The Time Warrior

Nowadays, by which I mean 1974, it strikes me as slightly odd that I used to remark so much on the bad-tempered old Third Doctor. I remember a lot of people in Jon Pertwee’s second season getting the sharp edge of his tongue, and then some hard words for Day of the Daleks’ Controller, as well as bureaucrats fighting The Sea Devils and experimenting on The Mutants. But as if mellowed by the charm of Jo Grant, or perhaps the impervious Master (no use shouting at him), the Doctor’s been getting increasingly sweet-natured and tolerant.

I suppose it depends on who’s rubbing the nape of his velvet jacket the wrong way; any civil servant or wunderkind scientist with a jacked-up ego was ever liable to have the air taken out of their tyres. Perhaps it was the frustration of memory loss, or the thought that he'd never see Jamie McCrimmon's hairy knees again. In this story you might expect him to be more irritable once more, given the big events of The Green Death: strange to find him on Earth at all, really.

And to be so tolerant of the Brigadier, going through one of his bumptious phases, and Professor Rubeish’s  fiddle-faddling, not to mention an investigative reporter smuggling herself into a 'top secret' government think tank as if it was a tupperware party. She's only there because scientists working on government related research are mysteriously going missing! But then that's suddenly the key to Pertwee's Doctor: suave and cool and jokey when everyone else is getting aerated.

That's the delight of the Doctor's scenes with our two testosterone-tastic warriors, Lynx and Irongron, and particularly the latter, who bellows and stomps about and swings his sword in all directions. When the Doctor's disguised as a robot and Irongron suggests chopping its head off, the Doctor suddenly becomes the unflappable upper class gent: 'Isn't that a bit unsporting, old man? I mean, sitting ducks and all that...' It's a playfulness I fondly remember from the days of his previous incarnation – although, catch this Doctor pretending to be a fool. He'd sooner drag up in a pair of old tights.

There's another rather Troughtonish moment when the Doctor is chucking stink bombs over his shoulder at Irongron's troops; not with the schoolboyish pleasure that the Second Doctor would have taken, but with quiet contentment all the same. He's almost whistling to himself as he dispatches an army – a very, very small army, yes, but it's the Doctor who really makes us see that. He's rather affronted when Sarah Jane implies he might have caused some permanent damage with his gas: he's not a soldier. He's just having fun.

Taken entire, this rather muted performance sometimes under-sells the drama of The Time Warrior. Even when he's not onscreen, we very rarely get a real sense of menace from Lynx the Sontaran – his 'ocular' hypnotism of Sarah Jane Smith notwithstanding. Lynx doesn't seem to pose a great threat to the world: we never get a real sense of what effect his 'time meddling' will be, nor does anybody really seem to care overly about the scientists he's abducted from the 20th century.

In fact, the story has a weird effect, like a rather crudely taken photograph. Everybody at the centre of the shot – essentially the Doctor, the villains, and the new girl in town – are acutely in focus, but the other elements of the composition range from slightly to extremely blurry. It's the Brigadier I feel sorry for. A few years ago, it felt as if he and the Doctor were co-stars of this series, and now he's basically required for thirty seconds in episode one, to set the scene and raise an eyebrow. Nick Courtney plays the scene with good grace, but the Brig in conversation with Lynx is a missed opportunity.

As would Lady Eleanor in conversation with Lynx. Or, indeed, with Bella Emberg. Lady Eleanor is just short of being one of the Pertwee era's great female characters – few and far between though they are. In Season 10, we had none at all in The Three Doctors, the lovable Shirna in Carnival of Monsters, the President of Earth (okay, I'll admit, that's not bad) in Frontier in Space, one rather soppy Thal in Planet of the Daleks and Nancy, the companion that never was, with her deadly mushroom bake and existential flute-playing (or whatever it is Clifford says she's doing with her instrument). Eleanor is strong, wise and charming; I could also wish for a bit more of the Mary Berry of her day, Meg, played by Sheila Feay and a really bizarre wig.

But the woman of the match is obviously and incomparably Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Katy Manning is irreplaceable, and without an eye for Doctor Who history, you might worry about the show after her departure. Remember when they recast Jamie for an episode? Remember when Vicki's place in the Ship was taken by Katarina? But Sladen walks into the show and owns it, instantly. 'Oh, I could murder a cup of tea!'

It's funny, because Robert Holmes wastes no time on any of Sarah's background. It should be fairly pitiful that all we know about her is that she's a journalist with an aunt, and that she frequently says, 'Ooh, men!' like a character from Acorn Antiques. But he gives Sarah so much to do and say, that between Holmes and Sladen, Sarah Jane is vividly there, from the get go, and she's there by accident, as all the best companions are.

She took a chance, a wrong turning or a right one, and there it was – an unexpected new friend, unexpected new trouble, a man who looks like a currant bun with legs, and a man who takes it all in his stride.

Of course the Doctor doesn't get all grumpy with her. He knows a new best friend when he sees her...

Coming next, a story I've never seen... Apparently it's just 

called INVASION!! (Deja vu...?)

Carnival of Monsters

In retrospect, it seems odd that Doctor Who's anniversary story should be so world-building, so forward-thinking, so unlike the stories of the First and Second, even to a large extent, the Third Doctor – only for the following story to encapsulate, in many regards, intrinsic qualities running throughout the series, and to reflect on them too. But that's what Robert Holmes, and the rest of the production team, managed to do.

It's not just that the Doctor and Jo are back in time and space. They went to the planet of the flea people last year, and the lost city of Atlantis not long after (Jo even got her hair done there). Carnival of Monsters, like my beloved Curse of Peladon, has a cosmic worldview, one that mirrors the unbounded multiplicity of a writer's imagination. Vorg the showman is really Robert Holmes in a false moustache: he can gather who he likes together, make them fight, pick them out of one world and drop them in another. As Jo says, at one point, 'I suppose we're due for monster bit in a minute.'

Like the Doctor (another double of his, in many regards) he's a figure who represents endless invention and mutability. If you can imagine it, the Tardis can take you there, and in this story multiple worlds are conjured up: Inter Minor, 1920s Earth, Drashiggia, and those places only gestured toward – the backwaters and fairgrounds that Vorg and Shirna tap dance in and out of, the Doctor's home planet, where he once ran a political campaign, and the worlds of Ogrons, Cybermen, Prehistoric Earth. In the Miniscope (which is, what – the story, the telly, broadcast media in general?) they can be interwoven.

It's all imagined and woven together so apparently effortlessly, each with its own little narrative, that the viewer really thinks – yes, the Universe really is a big place. And yes, it really is all one thing. Either because we can make it one narrative, or because we can bring it all together and look at it, or because we can travel between them all – these many worlds are all combined in us, our minds, our lives.

Holmes makes the continuity of worlds part of the colour and liveliness of the story. Alien travellers in the far future still use polari – in fact, they sometimes work fairgrounds on Earth (and do we realise they are not Earthmen when we see them?). Grey people called Shallak can fall for the same old cup-and-ball routine you see in old movies. Shirna, the hoofer from beyond the stars, even shares the viewer's POV, entertained by the Doctor's heroics, lifted out of her despondency by the magic of the Tardis dematerialisation at the end.

But it's all one thing in a serious way, too. We are shown that the actions of the audience are not disconnected from the lives of the people they watch, or the governing body that permits the show to run. The personal is political.

This is really a satire on how storytelling runs the world, the unreal representing and sometimes governing the real – from the romantic novel read by a man of the Empire ('Good heavens, a memsahib!' he exclaims, on discovering Jo) which ends disappointingly with a character becoming a missionary, to the machinations of the grey people to make bad news for the President (and play down bad news about the working masses). Power, oppression, pleasure, are all in the same industry.

The Three Doctors has no real story: its pleasure is all in the interplay of Doctors, companions, Omega himself. The problem at the heart of the story is a sad paradox: the freedom of the Time Lords is founded on the suffering of one man. The question is never asked, Is it worth it, or Can we find a compromise? Omega has already gone mad and tried to destroy the universe – the cartooniness of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, which works in its own way – leaves us nowhere to go but a big bang and a scream. In Carnival of Monsters, the oppressive Miniscope is partially transformed into a Tardis, a symbol of liberation. Then it's destroyed – and everything is changed.

Even Vorg becomes temporarily heroic. But like the Doctor, he finishes the story as a man of words rather than status – a vagabond, exactly as the Doctor identifies himself, surviving on his wits.

What's distinctively Doctor Who about this story, is the lightness of touch. It's a complex story, but deftly presented for a general audience: playful rather than self-important. Visually, it's a treat - and it's actually funny. The little guys win the upper hand, and not just by escaping a dimensional compression field. When the Doctor faces the Tribunal at last, he beats them immediately on the strength of his rhetoric – a Doctorish victory more persuasive than the combined Three Doctors managed last story, and a brilliant moment for Jon Pertwee.

Just when you start to think the show has changed completely, or that in leaving UNIT behind it might fall back on old stories, it reminds us why this show means something: invention, reinvention, liberation and alienness.

Can it last...?

The Time Monster

In my blog last week, I talked about the unsinkable Jo Grant, and her ability to remain sunny in the continually reconfirmed knowledge that planet Earth in the future is a cosmic shithole run by total bastards. How does she remain so buoyant, I wondered, when others like myself find it hard enough to deal with an office job and the daily round of news headlines? Then this week, Jo unexpectedly crumbled.

'What happens if the Master wins?' she asks the Doctor. Chaos, he explains, on a grand scale, and it depresses Jo. 'Makes it all seem so pointless, doesn't it?' she says. Perhaps the banality of the Master's evil has hit home – the imminent catastrophe doesn't only mean death and destruction: it's a universe without meaning.

This is the prelude to the Doctor's childhood reminiscence, the story of how his blackest day was redeemed by the hermit on the mountainside, who taught him to see 'a heaven in a wild flower'; that is, the 'daisiest daisy'.

It's the first casual chat the Doctor and Jo have had since The Mind of Evil, and it's a rare moment of the Doctor dropping the 'Who' for a moment. In referring to past troubles, it recalls a fatherly moment in the tombs of planet Telos; in describing the countryside of home, it connects with a much earlier tale of burnt orange skies. We have a better sense than ever of who the Doctor is – paternal, happy in that role (he looks entirely at ease, telling stories in that prison cell), drawing on a lifelong wonder at the universe, empathy with the figure of the mountain hermit.

Here's the anchorite in his new form, perched on the side of the mountain that is our planet in a single era. Does that 'black day' he's so cagey about still threaten him? He worries at his circuitry and drinks his tea. Or reassures his friend with a story. Meanwhile, upstairs, his childhood friend is seducing Ingrid Pitt and planning the death of the actual Minotaur in order to – what?

It's not clear. The Master has a Tardis – i.e., the run of Universe – and can inveigle his way into any position he likes. He begins the story by trying to tame a god-like being from outside space and time. It does seem like an awful lot of hard work, especially given how things when he tried it last month, and that he must know the result will probably be chaos anyway, a mirror of his own megalomania. This is a story where Roger Delgado really lets rip, strutting up and down and cackling to himself. Entertainingly, but not becomingly. 

What's the nature of this madness? It's a story about messing about with time, and produces some of the most surreal and comic images of the whole series. There's capacity for exploration of some huge ideas, about how we use time and chronology to sort the Universe into order, to give our lives meaning. 'The whole of creation is very delicately balanced, Jo...' 

Or perhaps chronological narrative is a fantasy, and the Master plans to liberate himself from an illusory world into a state of naked existence. True enlightenment?

This is a sort of sequel to The Daemons. The Doctor was rather adamant in that story that science was a superior way of looking at reality, but in this story he can remotely interfere with the Master's Tardis by balancing a cup of tea on a wine bottle and making some mystical passes. The Tardis itself – pressed into use in a climactic moment that makes it suddenly seem more wonderful than it has since the 1960s – is indestructible, telepathic, illogical. The authors of this story leave us in no doubt: it's not just a spaceship – it's an idea that has somehow gained material form.

Now, The Time Monster is a bit over-extended, and sometimes the dialogue is a bit weird (like someone who's seen a lot of TV but never met a human being), but it has some amazing performances, from Dean Lerner and Miss Babs to Roger Delgado and Ingrid Pitt. It has that audacious Doctor Who spirit ('Who cares if the money's run out? We're going to have a bird-god-monster from another dimension destroy the city of Atlantis!') and the real sense of camaraderie that is unique to Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning ('Glad to have you aboard, Miss Grant.' 'Glad to be aboard, Doctor!').

And even if it doesn't really explore those ideas about time, meaning, madness, the life of the mind ('I shouldn't listen too hard to my subconscious thoughts, Jo, I'm not too proud of some of them'), it nonetheless suggests that there are two responses to the meaninglessness of existence and the daily toll of unhappy feelings. You could try and Master it, by chucking out the structure and narrative. Or you could tell a story about it. Better yet, you could throw yourself in and Doctor the story. Same mountain, different view.

There's also bags of extreme CSO. I think it really is the Pertweeiest Pertwee story.

Day of the Daleks

They recast the Doctor, created a new environment for him, found the formula for ratings success. Having iced the cake, it's time to stick a few Daleks on top. But are they the delicious glacé cherries that add the real flavour to the cake, or just glittering candles to add a bit of sparkle to the ensemble?

To stretch my delicious metaphor a little further, this is a story with brilliant ingredients. Coming after the "Magic!" "Science!" "Magic!" "Science!" dialectic of the previous story, here the Doctor cheerfully assures us that ghosts are possible. Not only that, but when he's around, you get a rare kind - ghosts of people who haven't been born yet. Perhaps even ghosts of people who'll never exist! And where better to encounter them than an old stately home?

This era's gothic urban landscape - factories disgorging Satanic slime, laboratories whose doors are frequently kicked in by monsters, B-roads patrolled by murderous automata - is expanded to include railway tunnels infested with ape-men. Its seething background of political drama - glimpsed in The Mind of Evil - returns as imminent World War. And slowly we uncover more about the world after the war - a stylish dystopia to rival Inferno.

Plus, the Daleks strap the Doctor to a mind-scanner and, thrillingly, summon up images of his earlier selves. Their mortal enemy, stretching back through eternity, or a generation of television viewing (which is similar)!

Unfortunately, the result is a crushing disappointment. If it was a cake, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood would be looking extremely miffed.

The performers are all fantastic. Jo Grant is trusting and good-hearted. Aubrey Woods is wonderfully sinister, a human being with all his humanity eaten away (I always thought there was something iffy about that sweetshop owner in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). His zombie dollybirds are extraordinary, and under-used. You couldn't ask for more from Jon Pertwee, particularly in his scenes with Woods. The Controller is 'a quisling, a traitor!' - the victims of the regime are 'old men and women, even children': in one argument, we feel the force with which the Daleks' regime grinds down.

This is necessary, because we don't feel much of it elsewhere. When they appear onscreen, the Daleks are a shadow of their former selves. What's the sound equivalent of a shadow? A poorly modulated bleat? That too. Much as it's an impressive way of presenting them - already the masters of Earth, no shilly-shallying like the villains of Seasons 7 and 8 - they're really not integrated into the story, and criminally there are no big confrontations between them and the Brigadier or the Doctor, or even Jo.

I mean, come on. These are the effin' Daleks!

The direction's limp, with the modern day particularly lacking in atmosphere. A hint of  The Daemons' Dennis Wheatley theatrics would have come in handy for the ghosts at the mansion, which is lit like something out of a sit-com. But having presented them as looking simply like terrorists who have travelled through time, the script takes ages to explain that this is the case. Yes, I know that's okay - we can assume the audience picked it up for themselves - but it misses every dramatic use of time travel, and Aubrey Woods might as well be in a space ship with a transmat hovering overhead.

Equally, the Daleks could have been anyone. There's no sense that there are living beings wiggling those egg-whisks. The whole story would be improved for having Aubrey's zombie dolly-birds as the dominating evil regime. Can't you just see them marching towards that manor house, flanked by Ogrons?

Well, it was nice to look forward to. I'll just have to accept it didn't work out. The nice thing about Doctor Who is that the story has a sort of after-life in the memory: I fancy reading the novelisation at some point, too. Meanwhile, it's time to get really 'out there'...