030 The Power of the Daleks

Started 31-Aug

We watched the colour bluray animation on the big screen.

Another departure in style for about the sixth time in eight stories.

This is so serious.....

The colony admin characters are very earnest. Lesterson is a fool clearly but very bound to convention.

The technical details are made up and some are more imaginative than others. The uncorrodable metal key fragments are ok but the add electricity to the Daleks and wake 'em up thing is a bit primitive/dodgy.

The Doctor's Examiners Badge is a barely credible construct. It serves the story but is hardly believable.

Ben and Polly seem to have at least a working knowledge of the Daleks. This verges on a continuity error. It's not explicit but I guess the Doctor's been chatting to them between stories.

This is the fifth Dalek story and the first not written by Terry Nation.

The story manages to achieve something very original and creepy through character inversion. The Daleks act against expectation and so do the colony characters.

Dennis Spooner rewrote (uncredited in 1966 but credit restored for the animated version) David Whitaker's script.

Production dates reveal each episode was shot barely a week before broadcast yet none seem improvised or underproduced.

The Tristram Cary soundtrack is seductive and amazing. It's been heard several times before but seems perfect for this.

Troughton has a very different approach to the Doctor compared with the last guy. His character seems proactive rather than passive. Wild and uncontrolled but *not* crazy.

I have a feeling the animation is disappointing. The acting subtleties of Troughton that I keep imagining are not shown on the screen. Even with this miracle reanimation I still want this to be rediscovered. One of the features of the earliest rediscovered Troughton episodes (Underwater Menace p2) was how Troughton performs on the screen. If you don't believe me just take a look through these telesnaps http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/photonovels/power/. I think it zings off the screen. Chris Barry did a lot of very good DW directing but this might shade Morbius and The Daemons. But sadly we cannot tell.

Episode 6 is a bleak and raw tragedy. It is deeply affecting, and a new peak in dramatic impact for DW.

A major improvement for the series. This makes several steps in an adult direction (that might not be maintained but let's watch and see....) Maybe underappreciated by the British tv audience (the ratings and the appreciation score seem low), never repeated, only shown in 3 other countries and then lost for 50 years.

Lost. Classic. Doctor Who.

No.1 with a bullet....


ABM Rating 3.80/4.00
LJM Rating 4.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 8.25/10.00


No. 1 (out of 30)


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029 The Tenth Planet

Started 27-Aug

Welcome to the base under siege.

We have a small  cast  crew of tightly overworked nutjobs who struggle against some form of external threat which gets overcome by means of some advanced tech.

Invariably the boss man is irascible or quirky in some way (check).
And is played by some famous-ish guest star (check)
There's plenty of whacky side kicks (check)
There's a few dour, level headed side-kicks (check)
There are very few women (check)
If there are any then they're quiet, hardworking types (check)
When the Doctor and his friends turn up they are not believed/imprisoned/eventually prove themselves by valorous minor defeat of a baddie or technically generated defeat of a baddie.(check, check, check and check)

This is where this story type begins...The Tenth Planet is a' base under siege' phenotype.

The Tenth Planet is somewhat of a fave, having been watched many times over the last 30 odd years since wobbly videos first were available.

The style in this is new and sophisticated looking (for 1966.) There is plenty of tech stuff that looks dated and hokey now.  But the distance between this and Gunfighters/Celestial Toymaker/Ark is gulf-like (and very noticeable.. marathon, in order watching makes this look obvious.)

This watch I am struck by how the Snowcap base characters seem aggressive and even neurotic. Maybe I'm getting middle aged or something but these guys would be absolute hell to work with. Despite this unhealthy workplace situation the drama is heightened by pace.

The pace of the story is frenetic. Maybe we've been bored by recent Smuggles but the episodes in this fly by at rapid pace. I felt ep 1 and 2 ends came up really fast and unexpectedly as I was watching.

There's a superb moment in ep2 when General Cutler is told on the phone by Wigner that his son is the pilot astronaut on Zeus 5. Canadian movie star Robert Beatty is the guest here. He was a veteran of many, many leading roles in movies since the 1930's. His appearance is a casting coup for DW. He sells this moment with effortless and superb movie acting. He seems to go very quiet amid the chaos and the shouting. It's a little subtle but it packs a punch.


Tenth Planet is not perfect, the plot is really lacking in credibility: how do planets orbit back from 'the edge of space'? Why is Mondas geography identical to Earth's? Why isn't Mondas frozen solid? How exactly does the proximity of Mondas not affect tides and weather on the Earth? What is the process by which Mondas 'drains energy' from the Earth? Why does it suddenly fail, providing a giant deux ex machina resolution to the story?
Why are the Zeus orbiters capcommed from an isolated base at the South Pole, yet launched from somewhere else (presumably more equatorial and higher in planetary rotational speed)? This is really quite bizarre yet is central to the story and completely unaddressed in the narrative.
Most obvious of all the title should be 'The Ninth Planet' (or maybe the 14th planet?) Perhaps this reflects out of date, early 20th century notions of planet hunting. (The Kuiper belt was not discovered until 1992.) In the 21st century we are more obsessed with defined physical properties of planets rather than their mere presence or position.

The Cyber saucers are only the third flying model spaceships in DW to this point. (Dalek Invasion and Chen's Spar are the prior occasions.) They not a great effort. There's a way to go here.

The cyber costumes are creepy and the 2012 restored DVD reveals details that are fascinating to anyone who's sat through some kind of wobbly, noisy VHS in the past (like me). The suit surfaces are translucent, the hands are clearly uncovered and human (also hairless and male), there are eyes visible behind the face masks, there are wires running up the side of the head. These Cybermen are mad, hi-tech metal and plastic Frankenstein's monsters and they have an attitude to match Mary Shelley's moral-questioning 'Prometheus'...

There's a notion that these Cybermen are misguided first efforts but actually that is and has been subject to recent revision (especially since World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls.)

Hartnell seems a little subdued. He seems to spend a great deal of his time waiting around. Maybe he's not too well and taking it easy? He's missing for ep3.

The shows loses a point from me for being so incorrect scientifically. But scores high for pace and excitement and monsters. Lloyd and Davis have been faffing about a bit trying to get DW on track. With this going out they've had 9 months since Xmas of 1965 to come up with something. This is it but it's still not finished.

The regeneration (renewal? Fun Fact: it does not get called regeneration until Planet of the Spiders..) feels a bit tacked on. As if it were put there because it had to go somewhere. Unlike subsequent regeneration stories where the Doctor regenerates because of something which happens in the story.

There is a recent story about a first draft script of Tenth Planet ep 4 where the Doctor did not regenerate (see http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2013/09/original-tenth-planet-script-found.html ) This was found in Kit Pedler's papers when a biographer went through them. It agrees with the idea that Hartnell's exit was  rushed and not carefully planned at all.

The viewers' reactions, the viewers' feelings about this are largely unrecorded. I expect some fans resented the change. Some viewers welcomed it and approved. The Hartnell post DW interview (found in 2012 and on the DVD) reveals him as bitter and regretting his loss. He denies it and shoots a look to the camera that says 'bullsh*t'! Pointedly he does not discuss the show or the people in it after his exit.

Ian McLachlan's fan letter of 1968 indicates that Hartnell was 'unhappy with the direction the show was heading. He disagreed so he left.'  Can we guess what that disagreement was? Until they died in 1991 Lloyd's and Davis's position in interviews was always that 'Bill was frail, unwell, forgetting his lines".

The marathon watch indicates clearly that the Lloyd and Davis explanation IS NOT the case.
He was doddery and Doctor-ish on Doctor Who. The DVD interview and the 1965 Desert Island Discs Interview both show that he was not 'Doctor-ish' in real life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI081htoIW8

Hartnell was a smokin', drinkin' ischemic coronary artery case on legs but he wasn't debilitated beyond his means (certainly not permanently, certainly not by 1966). He might be angered and feeling betrayed and lacking motivation but he's still got his marbles.

I suspect there was a hell of a row and some horrible heart rending regret behind the scenes here. I suppose no one will ever tell the story now since the key personnel are all long gone.

What needs to be realised here is that success and fame is not permanent. The 1964/65 peak of Doctor Who with fame and high ratings (or any generally successful project) was always going to be ephemeral.  When you're riding high it's easy to forget, to be seduced into thinking, that this will last forever.

It won't. It doesn't. It never does.

When the end comes, you must take your chance to face it with dignity or else you will be forced to take it anyway. Either way the end is inevitable and unstoppable.

In fifty or a hundred or a thousand years the things that might be remembered are the good parts of the story not the worst parts. If that happens is not up to you. It's up to everyone else.

So make the end a good part.

William Hartnell (1908 - 1975), Doctor Who

ABM Rating 3.10/4.00
LJM Rating 4.25/5.00
SPJ Rating 7.00/10.00  

Peak Ranking No. 4 (out of 29)


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028 The Smugglers

Started 21-Aug

We sat through an LC recon.

Man, this is boring.

It's not hard to figure out why.

Incredibly incredulous. The 'pretence' that Polly is a boy is just **strange**. Moreover, there are no women in the pirate ships, the church, the inn. The Squire does not meet or talk with any women. This is a very odd community.

The plot is finding some lost treasure or denying various wild allegations of suspicion of crimes.
And avoiding either the 'revenue men' (the cops), the squire (the maybe good guys) or the pirates/smugglers (either "sus" trying to make good (Pike) or actually homicidal (Cherub) ).


Hartnell seems well enough in his scenes in the studio but he is noticeably absent from the location work. When this was made (end of Series 3) was actually before he would have known he was on the way out, so he's being professional.

A major problem with the story is the fluff by Terence De Marney (as the Churchwarden in ep1) over the names which constitute the clues to finding Avery's treasure. Hartnell gets the 3 names right in ep4. ("Ringwood, Smallbeer and Gurney".) So the old pro has **not** made a fluff here.


The surviving censored clips indicate that the death scenes of most of the major characters (Churchwarden, Kewper, Pike, Cherub) were chopped out of what was presented (at least in Australia) so it must have seemed confusing as well as boring.

The characters are cardboard-y and cliched. There's no cosmic baddie, there's no SF idea or fantasy element at all and worse for a historical there's no depiction of a famous or notable historical character or event. It seems difficult to work out why this was made as a DW story. It could be a dull serial of any kind. Ben getting his shirt off does not compete with Aidan Turner scythe reaping in Poldark.

It's hard to tell what kind of nasty race based trope the character of Jamaica is. He has no lines in a telesnaps serial and is murdered horribly by Pike. I guess the tragedy of his murder underlines the black hearted true nature of the evil Captain Samuel Pike so it serves the drama a bit (but only at a pantomime level.). Make him a character for gawd's sakes!

There's 39 seconds of silent 8mm colour home movie footage (on the Lost in Time DVD) which has **more** entertainment value than the whole 4 episodes.


This story is like The Gunfighters without the silly song. Only the 'pirates' (having maybe ended in cinematic popularity sorta mid 50's) are even more out of date than cowboys.

Actually it's worse because there's no attempted corny jokes....


The UK ratings average for the 4 Smuggly episodes (4.5 million) is the lowest for DW till Trial of a Time Lord in 1986.


I looked up this site...

www.broadwcast.org #sellingthedoctor

http://gallifreybase.com/w/index.php/William_Hartnell_stories#WILLIAM_HARTNELL

It says The Smugglers premiered in Brisbane in May 1967 and was repeated in May 1968.  Last screening anywhere in Australia was June 1968. It was only ever shown in 6 countries.

Australia	May 67	b/w
Barbados	Jun 68	b/w
Zambia	Oct 68	b/w
New Zealand	Jul 69	b/w
Sierra Leone	Sep 70	b/w
Singapore	Mar 72	b/w

Australia's films were definitely sent back to England in 4 June 1975 where they were skipped (along with many other 60's ep all in one go... set your time machine for this space-time event to make a rescue of missing eps!)

(According to Paul Vanezis.... The following were sent back on June 4th 1975 (with thanks to Damian Shanahan for the research):

The Space Museum, The Chase, The Time Meddler, Galaxy Four, The Myth Makers, The Ark, The Smugglers, The Tenth Planet, The Power of the Daleks, The Underwater Menace, The Moonbase, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks, The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Abominable Snowmen, The Ice Warriors, The Enemy of the World, The Web of Fear, The Dominators, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Seeds of Death, The Space Pirates, The War Games

The Krotons was returned in June 1976.)

NZ's Smugglers were likely supplied from Australian copies and then sent to Singapore. Barbados copies maybe went to Zambia then Sierra Leone and were returned to London in 1974 (or if they weren't the SLTV station was destroyed in one of several wars in the late 70's.)

There's a good chance The Smugglers will stay lost.

According to the site Serial 2C was the last of Group F in First Doctor sales terms. The next few groups after this were hardly shown overseas. Only 3 countries ever took Tenth Planet. By this time (later half of 1966) the Terry Nation rights sales embargo problem with Daleks asserted itself in two ways. DW stopped making new Dalek stories at the end of Series 4 (there was about a 6 month lead time on commissioning and writing new scripts at this time) and Dalek serials overseas were sold separately by BBC Enterprises, presumably at higher 'Terry' prices.

Masterplan was never shown overseas, Power in just Australia, NZ and Singapore and Evil in just 4 countries (and frequently out of order.)

It's gonna be 5 years before we see Daleks on DW after series 4.

After an initial burst of international distribution many countries were going cold on DW by this stage.
The distribution of missing episodes in the archives is reflected by international sales distribution (with a couple of minor variations...)

International sales would build slowly again from here to the peaks of the late 70's and early 80's when 200 PBS stations in the USA were buying every ep they could get and plenty of repeats...

HALF WAY

Episode 1 of this serial is number 127. Which is exactly half way to 253.
So we're half way through the B&W's.
After this serial it's 130 down (inc. 43 missing episodes with 4 animated).
In the remaining 123 to go there are 54 missing episodes (14 are animated.)

And episode 2 is my "birthday" episode... first broadcast (in UK) 17 September 1966.


ABM Rating 1.90/4.00
LJM Rating 0.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 1.75/10.00  

No. 27 (out of 28)

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027 The War Machines

Started 18-Aug

This has aged horribly.

It is clearly a prototype UNIT story. It is the first story wholly set in 'the present day'. There is a different feel to this story. It's modern and eschews established convention.

It seems decidedly odd to see William Hartnell's Doctor acting as 'Scientific Adviser" and getting all 'matey' with establishment types like Summers and the 'minister'. If this was Pertwee you'd believe it. Verity Lambert would have stopped this happening, I reckon.

While Prof Brett, Col. Green and Sir Reginald are very conservative characters, Ben and Polly are cheeky and irreverent in a way that looks starkly new. I cannot imagine Ian and Barbara talking like they do.

But the Inferno /hottest night spot in town seems twee.

The concept of hooking up computers across the world (about a dozen of 'em) by telephone is presented as "wowee".  This seems laughably naive in 2018.

The way WOTAN takes over people in ep1 is staged like a primitive religious ceremony. One thing that maybe hasn't changed so much is the fear of the 'big', sneaky technology. You can still read/see news stories today about how computers are gonna take over the world soon (or something like it.) The premise of the War Machines story plays on this primordial notion.


The guff about computers 'thinking' is obviously wrong. What computer technology allows people to do is the same evil but more efficiently and comprehensively. If the script of The War Machines had realised this it might have been 20 times better as a story.


The script mistake of WOTAN referring to "Doctor Who" is disappointing but it's hardly the worst aspect of this.

From somewhere in the middle of ep2 this goes seriously off the rails in drama terms. The characters are very underdeveloped and seem horribly cliched, especially the soldiers and the other goodies. The way Brett and Krimpton seem to stare upward into the middle distance and soliloquise about what the nasty computer is gonna do is very strange. Who exactly are they meant to be telling this stuff? Is it computer instructions? Greek chorus? Or narration? It does not work.

Several ludicrous things happen in the plot e.g the 'dosser' (who takes taxis and has brand new shoes... huh?) is attacked and presumably murdered late at night by the War Machine workers and yet the Summers and the Doctor casually read about it in the newspaper the **next** morning. Nah.... that's Silver Nemesis silly.

There's a lot of visual flourishes in this which are impressive: The war machines on film on location in city streets is the obvious, repeated one. The machines are a bit limited to crashing through piles of boxes but the director manages to make it look exciting... somehow. This kind of thing is destined for repetition on DW but here it is very style over substance.

This story is a bold, fresh, new style in DW. It's the start of 'the yeti on the loo' monsters. It's the start of modern contemporary DW stories (which they're still doing in 2017.) Give it another year and this idea will become Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep. But this early prototype is a bit lame looking 52 years on.

ABM Rating 2.05/4.00
LJM Rating 3.00/5.00
SPJ Rating 5.00/10.00  

No. 18 (out of 27)

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026 The Savages

Started 14-Aug-2018

Series 3 has been rocky. An ugly start, a Dalek powered soar in the air, some historical dullness, weird (bizarre?) forays into the experimental and (as of next serial) a genuine revolution in DW storytelling.

But in the meantime...
The Savages is a delightful surprise. And Bill is fantastic as the Doctor in this.


The first serial with numbered episodes....

We watched a LC recon. This has genuine telesnaps unlike recent missing eps serials which are recreated from publicity photos and other studio images.  Reason is the new production team started ordering John Cura telesnaps once again from The Gunfighters onwards and these were discovered in the BBC Written Archives by Marcus Hearn (now DWM editor again) in the early 90's...

Two eps in this seems a much more sophisticated SF story than anything this series so far.
The characters are genuinely 'shades of grey' duplicitous and have stealthy motives. Dramatically it is intriguing and the political themes (supremacism, eugenics, bio-engineering) mark a fresh dawn of sophisticated SF for DW.  Is this Davis and Pedler at work? I wonder...

The music in this is by Raymond Jones (whose only other credit is The Romans). It seems ambitious and insistent and noticeable. It's good but maybe it seems that way after the 'Ballad...'.

This is a story I had not previously appreciated. Poor quality soundtracks and tedious telesnaps are a barrier even for rolled gold fans I guess.

Easy no 2 for series 3.


ABM Rating 3.15/4.00
LJM Rating 3.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 7.00/10.00   

No. 5 (out of 26)

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025 The Gunfighters

Started 9-Aug

Brightly comic with pithy lines. Quite unconvincing as a western but clearly the intention is to satirise westerns.

Johnny Ringo is Shane.
Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp are western legends. The shootout at the OK Corrall is too. The actual history in this story is pretty ropey (apparently).

This teleplay is having fun with trope-y toys. Conceptually it's actually a little like kid's play with different brands, types and ranges of toys... like Barbie on the Star Wars Millenium Falcon action figures set or My Little Pony with bendy dinosaurs.

A point I've made before about this one is that watched in 2018 these episodes are shorn of the context of popular TV at the time this was made. TV westerns were in the early to mid 60's what Celebrity Cooking Shows are like these days. Back then there were many of them, the most popular TV shows were Westerns, so were lots of the less popular ones. When Dr Who was first shown in Australia on ABC channel 2 in 1965 the bill was 7pm The News, 7.30pm Dr Who, 7.55pm Tales of Wells Fargo. These days we have the idea that 60's telly was corny sitcoms and spies and detectives. Well it was. But it was also westerns....

The Gunfighters is a parody of the high budget US filmed TV western series.

Specifically,

• The Lone Ranger
• The Gene Autry Show
• Gunsmoke
• Cheyenne
• Have Gun – Will Travel
• Sugarfoot
• Wagon Train
• Maverick
• Trackdown
• Wanted Dead or Alive
• The Rifleman
• Bonanza
• Laramie
• The Virginian
• The Big Valley
• The High Chaparral 

....there's dozens of 'em... and all make The Gunfighters look stupid, cheap and a bad idea. Fake British "American" accents (except Shane Rimmer as Seth Harper who doing a fake Canadian "American" accent), studio lighting and video and the wimping out with gun play are competing with film, real horses, genuine western Hollywood chutzpah.

Which is why it had a bad reputation at the time. Here's a hard fact. Ep4 of this serial "The OK Corral" Audience Appreciation score was 30%  To this day that's the lowest,  last place, bottom of the barrel. Clearly the audience of 1966 saw this as a poor quality fake.

These days the western doesn't exist. No one reads 'em, no one makes 'em, even die hard fans are hard to find (DW fans aren't remarkable they are exceptional!!). The nearest to a popular Western show is HBO's Deadwood and that's more like Game of Thrones than Rawhide.

Might be tempted to say Gunfighters was bad then, it's still bad and therefore it's bad. But I think there is something tragicomic going on.

The tone in this seems jokey with an undercurrent of menace. This is a weird mixture. When you add the repetitious song with it's narrative elements the story takes on a almost operatic tragedian aspect.


Except that it ISN'T.... it's The Gunfighters. A silly experimental Series 3 DW serial that was lucky to get made, survives only through dumb luck, the other experiments that surround it having rather worse luck at surviving.

Is it good Doctor Who? The end of ep2 when Johnny Ringo makes his dramatic entrance is attractive and ominous but the DW theme music cuts against it really strainfully. So, that's a no....

Luckily this is the LAST Wiles/Tosh hangover script. From here it's all Lloyd and Davis's own work.... and it's about to swing.

Warning for where we're going. We haven't had a 'base under siege' story yet. When we start you'll have plenty of chance to get used to it.


ABM Rating 2.19/4.00
LJM Rating 1.50/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.50/10.00

No. 23 (out of 25)

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024 The Celestial Toymaker

Started 5-Aug

Today there are 3 missing eps and the curious coda of the ep4. It seems rushed and handwaving in it's denouement and boring and pointless for the first 3 eps. (Hartnell is on holidays for ep 2 and 3.)

The third producer in the same series takes over with this one. Also the new story editor is now in charge.

There is little actual record of it but Wiles tenure as producer seems uncommitted and rocking. Rumours of clashes with Hartnell are not unbelievable but my feeling is that Wiles was not suited to what he was being asked to do. It took just four stories for this to become obvious.

This story is a radical departure from what went before. It is unlikely that this is solely due to the new regime, but Innes Lloyd's and Gerry Davis' names are on the credits.

Precisely what is different?

• The Toymaker is presented as a mythic almost God like figure. (New, tick) 
• The Doctor knows who he is and the Toymaker knows who the Doctor is. (Not new, see the Meddling Monk). 
• Unlike the Monk, the Toymaker's domain is not normal or 'real' but wholly arbitrary and fantastical. (New, tick)  
• The Toymaker is NOT a Time Lord (or a one of the Doctor's people) however. (New (to DW, anyway), tick)

And the explanation ends there. In the future all powerful figures are called 'Guardians' (The Key to Time 1978) or 'Eternals' (Enlightenment 1983) or 'Gods of Ragnorok' (Greatest Show in the Galaxy 1988) or Omega (The Three Doctors 1972). These, wisely all have some kind of attempt at reasoned explanation baked in. For instance, when we get to The Mind Robber (1968) we'll meet another mystery realm. The keeper of the mystery is some kidnapped victim himself in that story.

The Toymaker is an intriguing and almost unprecedented type of character. It will be tried again. But it doesn't actually work in 1966.

What are we actually watching in this story?
The actual story is bizarre even for DW. The plot is: the TARDIS is hijacked (how? why?) by the Toymaker, the Doctor is placed in invisible, intangible limbo playing a longwinded logic game while Steven and Dodo participate in 'games' (tests?) to get back to the TARDIS (which appears to have been changed arbitrarily into a cupboard). This is repeated for each of the four episodes until well I don't get the denouement at all. On the final move of the game the choice for the Doctor is either ceding ownership of the domain from the Toymaker or condemning the Toymaker to continued entrapment in it. Yet simultaneously the Toymaker claims he can create any other world at his own will whenever he chooses (however this may wipe any beings in the previous domain). So somehow the Doctor just blows it all up, releasing himself, companions and the Toymaker (presumably). (Rugg and Clara and them are wiped I suppose...)

Up to this point stories in DW are either historical episodes of meeting people and places in Earth history or visits to apparently alien worlds where there are people or things with some kind of civilisation or society which purports to be as real as the historical episodes only more distant in time and space. To give a specific example: Vortis in the Isop galaxy is populated by Zarbi, Menoptera, Optera and Venom Grubs. If we were able to travel there we too could meet all these creatures and characters and talk with them.

So what and where/when is the Toymaker and his domain? Where do the characters/populace come from? There are several references in the script to these people (Rugg, Wiggins, Cyril etc) being captured, being victims who lost against the Toymaker on prior occasions. But this explains little.

So what is going on? What are we watching? It is some kind of absurd pantomime? If so then everything on screen is representational or figurative. Nothing on screen is literal or real.

So it's not a sci-fi on some planet or in some historical time anymore? Uh-huh. Either this story lacks credibility or it is some kind of allegory. For what?

Read Sandifer's Eruditorium ( http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-most-totally-closed-mind-the-celestial-toymaker/ ) for an extreme (and ugly, awful) interpretation of this allegory.

I cannot agree with Sandifer's interpretation for these reasons.

• Michael Gough **is not** affecting a Chinese accent at any point. He uses the same voice he uses in everything else he was ever in. (See The Man in the White Suit (1951) or The Arc of Infinity (1983) or Batman (1991) or The Avengers - The Cybernauts (1965).)

• The Eeny Meeny nursey rhyme has shifted in acceptability since the 1960's. I heard this frequently in the 60's and 70's when I was a child **with** the n word. Other stuff changes too. Look up the history of Robertson's jam in the UK (**Golliwogs** on the labels until the 1990's FFS).

• The 'celestial' aspect of the main character's name is not obviously Chinese.

But what **are** we watching? The weak, arbitrary metaphysical allegory? Some parody of Playschool? A nightmare/fantasy episode of The Avengers (like Too Many Christmas Trees (1965)) ?

I'm going for badly written misfire.

Production history says this story was rewritten at least twice. Hayles originally submitted script was quite different to what ended up on the screen, It is entirely possible that a racist fantasy allegory was clumsily misproduced as absurdly allegorical 'playtime' panto. The Toymaker's costume could have been a Santa suit but they chose a some kind of cr*p magician's outfit.

I think Wiles and Tosh were unexpectedly dumped when the ratings took a dive in The Massacre. (Maybe they were ready to go anyway?)  Lloyd and Davis were propelled into their new chairs with a 'just do your best' sorta orientation instruction.... and the only script in the fridge was this.

Whatever the explanation, The Celestial Toymaker is very boring and pointless.
Yet the ratings indicate, somehow, they got away with it (almost). In my view this is a failed experiment and an indulgent one.

Lloyd and Davis are taking DW on a journey. In the next two series it has a chance to learn how to change and it discovers that change is needed to survive...




ABM Rating 1.00/4.00
LJM Rating 1.5/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.5/10.00  

No. 24 (out of 24)

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023 The Ark

Started 1-Aug-2018

Boy it's good to see moving pictures.

The strength of this is the before and after plot.

The shortcomings are the Monoids and the Guardians.... oh and the Refusian too.

There are strong moments (the vase smashing scene) and weak ones (anything Security Kitchen related)
The Monoids are moronic villians. The Guardians are moronic heroes. Zentos makes me want to throw things at the TV.

The effects and the production are ambitious. The regulars are on form.
The ending of episode 2 is strong candidate for best ep ending of series 3, an award that is not distinguished at many points up to this in the whole series. (I mean it gets better from here....)



ABM Rating 3.00/4.00
LJM Rating 2.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 3.00/10.00  

No. 17 (out of 23)

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