An Unearthly Child: The TARDIS scene and its arrival on a strange rocky plain.

While all of An Unearthly Child is a bit scary in a ‘what’s going on?’ way, the moment Barbara barges into the police box is when everything changes. Forget everything you have watched before, this is special and totally boggling. A bright, big SPACE SHIP! A scary man from another world! One of our heroes gets electrocuted; panic and confusion. Now the scary aliens are fighting over the controls, anything might happen, and it does! What’s that NOISE?? It’s the TV equivalent of the ground disapearing from beneath your feet – topped off with a police box standing in the middle of nowhere, covered by a menacing shadow. This is tea time in 1963, telly isn’t meant to DO that! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRsfKK34SFY&feature=related

The Daleks, The Expedition: The whirlpool effect

Our heroes are camped near a large lake on their way to find a way into the Dalek city. They hear a scream, and rush to discover Elyon, one of the Thals, has been dragged into the lake by a mutant. What the viewer actually sees is a massive whirlpool effect. It’s big and defies the brain’s attempt to make sense of how it was achieved. Must have been a huge monster! Gahhh.

…now fast forward twelve years to Andrew’s time. Tom Baker! Philip Hinchliffe! Robert Holmes! Scary!

The Seeds of Doom: End of part two

This one I don’t remember watching, but saw it in my dreams for days afterwards. They were awful nightmares, and I never forgot them. Years later, imagine my surprise when watching the video release of The Seeds of Doom, to find myself watching my recurring nightmare on telly.

It’s set in an antarctic research base, where two alien plant pods have been found. Some baddies have got wind of this and turned up to get the pods, but not before one of the pods turns someone into a big green tentacled plant with horrid rasping breathing. The baddies get the other pod, and tie the Doctor up in the base and Sarah in the power room with a time bomb. Meanwhile, scary-green-tentacles monster is on the loose. . . the Doctor gets free and saves Sarah, just as the scary green fella bursts in on them. They get away, or do they? It’s all a bit grim and ends with a great big explosion. I wake up terrified.

The Hand of Fear: Sarah finds the Hand

My first ever memory of actually watching Doctor Who. And it’s scary.

The Doctor and Sarah arrive in a barren rocky wasteland, and the Doctor declares with marvellous irony – nodding to a back catalogue of years of alien quarry landscapes – ‘We’re in a quarry!’ So far not scary. Then it goes bonkers. The quarry blows up – that’s an amazing sequence. Sarah is nowhere to be seen. Oh, that’s worrying. Sure she’ll be fine, though – the Doctor’s on the case. More toasted teacake please, Mum. The Doctor finds her – she’s in some space under a great big boulder, coughing in that inimitable Sarah way. Then she spots a stone hand. It’s creepy. She screams, and Dudley Simpson’s music does a uniquely big Dudley-Simpson-scary-moment. Toasted teacake everywhere.

The Deadly Assasin: That clown!

Part three of The Deadly Assassin is brilliant. I’m sure you know. It’s the one in the Matrix, the Time Lord Matrix that is. Oh, it’s amazing. Evil train drivers, a Samurai warrior, a scary surgeon, First World War imagery. The Doctor is on the run from all of the above, and is pretty thirsty. He hears running water from somewhere, but where? Is there a stream hidden beneath the sand perhaps? He bends down and sweeps away some sand, to find himself face to face with a blimmin clown! The clown laughs at him. It’s a scary derisory laugh that stayed in my poor head and no amount of toasted teacake would distract from it. How on earth could a clown be beneath that sand? Why, what, gahhhhh! Year’s later a Doctor Who magazine interview with David Tennant revealed that this was one of his all-time scariest memories of Who too. Well, how about that.

The Stones of Blood: Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom.

Big stones that can walk and suck your blood. And when they are thristy they make a scary sound: Boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom. More nightmares. Gahhhhh.

The Power of Kroll: The Doctor nearly gets eaten by a great big scary squid.

This one genuinely terrified me and is the Doctor being his heroic best. One of his many Last Chance Saloons – testing a theory, and if he is wrong he’ll be no more, and if he’s right he’ll save everyone and they’ll all have the opportunity to make good on their mistakes and get a chance to live good lives.

There’s an enormous great big scary squid called Kroll. Kroll is more than a mile across and lives in a swamp. In a tale of science and so-called progress versus indigenous swamp dwellers the nasty exploitative scientists have been drilling for gas and using the swamp dwellers as slaves. Problem is they’ve inadvertently woken up Kroll. The swampies think Kroll is going to protect them from the nasty scientists, but Kroll has other ideas. Actually, he doesn’t have any ideas really. He’s just cross and hungry. And has got really long tentacles that pick off swampy and scientist alike. And even the Doctor. That was really scary. The Doctor in the grip of that tentacle, being dragged slowly towards that massive THING. I held on to my dad for dear life – and why was the sofa so blimmin close to the wall?? Fortunately Kroll was the fifth segment of the Key to Time, and the Doctor was jeeeeust able to convert him into his true form before becoming a tiny morsel. Pheeeewww. The thing was that I went nowhere near the deep end of a swimming pool for weeks. Or anywhere that a mile long tentacle could appear from.

Just recently, the Kroll prop was on sale at the Doctor Who props auction at Bonhams. If I’d had the money (haha, yeh right) I would have bid for it, set it up in my living room and pointed and laughed, going ‘Ner ner ne ner ner, not so scary now are you?’

City of Death: End of part one

Doctor Who is so clever at mining genres. Here we have a creepy inversion of body horror. Instead of someone inexorably turning into a big green tentacled plant or something, the villain of the story reveals that he’s not only a millionaire art criminal, he’s a ONE-EYED MONSTER! It was such a shock that there was probably another toasted teacake incident. This had just got bogglingly interesting. Doctor Who is good at being boggling. Wow. Scary green one-eyed monster with the technology to manufacture a well fitted convincing human mask that can blink, eat, drink, talk and everything. I’m not being sarcastic by the way, that is what I thought – we are up against something pretty amazing in this one. And isn’t the incidental music good. Shame you can see the actor’s nose through the green skin…

Here’s a question. Whose were those faces in the mind-bending battle in The Brain of Morbius? Were they the Doctor’s, Morbius’, or some red herring thingy that either the Doctor or Morbius or both were introducing into that battle of Time Lorderyness?*

Anyway… I really like the Beginnings boxset** and felt like writing a blog about it. Just because I love it so. I think it’s a treasure trove of truly awesome telly, and that everyone should see it.   

But first a bit of background. I was always of the school of thought that suggests black & white Doctor Who is not all that rewarding to watch. It’s black and white for goodness sake. And doesn’t have a stereo option. There’re no effects beyond wibbly split-screen or positive-negative gun-rays. The music was played in live and, when a scene ends, often stops wherever it’s got to. Time itself sloooowwwws down meaning that each twenty five minute episode actually takes a day or so to sit through. Spaceships clearly started life as Fairy liquid bottles*** and the sink plungers really were sink plungers. But what do I know? I used to assume that Masque of Mandragora was dull and tedious, and Carnival of Monsters was a daft run-around. Having found myself to be quite wrong about both of these I decided to have a go at watching the Beginning boxset. At the time I had just finished some studying that had eaten up loads of my spare time and left me wanting to chill out with some decent telly for a weekend. Hmmm, reading back this paragraph makes me wonder quite why I bought the boxset. I think it’s because there was nothing else that I wanted in HMV that day, and … it was on offer at a frankly staggering knockdown price. I think I just thought, yeh, let’s just try…

So what did I make of it all…? Well, my preconceptions were dashed.

I’d seen An Unearthly Child before but, blow me down with a feather, it’s good. It’s actually bullet proof in all regards, and still achieves the staggering feat of shifting without effort from a tale that could have been something like Cathy Come Home into something utterly extraordinary. Ordinary folk finding themselves hurtling through the space-time vortex with aliens in a police box! The suddenness and panic in the TARDIS scene and the first dematerialisation will always be an utterly breathtaking sequence. The only comparison I can think of is the equally wonderful opening episode of Life on Mars.

Then we go to the meet the cave folks, and while it might drag here and there it’s still a striking, memorable adventure. Politics, battle of wills,  survival, fear and hope. It’s memorable rather than dull. Here’s one thing I definitely picked up – it doesn’t feel safe. Doctor Who’s opening adventures each exude a sense of ‘maybe they won’t get out of this alive – the scenario is so far removed from everyday life that it actually wouldn’t surprise me. The Doctor can’t be trusted – look, he nearly killed a caveman. There is no safety net here. Yikes.’

Amazing. Next! Now before you all say ‘what do you mean you’d never seen The Daleks before??’ let me just say I’m actually glad I hadn’t seen The Daleks before. It was a revelation to my now rather set-in-my-ways view of telly. It’s very long, but it’s never dull. It’s a superb piece of writing, production and acting. Oh, and a shout out for Tristram Carey’s music – it’s incredibly evocative, and it sounds like he used some bits from the Torchwood theme. No. Hold on. That’ll be other way round won’t it. The alien planet scenes are superb, it just seems so… alien. And I had to remind myself that nothing like this had been seen on Saturday teatime telly before. Epic, scary, and pretty thought provoking. I’m not really a fan of the daleks, but in this one they are totally dalek-y.

Edge of Destruction is the first of Who’s occasional ‘woah, what’s going on?’ stories. It’s unsettling and weird, and leaves you thinking it through – and the revelation at the end takes the viewer even further into the realm of wondering ‘who are these strange alien people, what is their ship capable of, and are our heroes (Ian and Barbara) ever going to be safe with them?’

All through these adventures I got reminded of the initial coldness of the ninth Doctor as the first Doctor mellows in the companionship of Ian and Barbara. I wonder if he and Susan used to get into such scrapes before An Unearthly Child and had the Doctor always been such a selfish maverick up till then? We meet him on the run, a scared man ‘cut off from his own people’ and terrified of losing Susan, which makes me wonder how much truth there is in his later protestations that he ran away from Gallifrey because he was bored. Fascinating questions, which the series has never explored.

Doctor Who began with such fearlessness in its story lines and characterisations and in the sheer scope of what it set out to achieve that this was a golden era of ‘Anywhere in time and space, where d’ya wanna start’? I wish we could see Marco Polo…

Awesome.

*Answering ‘Members of the production team’ doesn’t count.

**Note to self: work on one’s links.

***Other detergents were available. Actually, I don’t know if there were other detergent brands in the 1960s?