which will get you from A to B without too much trouble... just not in style.

There were some really great things about last nights episode. For example, the addition of the Cybermen coming back from the dead. The iconic idea of Cybermen literally rising from their own tombs and the symbolism of resurrection from the dead has always been a part of the show. When Troughton’s Doctor saw them rising from their tombs in spectacular fashion in Tomb Of The Cybermen, it was a much loved and remembered part of that generation’s audience for the show and I remember myself the impression the similar scenes in the Peter Davison story Earthshock had on me when I was in my teens. So even the title of this week’s show, Death In Heaven, carries on a long legacy of the Cybermen being associated with the imagery and terminology of death. This episode we had an excellent addition to that established continuity with the writer combining the cybermen with the classic imagery of films like George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead and subsequent movies in the “modern zombie” cycle (although perhaps it’s best to go back even further than Hammer’s Plague Of The Zombies, to the 1940s Universal Mummy franchise, to find where the idea of the undead rising from the earth first started on film). So the Time Lord hard drive returning the downloaded “souls” back into the dead as Cybermen and then having them burst out of graveyards was one of a few welcome additions.

Another was the appearance of an old Cyberman helmet from the Patrick Troughton/Tom Baker days... that was good. A bit of a throwaway reference but, so too, was another nice little highlight... the "painted" portrait of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, as played by the late actor Nicholas Courtney, on prominent display in a U.N.I.T aircraft.

There were, however, a lot of mis-steps.

Michelle Gomez incarnation of The Master was a little better but ultimately too little too late and, killing her off (allegedly) like that was a terrible thing. Although, I’m not 100% sure that when the Cyberman incarnation of The Brigadier vapourised her, it was simultaneous to The Doctor saying a set of co-ordinates that could have been a signal for someone to teleport her to safety... or at least get zapped into a... well.. a Time Lord hard drive, for instance? A case of “spoilers, sweetie” perhaps?

And also, as much as I like the homage to the memory of The Brigadier, I’m not sure the character would have chosen to be reincarnated as something he’d spent so much time fighting in the 1960s. I was kinda unsure how to react to the scene at his deus ex machina return at so opportune a moment. I guess we’ll never know what the late Nicholas Courtney would have made of it... I hope he would have at least liked the acknowledgment that the part he played, on and off, for so many decades and opposite so many Doctors, was so well loved and cherished in the series.

I do think The Master’s demise in this manner was preposterous in terms of making it hard for the writers when that character next returns. In the 1930s, the Flash Gordon serials kept killing off Ming The Merciless in the last episode and then had to skate around the issue each time they brought him back in the next serial because they’d kinda wrote themselves into a corner. You’d think that writers these days would learn from the mistakes of the past but, in this case, I think not.

The also killed off a very promising character who, by all rights, should have actually been a Zygon (since the storyline in The Day Of The Doctor - reviewed here - was never actually cleared up or properly concluded, if you’ll recall). I think this was a bit of a mistake but then, there’s always the Christmas special to undo things, it seems to me. I’ll get on to that in a moment.

There was a sense of real loss at the end of the episode and I was really congratulating the writers near the end of the show which saw a bitter Clara and a bitter Doctor both putting on a brave face for the other and both lying about what had just happened to each other... both thinking they were sacrificing a part of themselves for the other. They said goodbye and then that was it... a dramatic ending. Unfortunately, they couldn’t even do that right because we had a mid-end credits sequence where Nick Frost suddenly appears to The Doctor as Santa Claus and basically says this is not how it should be. Now, alright if they want to bring everyone back from the dead (Danny Pink’s great great grandson, or whoever he was, couldn’t have existed in this timeline, or MIssy’s, if these events were irreversible), but this was a seriously dramatic ending ruined by the fact that the BBC couldn’t wait to give us a hint. It’s only seven weeks until Christmas people. It’ll keep. Why pre-warn us in advance? That’s just dumb. And it also ruined the drama of the moment... no matter how much I want to see Nick Frost playing Santa Claus. It’s like the BBC saw a moment of real pathos unfolding in their drama and said... “Oh, we can’t have that. Let’s put in a jolly fat man to lighten the mood.” Pathetic.

Overall, this was not my favourite episode and nor was it my favourite season. Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson have all been outstanding in their roles and are always watchable... but the stories and plot devices they were left to perform seems to me to have left them bereft of something really great to make a contribution to. Still, if there is another season commissioned, and I sincerely hope there is because Capaldi is really right for the role and is knocking it out the park in terms of inhabiting te character and making it his own, then I look forward to it with interest. Despite my grumbles, it’s still one of the best and most well loved TV shows in British television history.

Doctor Who - The Daemons

On The Devil

Doctor Who - The Daemons
UK Airdate: 22nd May to 19th June 1971
BBC Region 2

The Daemons is the last story in the second series of Jon Pertwee’s stint on the show. It’s a much loved classic among fans and, I believe, it was Pertwee’s personal favourite of the stories he worked on for his run as The Doctor.

I didn’t remember much of this one from when I was a kid, I was two years old at the time,  but I have a fair few Doctor Who memories from before this so I must have seen it and I think I vaguely remember Bok, the stone gargoyle that comes to life as a servant of Roger Delgado’s character The Master in this particular five parter.

Seeing it now with fresh eyes, I can see why people like it so much and it’s very obvious that the influence on this particular story probably stems from Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking teleplay for the third of the four Quatermass serials, Quatermass And The Pit (my review of the movie remake of that serial is here). Like the Quatermass story, The Daemons uses supernatural belief and terrors as a way into a tale which eventually turns out to be rooted in science, cannily exploiting the “best of both worlds” scenario to elicit the fantastic curiosity of the supernatural, specifically in this case The Devil, with the “grounded in science” personality of this show’s lead protagonist. Both the Quatermass story and this one both use the idea of another race of creatures chaperoning the human race in some sort of experiment although, it has to be said, Quatermass And The Pit was far more intriguing than this exploration of that concept.

One of the things going for it is that you have a full range of regular characters in the line up for this story, which was in one of the “Doctor is exiled to earth by the timelords” series, due to budgetary restraints at the time. Here we have my favourite of the female companions, the hippyish Jo Grant (as played by Katy Manning) and you have a full compliment of UNIT characters, featuring Captain Mike Yates, Sergeant Benton and, of course, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who in this story utters his famous line, which actor Nicholas Courtney plundered for the title of his memoirs, Five Rounds Rapid. When faced with Bok, the stone gargoyle who is running around and disintegrating people, he casually turns to one of his men and barks the wonderful order... “Jenkins. Chap with the wings there. Five rounds rapid.”

This particularly story is a bit of a romp and includes a force field around the sleepy village of Devil’s End which is keeping The Doctor, Jo, Yates and Benton inside the village while the Brigadier and his team are trying to find a way in. It’s pretty much action fuelled with lots of running about, Jon Pertwee driving both a motor bike and his faithful car Bessie, and lots of explosions (including a helicopter explosion which was tracked in from the James Bond film From Russia With Love, which I reviewed here).

Roger Delgado is in great form as The Master in this one... he’s always a delight to watch. I was, however, surprised to find that the two trained soldiers, Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates, get beaten up and have to be rescued so much by people who wouldn’t be as trained in the art of hand-to-hand combat as they are. I was also disappointed that The Doctor tends to talk down to Jo Grant quite a lot in this one, constantly pointing out her shortcomings to make relevant plot points apparent. However, it is at least Jo who saves the day in the end when she demonstrates the human trait of self sacrifice to The Deamons... or Daemon in the singular, actually, since you only ever see one of them. The make up on the Daemon is excellent but, alas, the special effects which superimpose his gigantic form over the rest of the setting is particularly bad, which is a shame.

There are some sequences when the titular monster is rampaging about the countryside where he is never actually seen on shot and is just glimpsed by others as we see their reaction shots to let our imaginations fill in the blanks. I expect that’s probably a shrewd move on knowing the limitations of the special effects rather than an all out attempt to be subtle but, whatever the reasoning, it works quite well.

Despite the conclusion of a classic but, frankly, silly scene where The Doctor is captured by Morris Dancers and almost burnt on a maypole, the story has some very nice moments and, although I prefer stories like The Sea Devils in the Pertwee years, this is certainly a pretty good jumping on point if you’ve never seen one before... although three scenes rely on Jon Pertwee making use of driving Bessie by a remote control device... when seen as a whole that’s a little over done but it would certainly have made sense when the story was originally spaced out over the course of five weeks. Reminders would have been necessary so we can see why The Master finds himself returned to UNIT captivity at the end of the story.

The other big weakness on this one for me was that, although I can fully understand that the idea of a stone gargoyle coming to life as The Master’s assistant is a pretty scary concept, Bok has his stone tongue permanently stuck out of his mouth... which makes him look rather silly and unthreatening in my book... but I’m sure as a kid I would have been as petrified as this stone monster is himself, so I can understand why he’s become one of the iconic images of the Pertwee years.

Still, a bona fide classic Doctor Who story and one which is well worth a watch if you are interested in the third incarnation of the United Kingdom’s favourite science fiction export. Sometimes it’s better the devil you know...

The Silurians

The Cave And The Bold

The Silurians
UK Airdate: 31st January to 14th March 1970
BBC Region 2

Well... today marks the 49th anniversary of the broadcast of the first ever episode of Doctor Who, so I thought I’d better watch a story and write a review of it. Here we have Jon Pertwee’s second story as the Doctor and I’ve not seen this since I maybe glimpsed bits of it from wherever I was playing or laying when it was on when I was two years old, on a black and white TV set... until I revisited it now. I honestly don’t know if I saw any of this as a kid or not, but little flashes of imagery did keep coming back to me as I was watching it.

I wasn’t expecting much more than a clunky piece of whimsy out of this but, once again, the serial surprised me by being fairly well written, pretty well shot and really well acted. The key UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) team of The Doctor, Liz Shaw and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart actually does have a lot of chemistry... even though it was not long, after only four stories, that Caroline John (who played Liz) left the show because of pregnancy, although I understand the shows producer wasn’t looking at renewing her contract anyway. Which is a shame actually. I mean, I like Katy Manning as Jo Grant as much as the next feller, but I thought Liz was a pretty good companion too. Although she continued with the character in later decades in Who related video and audio productions, she was only seen once again in the show itself in a tiny guest spot in The Five Doctors... which is a pity. The last I heard of her was when she was reading the audio version of Elizabeth Sladen’s autobiography, as Sladen was no longer around to do that herself. Ironically, it wasn’t long before Caroline sadly passed away herself, earlier this year.

Anyway... back to The Silurians. The writing in this story, about a race of cave dwellers who are awoken and want to reclaim their planet, touches on some really interesting themes and moral questions and, in seven episodes, covers slightly different but ultimately the same ground as the Matt Smith two part Silurian story, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood... which I realise now was more or less a rewrite of this original story but with some short cuts taken for brevity. Although, when you compare the two stories, I’d have to say I prefer the Pertwee original a lot more than the 2010 version.

There’s a whole group of familiar actors who turn up if you like playing “spot the future famous person”, including a young Geoffrey Palmer and a slightly younger than I remember him Fulton Mackay, who took me all of the first episode to place without that white hair I used to remember him for in Porridge. Also on hand, as UNIT-Captain-who-slinks-around-in-the-background-firing-off-shots and, amazingly, surviving all the way through the whole serial without being killed, is a young Paul Darrow, who many UK TV watchers will mostly remember from his turn as Avon in the much loved British sci-fi TV show Blake’s 7. It was nice to see all these kinds of people on hand to give quality performances to a show which really made use of them.

Also, Who fans take note, this story marks the first appearance of Jon Pertwee’s (and later Tom Baker’s) old faithful yellow roadster Bessie. I remember everyone used to like seeing pictures and doing jigsaw puzzles of Bessie back in the day.

The special effects are, as you would expect, a bit iffy (although not as iffy as they got a decade or more later) but the silurian costumes themselves are really top notch designs and so much better than the almost fake “pass-for-silurians” costumes which we have in the show nowadays. The design features of these suits really do look “non-human” as opposed to the “people wearing make up and a touch of prosthetics” which producers of all modern TV shows seem to think is the way to go, and which gives the aliens on most TV shows produced today a homogenous, similar look. The lack of flexibility in these old costumes still triumphs, I think, over the advantages of a lighter application of make-up, although there is a very bad performance issue with one of the Silurians on this. The more militant silurian (pretty much the same kind of character as one in the Matt Smith two parter) is faced with the problem, which his fellow silurians also have, of needing to add some movement to himself when he is speaking to show that it is, indeed, he who is speaking. Unfortunately, the actor playing this part seems to go over the top and his silurian seems to have a permanent, jittery movement whenever he’s on screen, like he’s got Parkinson’s disease or something. This really isn’t a good look for the character and it’s such a shame that the story in general is cursed with, effectively, a “mad silurian on acid” performance when the rest of the race are portrayed much more sensibly by his colleagues. Of course, he might have been told to act this way because of the nature of that particular silurian’s character, I don’t know, but I was surprised the entire performance on this one is like it is.

That issue aside, though, it’s a great little story and doesn’t shy away from showing things happening on a much larger scale than I‘m used to seeing in the modern incarnation of the series. When the silurians release a plague on mankind, for example, they actually show it happening all over London in various location shots such as a busy station. I’m guessing a lot of the “extras” in some of these shots weren’t aware that they were being extras in a TV show at all, and I’m not sure you could get away with that approach today, but it certainly pays off in here, especially in a crudely edited but brave attempt at a montage sequence showing The Doctor attempting to discover an antidote and UNIT working “crowd control”, superimposed over scenes of people collapsing in various UK locations. Great stuff.

Not one of my favourite classic Doctor Who stories by a long shot but definitely an enjoyable romp with a very serious edge to it (even if Jon Pertwee keeps doing his “funny face” look from Worzel Gummidge whenever he’s zapped by the third eye of a silurian). Definitely recommended and a nice reminder of the origins of the creatures who are still with us in the show today (and I am looking forward to seeing the return of my favourite of the “modern silurians” in this year’s upcoming Christmas special). Next stop for this Doctor Who fan will be me revisiting a story that definitely had something of a terrifying effect on me as a nipper, although I can’t remember any of it except the iconic look of the monsters. Join me again with my Doctor Who head on soon as I delve into the classic story of... The Sea Devils... string vests n’ all!

Doctor Who - Terror Of The Autons

Mastering The Doctor


Doctor Who - Terror Of The Autons
UK 1971
BBC Region 2

Okay... so here we have a Doctor Who serial that I’ve not seen in 41 years... I was three years old the last time I watched this one. It’s the second and final of the Jon Pertwee era stories to feature the Nestene intelligence and its deadly tools of the trade, the Autons. This is the last time this enemy would be properly seen again until they returned to the series (on more than one occasion) with the inaugural Christopher Eccelston story Rose.

As I began to watch this one, however, it became very clear to me that this story was a pretty interesting tale of Doctor Who “firsts” than I’d realised when I’d slipped the disc into the player. Lets take a little look at those...

My first clue was when one of my favourite all-time companions Jo Grant (played by the incredible Katy Manning) walked into shot and The Doctor was actually quite rude to her. What’s going on, I thought. Turns out these two characters had never met before. Yep! This is the very first story to feature the inimitable, long-standing companion Jo Grant, after Caroline John’s companion Liz Shaw (who featured in the first Pertwee story, Spearhead From Space, which was the first Auton story) had left the show. After accidentally causing trouble and mayhem in her first appearance, Jo Grant is kept on as The Doctor’s new assistant because, it seems, she’s just too nice for The Doctor to tell her he doesn’t want her around. Smart move Doctor!

The second “first” is that this is also the initial story of UNIT (United Nation Intelligence Taskforce) regular Captain Mike Yates on the show (Richard Franklin). He’s got pretty good chemistry with Jo Grant and one might almost feel that romance could possibly be on the cards at this stage. So this is, in fact, the first story to feature the full triumvirate of regular UNIT characters on screen together in the same story - Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates.

Lastly, and my no means leastly, this is the first appearance of The Doctor’s arch nemesis The Master, as played by the late, great Roger Delgado. Delgado made such a lasting impression with this role, mixing charm and ruthless villainy in equal measure... and right from the start he’s using his famous trademark weapon of a Tissue Compressor Gun which kills people by shrinking them down to the size of dolls. In just a couple of years, Delgado would find himself decapitated in a freak road accident in real life, but it’s a testament to the absolute brilliance of his performance that he is the one face you are always guaranteed to think of first (if you’re over 40) when the character of The Master is ever mentioned.

Okay... so this four part serial is one of those ones which got a lot of complaints from the parents of “scared silly” children at the time... and it’s easy to see why. The Auton’s trademark has always been death by everyday plastic objects which are usually harmless and this one has its fair share of ingenious deaths, aside from the trademark shop mannequins. These include a plastic blow up sofa which crushes a man to death by... well kinda swallowing him (it sounds better than it’s actually presented, believe me), a telephone chord that tries its best to strangle the life out of The Doctor, deadly plastic daffodils and a miniature doll that hurls itself on its victims to strangle them. All good stuff although modern viewers looking back at this one through the passing years may wonder what all the fuss was about, and I can’t say I’d blame them. The execution of these effects is so awful and crude (more so than in the previous Doctor’s black and white incarnations) that it’s hard to remember just how naive we all were to be taken in by this kind of thing at the time.  Even some of the effects that shouldn’t be effects shots, just actors in interior sets, are actually the actors standing on a projected backdrop of that interior... and they so look like it. The miniature doll death is particularly disappointing in retrospect, since it relies on an actor in a suit on blown up, projected backdrops lunging... followed by the victim attempting to sell the shot by gagging and trying to pull off a static doll from his throat. Comical death then but... the nation was in an uproar at the time it seems.

But, as typical of the Doctor Who stories in this period of the show, the bad effects work is just not really a problem because the dialogue, story and acting in these things is all top notch and the on-screen chemistry of the performers really helps to sell the story and distract from the sheer clumsiness  of the effects work (mostly due to budgetary constraints I would  guess... the effects teams on these things had to be pretty resourceful) and instead get the viewer caught up and involved in the events as they play out on screen. There’s some nice stuff here, especially when one of the guest characters fights the Nestene consciousness that has taken control of his mind and sacrifices himself for the good of the The Doctor and Jo. Perhaps a little rushed but it still manages to inject a certain amount of poignancy into proceedings.

At the close of the story, The Master helps The Doctor defeat the Nestene intelligence himself but when he escapes, The Doctor reveals that he has swapped out a crucial piece of The Master’s TARDIS with an older version from his own... leaving The Master as stranded on earth as he is. This new Moriarty for The Doctor was obviously expected to be a successful element of the show right from the outset and the chemistry between Pertwee, Manning and Delgado is a joy to watch at these early stages, as they always would be. These characters really hit the ground running.

So... all in all I would say that Terror Of The Autons is even more entertaining than Spearhead From Space and definitely worth a watch as an important serial establishing some long running elements in the show. Put this one on your Doctor Who play list, if you have one.