Best of Three

I wasn’t going to write a concluding post for my Pertwee watch-a-thon. I thought, if there’s anything I could ever find to say on this era, I must have said it somewhere in the last year or so that I’ve been a-watchin’ and a-bloggin’ about it. But then I thought of this title for this post and I thought, well, a top ten list wouldn’t go amiss, would it?

Also, a nagging part of me remembered writing a farewell to Troughton and apprehensive look ahead. I remembered saying, ‘I’ve never been a very great fan of the Third Doctor,’ that everything about the Third Doctor’s era is ‘basically antithetical’ to my beloved 1960s era. Is he, I asked, truly Doctorish? Was this, I wondered, going to be any fun at all?

I must admit, the major reason I didn’t feel like writing this blog post after I finished Planet of Spiders is that I was weary. I couldn’t face staggering on to Robot et al. Part of me wanted to list all my Who ephemera on eBay and be shot of it. But why?

While Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is ‘Doctorish’, it’s on a very odd point of the spectrum. Sometimes, when he’s fierily, fiercely yet foppishly intelligent, he reminds me more of his First incarnation than any other Doctors do. Yet in other ways he’s unrecognisable. He handles a ray gun, throws people over his shoulder as soon as look at them, and winds up owning a silver version of the Batmobile.  

Most importantly, he casts aside his mystery and his vagabond ways, and with them loses a certain magic. And magic, I think, is a quite specific turn. This Doctor is an avowed scientist, but this sometimes detracts from his Wizardly quality - in an Arthur C. Clarke, 'any sufficiently advanced technology', sort of way. Instead of an uncanny or tricksterish aura, he’s plain-speaking and direct – not one to fool his enemies, or hide behind a clown’s façade. He speaks without irony, in earnest, sometimes with heavy overtones of self-importance.

Sometimes this works brilliantly. In particular, Pertwee makes his enemies and even his alien allies more credible through his serious, sober gaze. Peladon (first time around) is as serious as a Hartnell historical (and therefore hysterically funny at times). This series can go totally wild when it wants to, knowing that its lead actor will always anchor the whole show. But when a story loses power, Pertwee’s straight and faithful line readings do nothing to lift it.

And overall, it’s missing something. We are rarely surprised by Pertwee. Mother Hens don’t tend to surprise us. One of the peculiarities of this era is that as soon as his dematerialisation circuit turns up, there is no dematerialisation – but how could this Doctor turn his back on his family? It’s hard even to picture it happening, the lever on the console falling, the Police Box doors swinging shut, the Brigadier raising his eyebrows in disapproval.

Yet this is the great strength of the series. The Doctor and his work-mates’ relationships are cartoonish, but they work in the context of the show. And while it would be a lie to say they evolve, they are drawn in ever bolder dashes of the pen, ever brighter splashes of colour. Not only that, they all get their big moment. Benton outsmarts the Master (briefly). Jo walks out on the Doctor and sets us all blubbing. Mike Yates goes undercover, then bad, then Buddhist. The audience’s investment in these characters is rewarded in ways that haven’t happened in Doctor Who before.

 

In my goodbye to the sixties, I looked back to the early years, my favourite era, ‘when we really care about the companions, when the actors are always slightly revelling in being the most mundane sci-fi heroes ever’ as well as ‘a time of rampant invention.’ In retrospect, the early seventies aren’t so different. Our heroes are perhaps less earthly than Barbara Wright, but they’re also distinctly unheroic. They say all the things that Star Trek and Buck Rodgers characters wouldn’t. They didn’t pass their O Levels. They watch the Rugby highlights while they’re on duty. They make jokes about the Clangers. At the end of the day, they go to the pub.

 

The Doctor himself, no longer a Who, is more of a ‘real’ character than he’s ever been before. He’s the man with two hearts, two worlds, forever torn between the local and the extra-terrestrial. This is a man who represents, not the longing to travel and explore, but simply the freedom of the mind. When the mind is free all sorts of new dangers can arise – but it’s still better than closing yourself off. This idea of transcendentalism – of being bigger on the inside – is spiritual and political at the same time. This is a series made by people who believe science and imagination can liberate, not just the individual but the world.

 

Perversely, this is when the TARDIS really comes to life. After years of being taken for granted as the vehicle to deliver us to the party and take us away at the end, it’s given its due value as a symbol of escape and liberation. There’s something really exciting in The Time Monster when the Doctor and Jo dash inside and vanish, off to Atlantis (you couldn’t get a more fabulous, impossible destination). This is where it truly becomes a conceptual space (two Tardises capable of landing inside one another), when it is first described as ‘alive’. At times like this, the writers actually seem drunk on the possibilities of these ideas of alien worlds and time travel.

 

At other times during The Time Monster, they just seem drunk. (Ah, you knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

 

This is the best of Doctor Number Three, and this is the reason: the producers really care about it. Some writers, actors, designers, it’s just a job, but the production team are invested in it, enthused by it. They make the show into a series, as far as they can. Eventually it runs its course. It’s time to shift away from a ‘setting’ and explore a multiplicity of worlds, to make the Doctor a restless wanderer once more, to bring a tight focus onto just two (or three) lead actors. Time to head into the unknown and unexpected once more.

 

Yesterday I went online and ordered a DVD of Robot, Tom Baker’s first story. I’m ready for the new.

 

 

 

A quick thank you to two blogs that have helped me illustrate this blog over the past year or so: the gorgeous, inexhaustible Third Doctor Costume blog, which includes an enormous amount of chocolate-wrapper/TV Action ephemera (and the like) - and Not Tonight Dalek, whose scans and images have been invaluable. Both blogs are Giant K-1 Robots to my equivalent Quark-like specimen.

 

 

So, My Top Ten Third Doctor Stories

 

1          Spearhead from Space

2          Doctor Who and the Silurians

3          Inferno

4          The Claws of Axos

5          The Daemons

6          The Curse of Peladon

7          The Time Monster

8          Carnival of Monsters

9          Invasion of the Dinosaurs

10        Planet of the Spiders

All Together Now ... Season Eight

Here we go, then; like a murderous doll coming back to life in a warm car, like Jon Pertwee lassoing a psychic, psychotic machine with copper wire,  I am taking charge of this blog. I am channelling all the power of the Nuton Energy complex back into the space vampire that is my life. Eko! Eko! The Dandy!

Yes, I skipped a couple of stories. Well, a whole season. And what a season! Let me bring you up to speed...

I must say, Dr Who sometimes seems his own worst enemy. Exiled to live life one day after another on the same planet, does he exorcise any of his wanderlust by traversing the globe, exploring the places he hasn't visited: Berlin, San Francisco, Tokyo? No, he hunkers down in Tarminster, chucking in a couple of trips out to a prison or a power station. The weather's usually dreadful, wherever he goes. Perhaps it's why he's eternally snappish?

A couple of incarnations ago, of course, he was hardly Prince Charming. As an impetuous young grandfather, he could hardly stop himself being tetchy in order to be patronising. What's the difference here? Perhaps it's that Pertwee (51, here) seems so much the younger man, for all that his curling white hair is his own, unlike Hartnell's (55 in his first story). His mind is pin sharp, and so is his tongue - and everyone ends up on the wrong end of it, eventually.

Of course, he's going through a difficult period. As if exile to the Home Counties wasn't bad enough, at the start of this season his side-kick Liz Shaw has just quit his company after what sounds like a row: later that day he finds a criminal megalomaniac has moved into his territory. The Master's like the neighbour from hell, except he's really just passing through - his vehicle isn't metaphorically sitting on a pile of bricks in the garage. Soon, everybody's  asking 'Who is this Master guy?' All the Doctor gets is grief from civil servants.

Of course, the Doctor isn't so badly off. Liz may have gone off to handle her own test tubes in Cambridge, but UNIT has a new recruit in the form of Josephine Grant. I should note here that I didn't watch her first story, Terror of the Autons (not enough stories with Terror in the title these days, I find) on DVD, or VHS, or at all. I've leant it to someone, and I know it backwards anyway - so I decided to try Terrance Dicks' novelisation. And it's brilliant!

It's light on its feet, effortlessly sketching in the backgrounds of characters who essentially appear on telly in order to be terrorised by Roger Delgado and his blank-faced henchmen, including Jo Grant herself: he spins a real story out of the TV version’s cavalcade of set-pieces (in retrospect, the TV version is just four episodes of cliffhangers) (but what cliffhangers!). On Jo's first day, she's already heard of the Doctor - you picture him as something of a public figure - and Dicks draws a real narrative out of her First Day from Hell.

I have to admit, though, I don't get a strong sense of Jo after her first five stories. Everything feels quite new to her - in Colony in Space, she doesn't even believe the Tardis can fly through time and space (so goodness knows what she thought was going on in The Claws of Axos, when much is made of the Doctor's vanishment in a cosmic huff). The Dæmons gives her some fun dialogue, baiting the Doctor - she even saves the day - but in many ways she still feels a supporting artist: someone to ask questions and lug trees out of the way of Bessie. The Brigadier, by comparison, is barely involved in the story proper but gets constant character notes and moments of triumph.

Katy Manning is, of course, fantastic - her finest hour being, probably, The Mind of Evil, when her compassion for Barnham is a nicely played counterpoint to the vicious machismo exploding at every hand. She also has to take care of the Doctor after he is nearly destroyed by the nightmares induced by the Keller Machine. This story features one of the only real character moments for the pair of them - until The Dæmons, which is in quite another register - with the Doctor reminiscing about his travels to his young companion. If she thinks he's Baron Munchausen at this point, she's more than prepared to humour him. It's the kind of scene you'd get constantly now - the fact that it's so rare here only makes it more cherishable.

She also gets quite a lot to do in Colony in Space, although much of it involves being held hostage and rescued. I love the moment when she and a colonist are chained to a bomb in a cave. 'What do we do now?' he asks her. She shrugs, almost blithely: 'Escape?' It's a rare moment of strength for Jo, and Manning's performance is entirely adorable. Her performance - innocent, frequently outspoken - is just crying out to be matched by Roger Delagado's.

Delgado is perfect in every story. If it was hard to ever imagine Patrick Troughton as a Lord of any kind, the Master oozes the confidence and glamour of the aristocracy. The universe is a giant costume party for the Master, and whilst he might start this series masquerading as an electrical engineer, it's not long before he's a High Court Judge In Space, a vicar and the leader of a black magic coven. It's a shame we always see him at work - it would be fabulous to observe the Master on holiday.

And it doesn't hurt at all that he's in every story. It would be thrilling if there was causality between his multiple appearances, but there's not, and his repeated appearances are gloriously camp, even comic, as in Colony in Space. Yet there are cracking scenes between the pair of them throughout the series. The Master sincerely wants to share the power of the Doomsday weapon with the Doctor, and doesn't raise Azal casually: he wants to rule. One big scene in Peter Capaldi's Death in Paradise reconnects with that idea - the Master doesn't just see the Doctor as weak, he thinks him petty and small-minded.

One final note - I only knew two of these stories. But in story two, I knew where I was. There's an aesthetic to the Pertwee era that is quite addictive, all on its own: lurid visuals, big performances, music and sound effects that make your TV sound like it's going to blow up. There is some fabulous writing here too, but I think this is what I particularly adore about this era. It's cosy. It's creepy. But it's also out of control - like so many machines in these five stories, it constantly sounds like it's about to overload and self destruct.

And here we are on the threshold of Season 9, and the return - four and a half years since their 'Final End' - of the Doctor's real arch-enemies... 

Oh, and I didn't mention Miss Hawthorne...!