Doctor Who - Frontier In Space

Master Plan

Doctor Who -
Frontier In Space
UK Air date: February - March 1973
Six Episodes
BBC Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers.

So Frontier In Space is the third story of the tenth series of Doctor Who, as reissued in the nice Blu Ray set of that season from the BBC. I was five years old when this story aired but I only seem to have hazy recollections of this one. Whereas, the next two stories in the box, I have a lot of childhood memories of terror. Looking back on it now, though, I have to say that it’s easily one of the best of the John Pertwee Doctor Who stories I’ve seen.

This one’s a six parter and involves The Doctor and Jo Grant (played by the always brilliant Katy Manning) getting involved with a cold war climate powder keg in the far future between the people of Earth and the people of Draconia (who are kind of a short hand version of ancient Japanese style lizard people, in terms of their manner and codes). The TARDIS is taken away from our two heroes more or less from the start of the tale and the majority of the first three episodes sees them being imprisoned by various people and spending a lot of time in jail cells, as the plot moves along without them in some areas. It sounds boring and padded but, well okay it possibly is padded but it’s nothing short of interesting and exciting since, you know there’s going to be some jail break or other set piece in each episode.

The plot is kickstarted by an outside party committing hostile acts of space piracy on the two species and using a sound based, hallucinogenic gadget to make the victims believe they are seeing the other race, humans or Draconians, committing these crimes, in order to start an intergalactic war. Fairly soon it turns out that the actual people committing these acts are the Ogrons, a race of quite dumb mercenaries for hire which were on a lot of merchandising such as jigsaw puzzles when I was a kid but were only actually in two stories in the Pertwee era (I’m not counting their cameo in Carnival Of Monsters, reviewed here and nor am I counting the 1990s Eastenders charity crossover, Dimensions In Time). The Ogrons, of course, are being directed by a higher power and it soon becomes evident that this is a master plan of... um... The Master, kind of. In the last episode it is revealed that he is working (although he plans to double cross them) with the Daleks, who only turn up in that final episode.

The story is absolutely superb and it has a great script. Katy Manning’s always watchable Jo Grant is given more to do here and there’s a wonderful scene where she is holding up a very long, one sided conversation with The Doctor to hide the fact from a security camera that he’s already escaped the cell... demonstrating that Jo Grant can talk the hind legs off a donkey with ease when she has to.

The Master is, once again, played absolutely brilliantly by Roger Delgado (aka Roger Caesar Marius Bernard de Delgado Torres Castillo Roberto) who, alas, died quite violently while shooting a television show in Turkey when the car he and two other crewmen were in plunged into a ravine, just a few months after Frontier In Space aired on television. It was a real loss and I think it’s probably why Jon Pertwee opted to leave the show a year later. Delgado’s last scene in this story is of him shooting The Doctor down, before Jo helps the wounded Doctor into the TARDIS at the end of the last episode. The Master would not return again until he was pictured as a kind of melted looking monster in the Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin in 1976. He’s been played a few times by different actors since then and, in at least two of the incarnations of this time lord, the actors have somewhat resembled the look of Delgado in the role.

The special effects in this one aren’t great as the story calls for things like space walks and so on but, it never really bothered us as kids. Even then, I’m sure, we could see those big cables holding the actors up but, you know, how else do you tell a story like this on a TV budget in the early 1970s. I look on them now as a kind of comforting presence in these things and count myself lucky that, unlike some other films and shows put out in high definition, the copyright owners haven’t tried to tart up the special effects and turn them into something they never were (although they have in some of these Blu Ray sets, it’s true.... but there's always the option to watch the original version). I like that the cell holding the prisoners here wobbles when they bash it and stuff like this should always be left in. It’s not just entertainment... it’s art and, as importantly, a historical document of its time. So leave it alone is always my view on the decision to intervene too much with modern technology.

The Target novelisation of the story, always a big winner with kids... I guess they were the Harry Potter novels of their day to some extent, when it came to promoting children’s reading... was one of the few of their adaptations not to use the name of the story for the book title. Instead of going on the shelves as Frontier In Space, the book version was called Doctor Who And The Space War. I probably enjoyed this one along with all the others... I certainly had a copy of this shelved with around 60 others at one point, I’m sure.

The next story in the series and on this Blu Ray set is Planet Of The Daleks, which I assume follows on directly from this story. I only remember a few things from it which haunted my nightmares but I also remember being disappointed with it when I watched this one again on a VHS tape in the late 1980s so... yeah, we’ll see how that one goes. Frontier In Space, though, is an absolute corker of a story and probably, it turns out and much to my surprise, the real jewel in the crown of this boxed set.

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...

Doctor Who: The Sea Devils

Devils In The Deep Blue Sea

Doctor Who: The Sea Devils
UK Airdate: 26 February to 1 April 1972
BBC Region 2

When I was three years old I watched this serial on my mum and dad’s old black and white television set with them. We all loved it. The iconic monsters that were The Sea Devils, rising up from the surface of the sea in their string vests and waving about their strange weapons was bound to create a certain sense of fear and left a memorable impression on me... and it didn’t help that my dad kept doing impressions of them at the time. I remember being disappointed by them when they returned, with their marine cousins The Silurians (see review here), in the era of The Fifth Doctor (and I’ll know sometime soon whether I still feel the same about that) but this original serial was a big hit with me and it’s taken too long, almost 41 years in fact, for me to catch up with it again.

I’m really pleased to say that this Pertwee era story is even more entertaining than I remembered it although, to be fair, I barely remembered any of it past the obvious iconic monsters and a scene I’ll describe in a little while. It’s well written, Pertwee is in complete control of his character, Katy Manning’s Jo Grant is absolutely adorable (and adorably written) here, complete with her trademark white suits which never get dirty even when she’s been crawling through a ventilation shaft, and Roger Delgado’s triumphant performance as The Master is up to his high standard.

The only thing that surprised me was that UNIT and The Brigadier were not in this story. UNIT is mentioned enough but outside of The Doctor and Jo, their presence is never felt on screen.

The other thing that surprised me was a sequence that I’d forgotten but which made a great impression on me as a kid, when The Doctor and Jo are trying to find their way through a minefield with The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, and then use said familiar implement to blow up a load of mines to frighten off a Sea Devil. I remember incorporating this scene into games I used to play in the garden as a kid... but I’d completely forgotten both the scene and my childhood games of it until I saw it again. Little tear brought to the eye their for sure!

There’s also some amazing stuff in the storyline, like The Doctor and Jo being stranded in a fort on an island with only a sick, surviving crew member and a Sea Devil for company. That’s a really good sequence where you wonder just how our two heroes are going to get themselves out of harm’s way.

And there’s another great sequence where Delgado and Pertwee have a sword fight at the end of an episode which is so good, the entire fight is repeated at the start of the next one. And when I say good, I mean corny and riddled with typical, Hollywood swashbuckler incidents and choreography which is bound to bring a smile to the face on anyone who realises that the two actors in question must have been having a really good time shooting this.

There are some other nice action sequences along the way in subsequent episodes and there’s also a heck of a lot of location work than you might expect from a Doctor Who story arc, especially in comparison to the show today. I have to say that this one knocks a lot of the latest season’s stories for six when it comes to sheer, all ‘round entertainment value. I was really pleased that the one memory I had of this show was not marked by disappointment on the re-watch... this one was a real treat for me and I whizzed through all six episodes in two sittings. Great stuff.

Oh, and the unusual synthesiser music by Malcolm Clarke is absolutely suited to Doctor Who and probably made a big impression on me as a child too. I wish they’d have let this composer loose on some of the other stories in the series because it’s quite forward thinking for it’s time. At the very least, I wish the BBC would have a think about releasing the score properly on CD, as a four or five minute suite really isn’t good enough for this music.

A short review, then, but a very positive one. If you’re a fan of the Pertwee era of the show then this one is definitely one of the best ones to watch, I reckon. Sun, sand and sea monsters are just what The Doctor ordered, it turns out.

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.

Doctor Who: The Claws Of Axos

It’s Beginning To

Look A Lot Like Axos

Doctor Who: The Claws Of Axos

UK 1971

BBC Region 2

It’s been a while since I last saw the Doctor Who story The Claws Of Axos... I’ve not seen it since I was three years old in fact and did not, therefore, have much memory of it... other than the much reprinted photographs of the iconic creatures created for this story, of course. Seeing it again for the first time in 40 years taught me two things...

Thing One is that you certainly don’t have to have modern, tricksy writing, kick ass orchestral scores and increasingly long story arcs to be left with a fun, entertaining and attention grabbing science fiction story... these old episodes had some pretty good stuff going for them such as the relationship which had developed between the characters like The Doctor, his playful companion Jo Grant and their banter with other series regulars such as the U.N.I.T personnel headed up by The Brigadier and their long standing villain, who had been introduced in the Pertwee era, The Master.

Thing Two is that you really do have to beware of Greeks bearing gifts... or to be more precise... you really do have to beware of impossibly beautiful golden beings who are really hideous, red, energy sucking spaghetti monsters in disguise... bearing gifts.

That said, this is a pretty standard and simplistic piece of scriptwriting retelling the story of the Trojan Horse... but this time that Trojan Horse is a substance known as Axonite which is given to humanity as a gift in the hopes that it will be spread around the earth quickly through various representatives of different countries to enable the Axons to steal the energy from our planet. The success of this plan is challenged slightly when you throw in the political angle of a British Government who want to control the distribution of the Axonite themselves.

As I intimated earlier, pretty simplistic writing... but when you factor in the performances of the actors involved in selling this little story and the way in which their characters react to any given situation... then you have something which can be quite gripping at times.

Yes, it’s true the special effects on these ones, for the most part, were worse in places than many of the black and white stories that preceded the Pertwee era (and this tradition continued into later Doctor’s eras in an ever increasing trend for terrible effects work) but every now and again they got it right. Case in point, when a spaghetti Axon wipes out a fleeing soldier with its tendril and the soldier disappears in a wisp of smoke, I found it surprisingly hard (if not impossible) to perceive just how the “trick” in that particular trick shot was done.

It’s a shame the rest of the action and effects were a bit less solid though. When a jeep is blown up, for example, not only does it not blow up where the grenade was (hey, two charges from one grenade... impressive) but it also happens to be speeding down a hill when it’s doing it... that is to say, the jeep’s valuable engine must have been taken out and so the effects crew presumably had to push it down a hill to make it look like it was going fairly fast.

But, as I’m sure most of you readers will know, special effects do not a good story make! Roger Delgado’s performance as the original version of The Master still puts all future incarnations of the character to shame and his vibrant, evil and above all self-assured personality is easily as good, if not more believable, than even Derek Jacobi and John Simm’s incarnations of the role.

And, as I said earlier, the relationship between the characters is not all that simplistic. I don’t recall Jon Pertwee being this grumpy in the role before but certainly, for the vast majority of this story, he definitely plays the role as an “angry Doctor” who might well put William Hartnell’s original “grumpy old man” personae to shame. When The Doctor pretends to team up with The Master to escape the threat of the Axons and leave the earth to it’s fate so he can trick them into getting caught in a time-loop, you almost believe that The Doctor has turned into the villain of the piece... certainly his constant companions fall for it hook, line and sinker.

There are some nice one liners in the script and they’re not all reserved for The Doctor and his companions. Periphery characters who are only in it for the duration of this story (often to provide a body count of victims for the alien menace on hand) also get some interesting bits of dialogue and the whole thing comes across as a real ensemble piece. It keeps you watching when elements of the storyline become a bit tiresome and over padded.

So there you have it. The Claws of Axos... an iconic monster but not exactly a great story. That being said, however, it was certainly a pleasant change from some of the other stuff I’ve been watching lately and hugely enjoyable in contrast to some of the more earnest fare of modern television writing. Check this one out if you like a flamboyant Doctor and some iconic monsters puttering around.