I don’t think the book was actually called Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks, any more than the Beatles first album was actually called Love Me Do With Please Please Me and Twelve Other Songs. Fans refer to it as the Armada Paperback. It was a very loose adaptation of the first Dalek Story, which was still called "The Dead Planet". It was published in 1965, the year I was born, eleven years in the past. If my tent partner still has it so many years later it is probably worth an awful lot of money.
The Armada Paperback eventually became Doctor Who And The Daleks, the first of the Target Paperbacks. All the Target Paperbacks were called Doctor Who and The Something even though Doctor Who is the name of the programme and not the character. They had a small bit of text on the fly-leaf explaining why the face of Doctor Who kept changing. My tent partner had hundreds of Target Books and I had a few. Even when I became a Fan, having them was more important than actually reading them.
I suppose I had seen the Peter Cushing movie by then? I suppose I could tell that it was a similar story but not quite the same story? I suppose I didn't think it mattered all that much?
It looked like an Enid Blyton book or one of those books about wars and jungles and Jesus. I mean that it smelt like one of those books, though not necessarily with my nose. It was already even then an artefact a tangible connection to the olden days, when Doctor Who was real. The olden-days kid who had first handled this book had been there at the beginning. Had seen the whole story. Was not playing catch up. I read all the Doctor Doolittle books in the school library, even writing the names of the ones I had missed on a blue card with a fountain pen and putting it in a box on the librarian's desk. It came from a time before the Daleks were the Daleks: when they were just scary new robots in a children’s book with pictures and there was a description of what the creature inside the Dalek actually looked like. I tried to sketch the creature: I have never been able to draw.
It's about time, as the fellow said.
Don’t let’s call them Lost Stories. Let’s call them Never Having Existed In the First Place stories. Imaginary Stories is already taken.
The Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, again.
A black and white photo of a scary looking unshaven man in a military uniform. The title “The Nightmare Begins”. And the summary:
“The Doctor lands on the Planet Kemble in 4000 AD when the space security agent Brett Vyon is trying to warn that the Daleks are about to destroy the earth”.
Who was this Brett Vyon, and who was this Sara Kingdom who got killed and what was this nightmare that after twelve episodes was still only beginning?
The Nightmare Begins is in fact the title of the first episode of the Dalek Masterplan. The Radio Times Special referred to Doctor Who stories by the titles of their first episodes. This made them seem more interesting in some cases than they were: Four Hundred Dawns seems altogether more evocative than Four Hundred Dawns. I think we would tolerate the Gunfighters much better if it was still called A Holiday For the Doctor.
In 1983 they found two episodes of The Dalek Masterplan in a Mormon Church in Tooting. No-one ever explained what they were doing there, and so far as I could tell from the phone book there was no Mormon Church in the vicinity at that time. One cannot help but picture them on golden tablets. I saw one of them at a showing at the National Film Theatre; I think to mark the twentieth anniversary, which would put me in the Sixth Form. It was one of Patrick Troughton’s first appearances at a fan event. It was the one with the Monk in agent Egypt; it starts with him, the Monk, disguised as a mummy. They showed the Dead Planet on the same day, and it very nearly lived up to my expectations, even the bit where they spent a whole episode trying to jump across a ravine. For some years afterwards I insisted that the Peter Cushing Film and the Armada Paperback lacked the high seriousness of the original episodes and should be ignored. I was twenty and a fan and very annoying like all twenty year olds and all fans.
But the orphan episode of Masterplan turned out to be nothing more than an old episode of a black and white TV show in which the Doctor and the Daleks run around some historical back drops and the Monk, the Meddling Monk, the First Time Lord Apart From The Doctor (and Possibly Susan) was somehow inadvertently played by the manager from Carry on Camping (the one with the bra) and in roughly the same style.
If my memory is correct, then one of the Great Old Ones who was acting as MC admitted as much. It’s worth watching if only for the Dalek choreography. Which is pretty faint praise.
(Memory may not be correct. I can remember the tent and the kendel mint cake much more specifically than I can remember the National Film Theatre and Tooting Bec and the Sixth Form; so I may be confusing different showings and different conventions.)
The Nightmare Begins formed in our heads on the basis of one photo of Nic Courtney and a one sentence synopsis. The Dalek Master Plan emerged from a handful of fan-relayed oral traditions. The Longest And Most Epic Doctor Who Story of All Time. We imagined a Stan Lee George Lucas Stanley Kubrick Dalek Master Plan and lost sight of the fact that it was a teatime instalment of Doctor Who.
Certainly, she behaves as if she were a companion, patronised by her stand-in grandfather and menaced by bad guys.
The Doctor and Katerina and Steven in the TARDIS is barely a prologue; barely a recap. The Story Begins with two military men in the jungle, and we are suddenly, metaphorically and literally, in a different world.
Before there was Blue Peter, there was Play School, and it would be nice to say that in three minutes The Nightmare Begins encompasses the holy BBC trinity: Peter Purves and Brian Cant and a Dalek. Play School was a show for pre-schoolers, the closest the British had at that time to Sesame Street. Nursery rhymes and stories and suspiciously long lived gold-fish and counting games. Brian Cant also provided the voice over for Camberwick Green, the BBCs stop motion evocation of rural English life. I had a vinyl recording of one of the episodes when I was a toddler: Brian Cant’s voice is literally my earliest memory. But until the credits rolled at the end of Nightmare Begins I recognised neither his face nor his voice. Putting a gun to your commanding officers head is a very different proposition from pretending that your horsey’s feet are going clippoty clop.
The Armada Paperback eventually became Doctor Who And The Daleks, the first of the Target Paperbacks. All the Target Paperbacks were called Doctor Who and The Something even though Doctor Who is the name of the programme and not the character. They had a small bit of text on the fly-leaf explaining why the face of Doctor Who kept changing. My tent partner had hundreds of Target Books and I had a few. Even when I became a Fan, having them was more important than actually reading them.
I suppose I had seen the Peter Cushing movie by then? I suppose I could tell that it was a similar story but not quite the same story? I suppose I didn't think it mattered all that much?
It looked like an Enid Blyton book or one of those books about wars and jungles and Jesus. I mean that it smelt like one of those books, though not necessarily with my nose. It was already even then an artefact a tangible connection to the olden days, when Doctor Who was real. The olden-days kid who had first handled this book had been there at the beginning. Had seen the whole story. Was not playing catch up. I read all the Doctor Doolittle books in the school library, even writing the names of the ones I had missed on a blue card with a fountain pen and putting it in a box on the librarian's desk. It came from a time before the Daleks were the Daleks: when they were just scary new robots in a children’s book with pictures and there was a description of what the creature inside the Dalek actually looked like. I tried to sketch the creature: I have never been able to draw.
I do, in fact, think that David Whitaker’s conception, of a creature that inhabits the shell and operates it like a vehicle is superior to the later conception that conceived them as more like cyborgs, robots with an organic component. There is a sketch somewhere of a grotesque little dwarf driving a pepper-pot.
This was before Jeremy Bentham but after the Making of Doctor Who.
Fresh eyes, is what I am trying to say. Defamiliarisation. Seeing a thing as if for the first time. A yellowed press cutting: a display of action figures alongside Jubilee mugs.
Fresh eyes, is what I am trying to say. Defamiliarisation. Seeing a thing as if for the first time. A yellowed press cutting: a display of action figures alongside Jubilee mugs.
Is this the whole of the Elusive Magic? We repeat the joke, over and over: "It isn't as good as it used to be; but then it never was." They have been making the joke since the death of Queen Victoria: “Punch was never what it used to be.” The graffito "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be" isn't particularly funny. If we go by linear, chronological time then school camp was no further from the Dead Planet than this essay is from Day of the Doctor. Do the eleven year olds of today hear the flapping of times chariot when they watch The Reality War? Did Michael Grade sever the cord?
It's about time, as the fellow said.
Don’t let’s call them Lost Stories. Let’s call them Never Having Existed In the First Place stories. Imaginary Stories is already taken.
The Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, again.
A black and white photo of a scary looking unshaven man in a military uniform. The title “The Nightmare Begins”. And the summary:
“The Doctor lands on the Planet Kemble in 4000 AD when the space security agent Brett Vyon is trying to warn that the Daleks are about to destroy the earth”.
Who was this Brett Vyon, and who was this Sara Kingdom who got killed and what was this nightmare that after twelve episodes was still only beginning?
The Nightmare Begins is in fact the title of the first episode of the Dalek Masterplan. The Radio Times Special referred to Doctor Who stories by the titles of their first episodes. This made them seem more interesting in some cases than they were: Four Hundred Dawns seems altogether more evocative than Four Hundred Dawns. I think we would tolerate the Gunfighters much better if it was still called A Holiday For the Doctor.
In 1983 they found two episodes of The Dalek Masterplan in a Mormon Church in Tooting. No-one ever explained what they were doing there, and so far as I could tell from the phone book there was no Mormon Church in the vicinity at that time. One cannot help but picture them on golden tablets. I saw one of them at a showing at the National Film Theatre; I think to mark the twentieth anniversary, which would put me in the Sixth Form. It was one of Patrick Troughton’s first appearances at a fan event. It was the one with the Monk in agent Egypt; it starts with him, the Monk, disguised as a mummy. They showed the Dead Planet on the same day, and it very nearly lived up to my expectations, even the bit where they spent a whole episode trying to jump across a ravine. For some years afterwards I insisted that the Peter Cushing Film and the Armada Paperback lacked the high seriousness of the original episodes and should be ignored. I was twenty and a fan and very annoying like all twenty year olds and all fans.
But the orphan episode of Masterplan turned out to be nothing more than an old episode of a black and white TV show in which the Doctor and the Daleks run around some historical back drops and the Monk, the Meddling Monk, the First Time Lord Apart From The Doctor (and Possibly Susan) was somehow inadvertently played by the manager from Carry on Camping (the one with the bra) and in roughly the same style.
If my memory is correct, then one of the Great Old Ones who was acting as MC admitted as much. It’s worth watching if only for the Dalek choreography. Which is pretty faint praise.
(Memory may not be correct. I can remember the tent and the kendel mint cake much more specifically than I can remember the National Film Theatre and Tooting Bec and the Sixth Form; so I may be confusing different showings and different conventions.)
The Nightmare Begins formed in our heads on the basis of one photo of Nic Courtney and a one sentence synopsis. The Dalek Master Plan emerged from a handful of fan-relayed oral traditions. The Longest And Most Epic Doctor Who Story of All Time. We imagined a Stan Lee George Lucas Stanley Kubrick Dalek Master Plan and lost sight of the fact that it was a teatime instalment of Doctor Who.
Doctor Who isn’t as good as it used to be. And even when it was, it wasn’t.
The Nightmare Begins
That opening credit; that wobbly line in the middle of the screen; when the theme tune was a pulse and a rhythm not a fanfare. When the opening credit itself was an abstract riff on the concept of monochrome TV.
Steven is sleeping.
If we didn’t know better, we would wonder if it is his nightmare which was beginning.
Except, of course, that I sill cannot see “Steven”: I can only see Peter Purves, with his badge and his makes table and his annual scheme to make assistance dogs out of silver bottle tops. I suppose there is now a whole generation of fans who know about very olden days Doctor Who but would have no reason to remember Blue Peter.
“The Nightmare Begins”: those words, superimposed over the picture just like in any normal TV show.
That opening credit; that wobbly line in the middle of the screen; when the theme tune was a pulse and a rhythm not a fanfare. When the opening credit itself was an abstract riff on the concept of monochrome TV.
Steven is sleeping.
If we didn’t know better, we would wonder if it is his nightmare which was beginning.
Except, of course, that I sill cannot see “Steven”: I can only see Peter Purves, with his badge and his makes table and his annual scheme to make assistance dogs out of silver bottle tops. I suppose there is now a whole generation of fans who know about very olden days Doctor Who but would have no reason to remember Blue Peter.
“The Nightmare Begins”: those words, superimposed over the picture just like in any normal TV show.
The first time I saw Unearthly Child in the great hall of Imperial College almost the biggest pang was seeing the words “Next Episode: The Dead Planet” hovering so neutrally on the screen.
“Written by Terry Nation.” Not in his handwriting though. Dalek Annuals and Blake's Seven annuals and even I think the Survivors novelisations printed his signature above the titles. A bit, it suddenly occurs to me, like Stan Lee’s signature, appearing above all those comic-book he didn’t actually write. Did Terry’s agent realise that?
Steven is sick, poisoned. The Doctor asks the black haired girl to take care of him.
We all used to think that the hostile scary Doctor of Unearthly Child was just how the Original Doctor was, and that the affable friendly Doctor was part of a gradual fall from grace that culminated in scarves and jelly babies. At least, that was what the Great Old Ones taught us to believe. It was truly the jelly babies and the scarf that I loved.
“Written by Terry Nation.” Not in his handwriting though. Dalek Annuals and Blake's Seven annuals and even I think the Survivors novelisations printed his signature above the titles. A bit, it suddenly occurs to me, like Stan Lee’s signature, appearing above all those comic-book he didn’t actually write. Did Terry’s agent realise that?
Steven is sick, poisoned. The Doctor asks the black haired girl to take care of him.
We all used to think that the hostile scary Doctor of Unearthly Child was just how the Original Doctor was, and that the affable friendly Doctor was part of a gradual fall from grace that culminated in scarves and jelly babies. At least, that was what the Great Old Ones taught us to believe. It was truly the jelly babies and the scarf that I loved.
But this Doctor says “my child” and “that’s a good girl” and puts his chin thoughtfully in his hand. He is much more the eccentric Eagle-reading Peter Cushing than the elderly thug who threatened Ian and Barbara in the junkyard. Not even crotchety. More: doddery.
What does crotchety even mean? I think it means “That quality possessed by the First Doctor.”
The line between an actor fumbling his lines and a character improvising is quite a wobbly one. The girl asks if they have reached the "place of perfection", and he replies “Ah…well…. I rather doubt it. At least….that is….we shall be stopping at a lot of places before that.”
In the beginning the show had been about a child who was not quite of this earth. Her replacement was from the Far Future. This third stand-in granddaughter is a refugee from the Siege of Troy and talks fluent old fashioned. The idea that they were audience-identification figures does not quite stack up.
Adric died in 1982, in retrospect, perhaps punishing Matthew Waterhouse for being, by all accounts, quite annoying. And the world said “It’s the first time a Doctor Who assistant has been killed off!” and the fandom replied “No, Katerina was killed in the Dalek Masterplan!” and here we are, now, looking at her, Katerina, the first companion to be killed, before she has been killed.
Is she really a companion, given that she appears only in one story and is not given co-star billing. (Also: do Balrogs have wings, and where was Watson injured, and how many children had Lady McBeth?)
What does crotchety even mean? I think it means “That quality possessed by the First Doctor.”
The line between an actor fumbling his lines and a character improvising is quite a wobbly one. The girl asks if they have reached the "place of perfection", and he replies “Ah…well…. I rather doubt it. At least….that is….we shall be stopping at a lot of places before that.”
In the beginning the show had been about a child who was not quite of this earth. Her replacement was from the Far Future. This third stand-in granddaughter is a refugee from the Siege of Troy and talks fluent old fashioned. The idea that they were audience-identification figures does not quite stack up.
Adric died in 1982, in retrospect, perhaps punishing Matthew Waterhouse for being, by all accounts, quite annoying. And the world said “It’s the first time a Doctor Who assistant has been killed off!” and the fandom replied “No, Katerina was killed in the Dalek Masterplan!” and here we are, now, looking at her, Katerina, the first companion to be killed, before she has been killed.
Is she really a companion, given that she appears only in one story and is not given co-star billing. (Also: do Balrogs have wings, and where was Watson injured, and how many children had Lady McBeth?)
Certainly, she behaves as if she were a companion, patronised by her stand-in grandfather and menaced by bad guys.
The Doctor and Katerina and Steven in the TARDIS is barely a prologue; barely a recap. The Story Begins with two military men in the jungle, and we are suddenly, metaphorically and literally, in a different world.
Before there was Blue Peter, there was Play School, and it would be nice to say that in three minutes The Nightmare Begins encompasses the holy BBC trinity: Peter Purves and Brian Cant and a Dalek. Play School was a show for pre-schoolers, the closest the British had at that time to Sesame Street. Nursery rhymes and stories and suspiciously long lived gold-fish and counting games. Brian Cant also provided the voice over for Camberwick Green, the BBCs stop motion evocation of rural English life. I had a vinyl recording of one of the episodes when I was a toddler: Brian Cant’s voice is literally my earliest memory. But until the credits rolled at the end of Nightmare Begins I recognised neither his face nor his voice. Putting a gun to your commanding officers head is a very different proposition from pretending that your horsey’s feet are going clippoty clop.
The unshaven man from the magazine was, of course, Nicholas Courtney. Nicholas Courtney appeared with every Doctor in the original run apart from the one he didn’t; and he was Space Agent Brett Vyon before he was ever the Brigadier. His face looks different but his voice is unmistakable.
The biggest miss-step the Revived Series took was chucking the classic TARDIS design overboard. When I see that white room and the white mushroom I know that I am watching Doctor Who. The weird wobbley coral arrangement, not so much. The Doc and Steven and Katerina in the control room is clearly ninety seconds of Doctor Who; but then suddenly the channel flips. The Brigadier and Brian Cant are (briefly) tying to send a message to earth: and then we cut back to Mission Control on Earth, where everyone is studiously ignoring a flashing red light. (I assume it is a red light. Obviously, we are still in black and white.) Then we go back to the jungle planet.
The stylistic channel hopping makes the episode feel more expansive that it actually is. The jungle scenes feel like Blake's Seven, or Survivors, or in short something written by Terry Nation. On earth, all the technicians are bald: there are big perspex maps and banks of equipment but someone is still using a clipboard. People sometimes draw an analogy between the Dalek Masterplan and Dan Dare: but Dan Dare was set in a 1950s retro-future, where the Masterplan gives the 41st century a Things To Come Freemasonry of Science vibe. But the two characters with speaking parts (who aren't much more than a chorus) are arguing about what to watch on TV: a sporting fixture or a political speech. Which puts us more in the realm of the Jetsons. Even two thousand years in the future, people are still just like folks.
People sometimes talk about Padding in Old TV. Other people say that New TV is far too rushed. Roald and Lizan spend several moments talking about their favourite make of space ship. He prefers the latest Flip T4; she prefers the Spar 7-40. “Elegance, plus technology."
If you think that we should cut out everything which Doesn’t Advance The Plot, then certainly this scene should be cut. But I think I can still feel the eleven-year-old's thrill of glancing into a world where spacecraft are as common as cars. That’s what we did when we played spacemen, isn’t it? We did not imagine that we were fighting Daleks or setting foot on an alien planet, necessarily. We just constructed our space cockpit out of chairs and bean bags and maybe tin foil and cardboard, and said “We are on a spaceship isn’t it great being on a spaceship don’t you just love being on a spaceship.”
Mavic Chen is the Guardian of the Solar System. He’s a politician. Although the episode ends on a kind of a twist--Mavic Chen has betrayed the Solar System to the Daleks!--I don’t think that first generation viewers can have been entirely surprised that he was a wrong 'un. He has a sinister name. He looks a bit foreign. I might not go so far as to say a "racist caricature", but foreign, certainly. And literally the first thing he does when he comes on screen is twirl his moustache!
Mavic Chen is the Guardian of the Solar System. He’s a politician. Although the episode ends on a kind of a twist--Mavic Chen has betrayed the Solar System to the Daleks!--I don’t think that first generation viewers can have been entirely surprised that he was a wrong 'un. He has a sinister name. He looks a bit foreign. I might not go so far as to say a "racist caricature", but foreign, certainly. And literally the first thing he does when he comes on screen is twirl his moustache!
While he makes his speech about peace and prosperity everyone ignores the flashing red light warning that the Daleks are about to invade the universe. Subtle is not the word.
And then we go back to the jungle. The extended two-handed scene between Brett and Kurt is genuinely one of the best bits of B-movie space-opera schlock I've ever seen. I mean that in an entirely positive way. I think that this is what the Old Fans wanted us to believe that the Dalek Masterplan was like all the way through. Brett remains calm and soldier like, while Kurt slowly disintegrates. Nation throws every suspense trick in the book at us. “You know we can’t fight… them” says Brett “Our weapons are useless against… those things.” Granted, if we have read the Radio Times, or know the title of the story, or, indeed saw the stand-alone prequel five weeks ago, we know perfectly well who “they” are.
And then we go back to the jungle. The extended two-handed scene between Brett and Kurt is genuinely one of the best bits of B-movie space-opera schlock I've ever seen. I mean that in an entirely positive way. I think that this is what the Old Fans wanted us to believe that the Dalek Masterplan was like all the way through. Brett remains calm and soldier like, while Kurt slowly disintegrates. Nation throws every suspense trick in the book at us. “You know we can’t fight… them” says Brett “Our weapons are useless against… those things.” Granted, if we have read the Radio Times, or know the title of the story, or, indeed saw the stand-alone prequel five weeks ago, we know perfectly well who “they” are.
There is something very Avon and Blake about a situation where the coward points a gun at the hero and demands to be left behind. Kurt knows he is going to die and we know that he knows, but we stay with him for a full minute after Brett leaves. And then he sees….
Well I guess we know what he sees. But it is a genuinely impressive bit of sci-fi TV. He points his gun into the jungle: we see it from his point of view. And again. And again. He falls to his knees, he looks up, and there it is. Looming. Less like a BBC prop and more like the cover of an annual. And of course, the gun fires, and the screen turns negative and he falls down dead.
It recalls the endings of the first two episodes of The Dead Planet: Barbara, lost in the city, waiting for the moment when the unseen presence would make itself known; and Susan running headlong through the Skarovian forest. A feeling of desperation; waiting for a bad thing to happen. Like the beginning of a nightmare.
And then there is another point of view shift: two Daleks, in the jungle, talking in capital letters about who they are going to exterminate. It’s an effective transition: from the looming monster Dalek to the faintly absurd matter-of-fact artefacts trundling through the foliage. Things out of bad dreams: but also unwieldy, physically present, tactile objects.
This is what made old Doctor Who so much like old Doctor Who, and why new Doctor Who has never been able to replicate the Elusive Magic. Every monster (and every planet, and every spaceship) has been physically constructed. Every monster is present in the room with the actor, and therefore feels present in the room with the audience.
(It has been said that 1960s “adult” TV is sexy in a way that much more explicit modern stuff fails to be, for a similar reason. Modern TV can do closeups and long shots and swift intercuts and show us nipples. Older TV had to point the camera at the bed, giving the viewer the impression that he was just watching two people doing it.)
(It has been said that 1960s “adult” TV is sexy in a way that much more explicit modern stuff fails to be, for a similar reason. Modern TV can do closeups and long shots and swift intercuts and show us nipples. Older TV had to point the camera at the bed, giving the viewer the impression that he was just watching two people doing it.)
The final shot of the dead Kurt is quite unsettling. Not X-Certificate body horror, of course, but strong stuff for a Saturday tea-time.
Brian Cant does not stand up and say "It's all right children, I was just pretending."
Some people have never stopped saying that Doctor Who feels like a pantomime: fake horror, fake violence, fake evil, fake death. This Doctor Who is being as real as it dares.
We are halfway through the episode before the Doctor arrives. (There was of course a prologue or prequel, Mission to the Unknown, in which he didn't arrive at all.) We might almost forget what show we are watching. A new, grim-ish and moderately gritty Terry Nation space show--Vyon's Two, perhaps--into which Old Grandfather Who has incongruously materialised.
Uncle Who natters away inconsequentially to himself. Or perhaps he is talking through the screen to us "kiddies" at home. “A city, or perhaps a town. I wonder where we are? All I have to do is get through that jungle and perhaps then I can get some help. I must say, it's a strange place to put a city.” (Who is that? It’s Windy Miller! Let’s see what he is going to do next....") And then the scary man in the uniform puts a gun to his head and says “Give me the key or I will kill you.”
(A clunky bit of construction, if ever there was one. Katerina, who has been told to stay behind and watch over Steven, comes out of the TARDIS with the Doctor purely so he can show her, and therefore Brett, the TARDIS key.)
Was Doctor Who always like this: whimsical safe kids TV rubbing up against dark, somewhat adult science fiction?
This is the change that has come over Doctor Who in its first three seasons, I think. It isn't just that William Hartnell, as he put it, "mellowed" the Doctor. In those first three or four stories, the nasty hostile Professor Challenger figure who has kidnapped the two gormless school teachers comes from a similar world to the Thals and the Cavemen they encounter. But this Doctor and Brett Vyon are gate-crashers in each others stories.
Which world do the Daleks come from? The world of Space James Bond or the world of Childrens' Television?Perhaps the remaining episodes explore that.
"DALEKS!" exclaims the Doctor, in the tone of voice of a form-master who has spotted someone chewing gum. One hopes that even the first night audience responded. "Yes, we can see that you doddery old duffer."
There is an old joke about the man with polaroids of UFOs. But come now, says someone of a skeptical bent: isn’t it obvious that one of those spacecraft is a hubcap and the other one is an ashtray? Yes, says the enthusiast, and when we understand why the human race designed their hubcaps and ashtrays to resemble alien spacecraft we may understand their ultimate mission.
The Dalek city is obviously a model. Furthermore, it is obviously a model made of bottle-tops and cardboard and tin foil: the kind of model that you could probably make yourself in a craft lesson given some effort. And yet I look at it now all those years on and I think: yes, that is what a space city is suppose to look like. That is what space cities used to look like. That was what the future looked like in the past.
It is not a huge twist that Mavic Chen is a traitor: but it is a terribly good bit of narrative architecture. So much has been crammed into the last dozen minutes that when he appears we have temporarily forgotten about him.
Aha, we say, now we see the point of the long digression in the earth control room. Now we see how everything fits together.
But we are watching Doctor Who, not a political space opera. The final cliffhanger is not that Earth’s Guardian is a traitor, but that the Daleks have surrounded the TARDIS.
But we are watching Doctor Who, not a political space opera. The final cliffhanger is not that Earth’s Guardian is a traitor, but that the Daleks have surrounded the TARDIS.
Do the Daleks know what the TARDIS is, or who the Doctor is? They have probably not encountered each other for a millennia and a half….
And now we are back in the present, and only half the episodes are on BBC IPlayer. I suppose there will soon be cartoons. Or perhaps if after seventy years you can find two tapes then there is no reason that any day now you may find six more. Katerina in the airlock. Space Agent Sara Kingdom aging to death. A merry Christmas to all of you at home. We have seen more than we ever hoped to see.
A particular Doctor Who fan, who you may have heard of, expressed his disappointment that the Nightmare Begins has been found because it makes his own attempted reconstructions redundant.
Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment. You love the idea of the thing. You are disappointed that the Thing doesn’t live up to your idea of it. But then you learn to love the thing itself.
I learned to stop worrying and love Doctor Who. Not the idea of it: the thing with its imperfections. I am not one of those who says that I do not want to watch old episodes in case they spoil my memories of them.
I think that there are some people, including that Very Famous Fan, who are only able to love the idea. I think that there are toxic fans who are permanently angry because the actually existing episodes are different from the ideas in their heads. There are people who find it easier to love an AI reconstruction of a Flag than the nation for which that Flag used to stand.
'Tis mad idolatry which makes the servant greater than the god. Hmmm, hmmm my child: I hope you find your place of perfection.
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