Doctor Who - The Space Museum

Whoseum Piece

Doctor Who -
The Space Museum
Airdate: 24th April - 15th May 1965
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray
Four Episodes

Okay then. The Doctor Who story The Space Museum is a little odd but, of course, that makes it all the more interesting and, despite it not being held in very high regard by the show’s still growing fan base, I certainly thought this one was quite enthralling.

Following on from being frozen/paralysed in the TARDIS at the end of the last episode of The Crusades (reviewed here), in footage which is repeated, the crew of the TARDIS... William Hartnell as The Doctor, Maureen O Brien as Vicki, William Russel as Ian and Jaqueline Hill as Barbara... find themselves in a space museum. And the planet housing the museum is a pretty badly shot environment, it has to be said... when the actors manage to cast shadows on the backdrop of the sky and rocks in the distance, it’s a pretty big giveaway that it's a small studio. But odd things happen like, after beings frozen they somehow find that they are no longer in their crusades costumes. And when Vicki accidentally drops a glass of water, it reassembles itself and jumps back into her hand (in one of the very few pieces of early recording on film stock for a ‘non-location screen’ in a show, in order for the film to be reversed).

And when they go out onto the planet they are walking around in thick dust but... leaving no footprints (which I suspect is a discovery with more of an eye on explaining why they weren’t leaving footprints on the studio set, to be honest). Then, they go inside a structure and find themselves in a space museum, but out of time phase with everything else. It must have been a great tease for viewers at the time when they come face to face with a Dalek, only to find out it’s an exhibit. Although, personally, I would have questioned why, in all of the museum, that was the only exhibit which was labelled up. It’s more of a shock for the regular companions when they come face to face with frozen and embalmed corpses of themselves in four display cabinets, which is when The Doctor realises they are somehow out of phase with time and are actually exploring the planet before they’ve actually arrived (which in the fourth episode is explained away as a malfunctioning component in the TARDIS). He says that, when they do arrive (and this happens early on in the second episode when the encased versions of themselves dissappear), they will be in great danger and will have to make sure that this possible future event doesn’t actually occur. The rest of the story, which once again splits the four companions, is about evading the military presence who run the space museum and teaming up with a ‘rebel faction’ whose planet it was in the first place.

And it’s odd because the whole ‘out of phase’ stuff from the first episode, as intriguing as it is, is not really explained to a satisfactory degree and, frankly, it would still certainly not explain why the travellers are in their crusades clothes one minute and then in their regular attire the next. Furthermore, certain plot details made apparent seem to be dropped in without any pay off later in the serial, such as when The Doctor makes a big thing out of Ian having a button on his jacket missing. You could surely be forgiven for assuming that this will come up later in the story as a way of telling one time phase from another but, no, it’s not mentioned again other than in the second episode of this four episode arc.

But it is enjoyable and has moments such as William Hartnell hiding in a Dalek and, when the coast is clear, putting on a Dalek voice and popping out of the top in a comical manner. Also, newby companion Vicki really shines in this episode, as she stirs up the rebels into a full scale revolution single handedly, by taking apart and rewiring the computer defending entry into the military armoury and enabling the rebels to retake their planet from the, really very small, occupying force.

Okay, so it’s pretty entertaining despite its many flaws and I really thought it was quite good. Also, though, it has a decidedly odd ending to the fourth and final episode. Viewers at this point were more than familiar with the practice of dovetailing the story into the next arc but this one does it more like a teaser trailer by showcasing the Daleks (who really have nothing much to do with this story at all, other than an older, differently designed model being on display in the museum). It’s really the Daleks tracking The Doctor in their own time machine (don’t know how they got one yet) and letting viewers know, at the beginning of the whole Dalekmania period of fandom, that they will be back in it for the next story, entitled The Chase. Which is the next one in this set and which I look forward to watching. That being said, I can only hope the BBC have paid all thier licences as footage of The Beatles was included on a screen in the TARDIS in the original broadcast of that serial and, I know from a recent viewing of The Evil Of The Daleks (review coming soonish), that they certainly didn’t include The Beatles song from the original broadcast in the new edition of that story. Time will certainly tell, I guess.*

Meanwhile, as far as I’m concerned, The Space Museum is another winner of a story and, what it maybe lacks in dynamic punch for some viewers, it certainly makes up for in it’s odd, off kilter qualities, I reckon. I certainly enjoyed my visit with it. It’s a shame the BBC didnt include a Behind The Sofa extra for this one... although there is a charming but short documentary on the collectibles/merchandising of the 1963-65 period of Doctor Who which is worth a look, it has to be said. 

*Since writing this review, time has indeed told and, let's just say if you purchased a UK edition of the Blu Ray like me, you got lucky where many didn't.

Doctor Who - The Rescue

Discreetly
Packaged Dido

Doctor Who - The Rescue
Airdate: 2nd - 9th January 1965
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray Two Episodes

Warning: Full spoilers.

This story follows on from Caroline Ann Ford’s departure as original companion, The Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, in the previous story The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (reviewed by me here), alluded to fleetingly when William Hartnell’s Doctor briefly forgets she’s no longer on the TARDIS. The Rescue served as a very short, two part introduction to the newest companion joining the TARDIS crew, Vicki, played by Maureen O’Brien. And it’s a quite nice introduction, at that. Apart from the last story, I’d not seen any of the other shows in the new Second Series Blu Ray set from the BBC and the ride so far is of varying quality but, never less than interesting, it has to be said.

So The Doctor, Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jaqueline Hill) land in a cave on the planet Dido and are menaced by a threatening alien called Koquillion. They are split up and Barbara survives a cliff top plunge by being rescued by one of two survivors of a crashed spaceship, Vicki and the disabled Mr. Bennet, played by Ray Barrett. The Doctor and Ian, left in the cave with a ferocious looking monster (guy shambling around on all fours in a rubber suit) and a series of traps, seek to get out to find out what’s happened to Barbara while she, rescued by Vicki, bickers with her and Mr. Bennett about their safety and how they might throw off the threat posed by Koquillion. The Doctor and Ian eventually arrive (after Barbara has accidentally shot Vicki’s pet monster to death) and The Doctor solves the riddle of what’s really going on.

Now, I have to be candid here... around about 15 minutes into the first episode, I realised there was going to be a twist and guessed exactly what the twist would be. But, I have to say... it’s a smashing twist and normally, even though I can usually see the twists coming a mile off most of the time... I really shouldn’t have seen this one coming and I think a lot of people, including many of the various guest companions watching this as part of the much loved Behind The Sofa watch-along extras in this set, were taken by surprise by it. I only guessed it because the monster costume on the Koquillion looked so much like a standard man in a suit that I figured it was actually supposed to be representational of a man wearing a suit... and not just some ‘golly weren’t the monster suits so bad in those days’ manifestation. So, yeah, I was way ahead when it turns out the person responsible for the deaths of the rest of the crew members and the majority of the Dido race was actually the disabled Mr. Bennet himself, putting on the personae of Koquillion and heading for a pure Scooby Doo ending when The Doctor works this out and he unmasks himself. It didn’t take me long to figure out both Koquillion and Mr. Bennett were never seen together at the same time.

At the end, a really bizarre and, possibly slightly disappointing bit of deus ex machina resolution sees Mr. Bennet fall to his death and The Doctor waking up in the TARDIS, to offer Vicki the chance to ride along from adventure to adventure with them. As was standard for the show at the time, the story finishes and automatically starts off the next adventure, with the TARDIS landing somewhere and falling off a precipice.

Okay, it’s actually, despite how some people feel about this one, a really nice introduction to the character of Vicki... who’s not such a cardboard cutout of a character, it seems to me, as you might think and definitely modelled from the same mould as Susan, in terms of arguing about things and being quite child-like in places. I’ve never seen this companion before but I’ve warmed up to her right away, even though the person she was replacing was absolutely phenomenal in her role. It’s a hard gap to plug but I think the writing and performance fills it pretty well here.

The actors are all great although, since they were only allowed two edits or retakes an episode, you can once again see how Hartnell’s memory started flagging and how he pauses and talks around things to give the right cue to the other actors after remembering what his real lines were... with William Russell occasionally looking bemused or off set to see if he should try to continue or not, it seemed to me. Hartnell, though, is absolutely electric in the role here and he really does save the story in some ways. His pep talk to Vicki and his later confrontation with Mr. Bennet/ Koquillion is pretty strong and helps things along greatly.

The one thing which I only just realised is that they were also writing in scenes where he’s almost the butt of the joke in terms of humour. For instance, with Ian suggesting or observing something and the elder Hartnell ignoring it and eventually flagging it up himself. I reckon this was to get the teenagers into the show more, to identify with the younger members of the cast looking up at the old fuddy-duddy and it probably would work to retain these audiences on this show, for sure. Make no mistake though, Hartnell’s Doctor is ingenious and with a lot more going on that you at first see... Hartnell plays it to perfection as somebody who really has some teeth which, when they come out, certainly demonstrate his bite is louder than his bark, so to speak.

So, yeah, The Rescue is another excellent, if short, story and I really enjoyed this one. I’m not looking forward to the next one so much as it’s one of the period/eductional stories but, well, let’s wait and see. I’ll report back here soonest.

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child

Who Un Earth?

Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child
Airdate: 23rd November -
14th December 1963
BBC 1 - Region 1 DVD
Four Episodes

I hadn’t seen the very first Doctor Who serial since it was repeated, when younger viewers such as myself could finally see these older episodes, as part of a five story collection of 18th Anniversary shows called The Five Faces Of Doctor Who (which kinda cheated since the only footage we’d seen as yet of The Fifth Doctor thus far, repeated as part of this season, was the last 20 or so seconds of Tom Baker’s last story). I remember at the time being extremely intrigued by the opening episode of this one but, finding the following three parts somewhat underwhelming. However, I thought I’d revisit the serial again, this time as a DVD, which is a third, bonus disc included in the US Blu Ray edition of An Adventure In Space And Time (which I reviewed here).

Now, I remember the first episode being extraordinarily well written and suspenseful and, sure enough it is. It tells the story of two teachers and ‘about to be companions’ of The Doctor, who are discussing a mysterious and ‘ahead of her time’ student, Susan Foreman. They want to get a handle on her strangeness and, eventually follow her home, to an old junkyard where they end up meeting Susan’s grandfather, The Doctor (after about ten minutes into the first 25 minute installment), get into an argument with him, get alarmed about the inside of the TARDIS being bigger than the outside and, eventually, by the end of the first episode, being pitched back to the days of the cavemen. The following three episodes, while definitely fulfilling the brief to educate kids, shows them embroiled in a power struggle between two violent and ‘would be’ leaders of a tribe, held captive until they can show one or the other how to make fire. Yeah, episodes 2-4 are still pretty much silly shenanigans but, it’s really not as badly written as I remember.

So much for the plot. The actors and script are all superb (in the first episode), however. We have Carole Ann Ford as Susan, playing her as a teenager (although she was in her twenties when she took this role) and in a much different but striking way to the much younger version of her presented in the two movie adaptations. There’s also Jacqueline Hill as history teacher Barbara Wright, who is mostly the scream and act like a damsel person in this first serial but I seem to remember she got much better things to do in later stories.

Then there’s William Russell as science teacher Ian Chesterton, who I always kind of liked and he’s the ‘young man’ member of the cast, presumably to be the one to do any fighting or heavy lifting as required in each story. He later returned to the role as a cameo in Jodie Whittaker’s last story, The Power Of The Doctor (reviewed here by me) in 2022, marking it as the longest gap for a returning actor playing a character in TV history, I believe.

And, of course, we have William Hartnell, who was finally persuaded to join the show and, after a very short while, rather took to it. It’s a very different version of The Doctor than most kids would perhaps accept easily today and, the same can be said of the show as a whole. The nice thing about Hartnell’s portrayal of the role was that he was stubborn, tetchy, antagonistic and, in the early days, you never knew if he was a hero or a villain so much. For instance, in this story, when a caveman has been badly mauled by a beast and his companions, who have all been trying to escape from the victim, stay to help said caveman recover form his wounds... Ian catches The Doctor about to bash the wounded caveman’s head in with a rock because he’s slowing down their retreat back to the TARDIS.

And when I say it’s a very different show... well, for instance, when the caveman is mauled (off screen) by some kind of animal, his torso is absolutely covered in blood. Pretty sure they wouldn’t get away with that in that time slot these days.

There are a few interesting things about the show so let me just quickly point out the obvious ones but, before I do that, I noticed a big continuity problem this time around which I’d never thought of before and so I’ll maybe point that out here (I’m sure I’m not the first to do so). When Barbara lends Susan a book on the history of the French Revolution, once left on her own she begins to read it and mutters to herself... “That’s not right!” Well, all well and good but, bearing in mind she doesn’t actually visit the French Revolution until a 1964 story, later in the same series, one has to wonder how the heck she would know the history books have got it wrong.

The show starts out with the chilling title sequence and Ron Grainer’s catchy theme tune, rendered all the more unearthly, to match the first episode premise, by the uncredited arrangement by the late, great Delia Derbyshire. It must have put fear into the hearts of children everywhere whenever it started each week and it’s still, pretty much, the most effective arrangement of the theme tune (various modern arrangements don’t stand a chance against it).

In the last part of the final episode of the first serial (each series was put together by a number of Doctor Who serials), the episode bleeds into the next story, where the needle on the TARDIS Geiger counter slips into the danger zone, unnoticed by the crew. This is, of course, because they have just landed on the planet Skaro and are about to come face to face with The Doctor’s most famous and popular villains, The Daleks.

Now, about that. Sidney Newman, the show’s producer, tasked Verity Lambert with bringing a science fiction programme which would educate children and families... his big edict was “no bug eyed monsters”. If Lambert hadn’t rebelled against that idea and ran with The Daleks as the follow up story, I believe Doctor Who would not have survived it’s first season. They had some ratings issues for sure. In addition to some of Britain being hit by a power cut the night the first episode aired, it was also the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy, with news programmes and national trauma (to an extent) overshadowing proceedings. The BBC took the opportunity to repeat the episode again before the second one aired, which picked them up a fair few more viewers but, honestly, the rating were not what they would have liked (although, compared to ratings today for a TV show, the viewer numbers would seem a smash success). Doctor Who was, though, a smash success... but only because Lambert went ahead and ran with a science fiction story featuring the mechanistic, exo-skeletoned Daleks. She realised the gambit had paid off over the next few days when kids in playgrounds and on buses were stretching their arms out and yelling “Exterminate”. Plans were quickly put in place for the Daleks to return the following year and there was also some development considered for a spin-off Dalek television series... which didn’t quite happen but, with various bits of strange news coming out of new co-owners Disney just recently, this still might occur.

And that’s me pretty much done on the opening story. A lot of the mythos surrounding the character of The Doctor is established in these first few episodes... more than you might think. Names and places are not revealed as yet but various pieces of lore built on and expanded over the years have certainly been thought about due to the open ended nature of some of the things said. If you’re a fan of the show and you’ve never seen it before, Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child, is well worth a look... especially the first episode, which sets things in motion. It’s not all that dated and surprisingly well written... maybe give it a go sometime.