The Bishop gets lost in time

Actually, having actually gotten the Doctor Who DVD boxed set Lost in Time—which brings together the various bits and pieces of serials left incomplete from the Hartnell and Troughton eras—some number of years ago, the Bishop thought it might be time to give them a proper watch and pass on his thoughts. This entry will get progressively longer as he makes his way through.

'THE CRUSADE'

Two episodes remain—'The Lion' and 'The Wheel of Fortune—which suggest a story as marvelous in its own way as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'. Indeed the comparison is just, because while Robert Holmes may have scripted all of Doctor Who's best lines, David Whitaker turns out to be the better writer of dialogue. His Shakespeare may be cod Shakespeare, but as every gourmet knows, fish and chips may make a fine meal when the stars are aligned just right. That some of that cod Shakespeare is being said by Julian Glover was never going to hurt, either, and the Bishop is once again impressed by an actor who never pretends, nor adopts a manner, yet is always exactly who he is supposed to be. Bernard Kay and others match him, and it is only the two regular Williams—Hartnell and Russell—who seem a little out of place on this collective stage: Hartnell does not so much forget lines as forget the point of them, and Russell doesn't really have the chops to match the likes of Glover. Still, Hartnell does the trickster as well as any, and one has to admire Russell's Ian, all no-nonsense pluck in the face of the dithering, tempestuous but ultimately wise king. Jacqueline Hill breaths a thoughtful calm which shows how very good she could be. Jean Marsh is unforgivably hot.

'THE CELESTIAL TOYMAKER'

Part four of this, known as 'The Final Game' at the time, is not near as bad as its reputation probably suggests. This is not to say it is good, but surreality in Who is like a blanket that can hide a multitude of sins. With Hartnell inexplicably missing for much of his scenes 'with' Michael Gough, the latter declaims as though he is reading off a cue card somewhere in his peripheral vision, and the game Steven and Dodo play is interesting much more for its camp eeriness than its dramatic immediacy. What is most intriguing, though, is the way the Toymaker's realm explodes instead of blinking out of existence—an illogical piece of direction which in the strange world of sixties Doctor Who is accidentally exactly right.

KEVIN STONEY . . .

. . . doesn't seem to be trying too hard in 'Day of Armageddon', the second episode of 'The Daleks' Master Plan'—much like the rest of it, apart from some wonderfully loopy costumes by Daphne Dare. This is a Hartnell that feels very much like a Troughton, and not in a good way. Still, Stoney has a way of keeping you interested in what he does, even when you have no idea why you're interested in what he does or whether he has done anything to be interested in. When he actually does do something, as in 'The Invasion', he is quasi-superb.

'THE UNDERWATER MENACE'

If you want to see when Doctor Who was crap, you watch the Cartmel years. If you want to see when it was awful, Colin Baker is your man. And if you want to see when it was stupid, ‘Time-Flight’ is as good a serial as any. But if you want to see what people who don’t get Doctor Who mean when they say Doctor Who is bad, you’ll always have episode three of ‘The Underwater Menace’.

There really isn’t much reason to watch this, unless you are the sort who gets a kind of kinky thrill from being slightly bored. The dialogue is functional at best and functionless at worst, and spoken by a cast of characters that, regulars aside, vary only in their tendency to psychosocial maladjustment. It looks—there really is no other word—shocking, and of the set and costume design, the Bishop can only be thankful that it wasn’t shot in colour. Of the tale itself, one scene sums this up. The dippy fish people at one point go on strike. These means, in essence, that they choose to do nothing for part of the story. This is filmed.

And yet there is a sense that this is exactly what Doctor Who is and should be about. A scruffy little man in a shabby frock coat getting up to surreal mischief with a cockney ab, a dolly mod and an eighteenth century Scottish highlander, in a setting that’s half fantasy, half Quatermass and weaves cod ancient Greeks, mad scientists, shipwrecked sailors and tinsel-skinned fish people into a, if not actually believable, at least acceptable, whole. There is also a second sense to this: that Patrick Troughton was and is the Doctor, by whom all others ’fore and since are simply variations on a theme; able without flash or show to paint some technicolour into this throwaway via the nooks and crannies of his marvellous face and a judicious helping of energy and pace.