The Singing Sands

"We should be up there."

Susan says wistfully looking towards the stars from outside Polo's tent on the Gobi desert in a touching scene with Ping-Cho. Another high quality episode of thoughtful dialogue and imaginative plotting. The tension comes from knowing that Tegana is about to sabotage the expedition together with the oncoming storm, the 'Singing Sands' of the title, which is cleverly explained and realised, culminating in Ian's real voice calling for Susan. The approaching sandstorm is preminiscent of the 'Robots of Death' thirteen years later. Very clever, and very educational. As was 'Shah-K-Mate' - the King [the Shah] is dead [Mate as in Matador - killer]. The Doctor is strangely absent in this episode, sleeping a lot and generally being rude according to Polo and Susan. Barbara intuitively interprets this as feeling powerless at having his TARDIS taken off him by a 'primative'. He'll bounce back like a rubber ball, full of ideas, she thinks and I was reminded of David Tennant's Doctor.

A great cliffhanger as Tegana stands astride the oasis, gourd in hand, 'Here's water, Marco Polo. Come for it!'



An erroneous caption at the end shows 'Next episode - The Cave of Five Hundred Eyes'

But really, we know it's

Next Episode: Five Hundred Eyes

I can't wait.

The Roof of the World

The first Radio Times Dr Who cover. Hurrah!


And the now customary half-page article to introduce each new story.

"I wonder what the strangers reaction will be... when I tell them what I propose to do."

This may well have been John Lucarotti's diary entry the night before he showed his script to the Dr Who production team. What an utter delight this episode is! It's beautifully written and, above all after the last two episodes, elegantly plotted. It seems to have been the thing in the early days that something would go wrong with the ship that would prevent the travellers leaving straight away and making them take part in the adventure - the fluid link, the fast return switch and now another broken electronic circuit that will take the Doctor 'days to build a new one'. Yet Lucarotti seamlessly builds in other plot elements that will compel the crew to stay in what will become the norm for the series i.e. that curiosity or circumstances will prevent their leaving as opposed to mechanical failure. I suppose this is already there in 'The Dead Planet'. The Doctor's curiosity is enough to warrant an adventure, so much so that he sabotages the ship. Here, Lucarotti adds the suspicion of the Mongols and both Marco Polo's dream of returning to Venice and Teganna's lust for power as plot devices to prevent our quartet from entering the TARDIS.

I love this episode, and I'm watching a reconstruction. It's well written, it flows, it's believable; it's another journey. The credible journey. For Marco Polo's life was one of travel and so it is entirely appropriate that a Dr Who story involving him includes journeying. It's pure inspiration to call the TARDIS the Doctor's caravan and to make it the prize for just about everyone in the story, including our travellers. There are many echoes of the first episode in this one, perhaps because it has the same director, but possibly because John Lucarotti stuck to his brief. There is another reference to the TARDIS not being on wheels and Ian and Barbara return completely plausibly to teaching. Barbara tells Susan (an alien) of Marco Polo and Ian explains to Mister Marco (who is from the 13th century) about the thin atmosphere affecting the boiling point of water. This is exactly the subtlety and craft that the series set out to achieve I feel sure.

What do you need for a journey? Yep, a map and how lovely is that moving map of Cathay and Marco's narration over it? I'm struck that this story has a tiny number of sets - the TARDIS on the Pamir, the mountainside, Polo's tent, and the way station at Lop - and yet when we arrive at Lop (see, I'm doing it now) it feels like a completely different place with a different style and different costumes.

A great cliffhanger and a great sense of a journey in this episode. Like us, it feels that Doctor Who has arrived.

Next episode: The Singing Sands

Baker's Dozen

I'd like to pause a moment and think of these first thirteen episodes in isolation.

What if Sydney Newman had turned left instead of right? What might have tipped the balance in favour of cancellation? I think the latter three episodes of 'An Unearthly Child' are, if I'm honest, a bit boring and completely at odds with the modern, urbane and stunningly futuristic first episode. I can only imagine that people sat through them desperately hoping for another glimpse of the inside of that wonderful machine in the same way that they must have sat through the confusion of this episode revelling in the set and wishing the Daleks would come back.

That said, it's all too easy to see why Sydney took a chance and turned right (phew!)

The first episode of the series is staggering, the Daleks are a superb creation, the concept of the TARDIS is wonderful and its realisation fabulous, both inside and out. Terry Nation shows how to construct a script in a style and format which remained in use until 1989. And some of David Whitaker's dialogue in this current story is sublime. And then of course there's the wonderful cast. No wonder the show has lasted so long.

The Doctor is so darkly alien in these early stories. At times he comes across as a desperate fugitive. He clearly relishes exploring the cosmos, free of the constraints of the Time Lords. Only Susan, rather like Rose so many years later, can literally bring him down to Earth for a period of stability which he seems to detest. He seizes the excuse to set off into time and space again to explore even if it might mean kidnapping two humans, murdering a caveman and sabotaging his own ship to explore the Dalek city. Until Barbara stops him. In the same sublime way that, thinking about it, Polly stops Troughton, Jo stops Pertwee, Sarah stops Tom Baker's Doctor, Rose stops Ecclestone, Donna stops David Tennant's and Amy stops Matt Smith's.

I think this post is starting to resemble the episode itself in being all over the place, but with some very good bits! So perhaps it's time we moved on.

Which brings us to a fresh challenge. The next story is gone from the archives. Well in terms of being a television programme it's gone. So many bits of it still remain, crucially the soundtrack. Also production photographs, telesnaps, reconstructions, the script and the novelisation by the original author. It's going to be fun pulling all of this material together to try to get a sense of the story. Fancy a challenge?

Next episode: The Roof of the World

The Brink of Disaster

"We had time taken away from us, and now it's being given back to us... because it's running out!"

So says Barbara and she's right in many more senses than one. This is still a very strange Dr Who story. I decided to watch the DVD on the big screen rather than YouTube after all, to give the story its best chance. Even so it reels about all over the place though it does come good in the last ten minutes when we get back to I suppose what we consider now to be 'proper' Dr Who. The four incumbents (is this word ever used anywhere else other than to describe the people who travel in the TARDIS?) start to co-operate and begin to trust each other. Ian accepts the Doctor's apology readily, but I love when Barbara sits tight, unwilling to forgive him. The scene where the Doctor apologises is very touching and they both show incredible strength of character; he by apologising and she by accepting. They could so easily have been enemies forever. After all the tension I love the playfulness with Gilbert and Sullivan's cloak (it seems that the Doctor has visited Earth on several occasions already) and Susan in the snow. The cliffhanger is great, giants! Perhaps banging their heads on the roof of the world.

Next episode: The Roof of the World

Article: Baker's Dozen
My thoughts on the first 13 episodes

The Edge of Destruction

"I can't take you back, Susan, I can't."

I've put the RT article at the top of this post to help you try to make sense of this episode (you'll need all the help you can get!)

Well, what did you think? I thought it was odd. Very odd. It's so early on in the series and so experimental. While I was watching I thought that perhaps they got away with it because the programme was brand new and so most people didn't have a clue what was going on anyway.

Good points? A fantastic opportunity to see the beautifully detailed TARDIS set with all of its nooks and crannies and control banks and strange suspended cylinders. This episode is fabulously lit, notably towards the end when the Doctor is sitting in his chair illuminated by a knave of light. I've never seen the set lit like that before or since and it's so evocative of a church. Talking of churches, after Susan gets changed into that flat black smock and then has to have a lie down with a cooling cloth on her head after attacking Barbara with the scissors (bit strong, those scissor sister scenes) she looks like a medieval French Nun.

They all behave very oddly until the Doctor has a pop at Barbara. What a mistake-a to make-a. And then the whole thing gets very, very good. I do feel that David Whitaker's strength was in dialogue rather than plotting. Consequently Barbara's row with the Doctor is sensational and, in my opinion, crucial to the development of the series. For this is the point where everything changes and all the fear and doubt and suspicion between the two pairs of characters comes to a head and then is gradually replaced by trust and understanding and eventually love. I may be wrong, but from memory this is the pivot.

And how utterly bloody marvellous is Jacqueline Hill? This will be a recurring theme on these pages, but with good reason. Long one of my favourite companions and actors, I can't take my eyes off her. She is mesmerising, and the character of Barbara such a perfect foil for the Doctor. It's a wonderful moment after the row when the Doctor appears with a tray of drinks and is utterly charming. I'm still not convinced he hasn't slipped something in them to knock them all out. He's still manipulative to get his own way and skips about the console room when they're all unconscious. It's a genuine surprise when he finds himself with unknown hands around his throat.

However odd this episode is , and it is very odd (did I mention that?), it's again strikingly directed by Richard Martin. Ian's new favourite director.

And I meant to tell you that I'm about to be born. No really I am. Next Thursday. At midday. Keep an eye out. As a child I was stupidly proud when I found out I had been born between the two episodes of a rare two part Dr Who story. I mentioned this to my Dad a few years ago when the video first came out. He was singularly unimpressed!]

Next episode: The Brink of Disaster (I would like to make clear that this refers to the next episode of Dr Who that we will be watching and not to my impending entre into the world)

The Rescue

"I'm too old to be a pioneer, though I was amongst my own people, once."

So says the Doctor at the end of this long adventure, and what an adventure. Many stylish and intense scenes again here; I wonder what the tv audience of late 1963, early 1964 truly made of it. Where poor dear Antodus, who didn't want to come anyway, cuts the rope that threatens to pull Ian and Gannotus to their deaths and falls, screaming, into the chasm. Where our venturers afterwards sit broken, dirty (a feature I love of these realistic early episodes) and despondent until the lamp fails and new light is literally shone on their situation. Where there's a marvellous (Richard Martin again) almost 360 degrees shot that takes in a recently murdered Thal, the Doctor and Susan quaking in their corner cell and a long corridor shot with Ian, Barbara and the Thals moving towards Dalek Control that is then itself interrupted by a Dalek cutting across it. That scene would be hard to achieve today, but must have been a triumph of choreography between camera, actor and wayward prop in those days. Bravo!

The Thals final triumph over the Daleks is philosophically portrayed and few feel for the loss of the evil pepper pots, here uniquely seen upended rather than exploded.

Ian at this time was by no certainty the love interest for Barbara that he might become and so I love the gradual and touching scenes between Barbara and Gannatus that culminate in a farewell kiss.

All in all a fantastic adventure, but for a brand new television series in the sixties an astonishing achievement. Small wonder that this programme not only survives, but still commands today. The old battles are still being fought. C'est la vie.

I love this story yet I'm pleased to be moving on. Perhaps the first two stories are just a little too familiar to me from over-viewing, and certainly because of 'Dr Who and the Daleks', over-reading. Already the next episode looks intriguing: our travellers thrown to the floor in darkness as the Ship wheezes and groans in obvious distress - a sound that resonates with us all now, but must still have been disconcerting way back when.

This is an opportune moment to speak of platforms, as I realise that I failed to make clear at the outset of this project that I intend to explore Watching Dr Who on as many different platforms as possible. So far I've used the DVDs, on both my large screen television (not bragging, just interested to see how the picture quality stood up) and my PC. I've watched episodes on YouTube and also the BBC4 repeat of 'The Dead Planet'. I expect that by the time I finish I'll be having holographic versions of episodes beamed directly into my head. Or is that old-fashioned?

Next episode: The Edge of Destruction