In early July, the Doctor Who Season 12 blu-ray arrived, but because of some footballing tournament or other, in our house the telly kept getting hijacked, so I was unable to watch it as immediately as I would have liked to. But, because I’d been thinking about doing another “Episode One” piece about Tom Baker’s first broadcast episode of Doctor Who, I ended up watching the DVD on a computer screen in another room, and these are the thoughts I came up with.
Somehow I managed to stagger through reading this in the latest podcast from Lisa and Andrew (available at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/round-the-archives-episode-25 ) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...
PODCAST 10 – DR WHO – “ROBOT”
(EPISODE ONE)
New season.
New title sequence.
New Doctor.
The generic BBC1 trailers for
this new season really didn’t tell us all that much about what to expect, other
than that the show was back, and we didn’t even get a Radio Times cover to tell
us that.
In fact, I’m almost certain
that nobody outside the BBC got to see anything of Tom Baker in action as
Doctor Who until the episode aired, but I’ve not yet been able to confirm this.
I can remember the “exploding mines” trailer from a couple of weeks later with
Tom standing there grinning as the smoke cleared, but I really don’t remember
seeing anything at all of him before “Robot” burst onto our screens in late
December 1974.
After that - sort of - brand
new and now iconic and gween title sequence fades, the episode immediately
starts with the “Look Brigadier, it’s starting!” recap scene from six months
earlier - featuring Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney - in which that strange
dark haired bloke replaced our lovely Uncle Jon, but, on closer repeat viewing,
he no longer resembles the puppet Lord Charles.
There were reasons why I’d
thought this. My father used to send me out of the room whenever he thought
something on television might upset me, and so I got quite familiar with the
gas heater in the hallway under the huge mirror we used to have there. I also
found that, if I didn’t close the living room door behind me, and sat on the
stairs, looking through the banister spindles, I could still see the telly from
a blurry distance.
Hence my beloved telly uncle
Jon Pertwee transmogrified and, because my less than perfect eyesight was as
yet undiagnosed, the brief glimpse we’d got of his replacement had really
resembled Ray Alan’s puppet nemesis.
Of such moments are tiny
lives shaped.
It’s difficult now to realise
just how unknown Tom Baker really was when the rollback and mix was completed
and Jon Pertwee’s face had turned into his.
Jon Pertwee was famous. Jon
Pertwee had been doing the job for five years. As far as almost everyone was
concerned, Jon Pertwee WAS the Doctor, and this bloke, well, he was almost a
total unknown, wasn’t he? What on earth were the BBC thinking…?
Yet hindsight is a peculiar
thing because he is, of course, quite brilliant right from the word go.
In a magical ten minute
whirlwind – and yes it is, astonishingly, only ten minutes (if that) – the tour
de force that is The Mighty Tom seizes the part and makes it wholly his own, so
much so that, despite the fact that Jon Pertwee was still filming scenes elsewhere
whilst some of this was going on, the viewer is already to a certain extent
wondering "Jon Who…?"
Whilst the Brigadier is
phoning for the M.O. Doctor Sullivan, Tom lies on the floor burbling about
messing with human history and the brontosaurus being large, placid…
[Pause]
…and stupid!
…and squares on hypotenuses
and why is mouse when it spins.
Gobble-a-duke, but
spectacularly fizzingly delivered gobble-a-duke.
The Warrant Officer formerly
known as Sergeant Benton, played as ever with underplayed “thank your lucky
stars” charm by John Levene, appears with a report and has a beautifully
understated exchange with the Brigadier about the matter-of-fact recent
transformation of their scientific adviser ---
“Saw it happen this time…”
---which is another nod back
to that previous time when he didn’t. I often wonder whether this is the first
time that the Brigadier actually believes in such transformations, despite
being told about them and all the evidence that stacked up between “Spearhead
From Space” and “The Three Doctors”, but you never can tell.
He’s such a pragmatist, that
dear old Brig.
And whilst the Doctor is now
under the personal care of Doctor Sullivan, everything else at UNIT
Headquarters this morning is “just routine” or about as “just routine” as
things ever get at UNIT HQ.
You take a breath and watch a
security guard on a military base being murdered by metal-limbed creature or
creatures unknown through the means of a square multi-prismed filter and some
ominously sinister and slightly bleepy and electronic music.
The guard dies, but the guard
dog simply yelps off to consider its career options.
After seeing a side view of
an obviously inhuman shadow projected onto a nearby wall, back through the
“Point Of View” prisms, we see the arms of the metal-limbed creature or
creatures unknown opening a massive vault door possibly – or probably not -
left over from the Fort Knox set in Goldfinger, grabbing a file and making off
with it.
Back at UNIT, Sarah Jane
appears wearing an alarming white sun hat and the Brigadier starts telling this
most favoured journalist about the fact that some Top Secret plans have been
stolen because, with the Doctor out of action, he has no-one else to tell,
which seems all rather sad, especially as he’s obviously spent the last three
weeks brooding over the empty corner of the lab whilst Jon Pertwee was lost and
slowly dying in the Time Vortex.
Sarah seizes her opportunity
to use this moment to persuade her most influential of contacts into getting
her a visitor’s pass for the rather alarming sounding Government Scientific
Ideas Body also known as the “ThinkTank” - and whilst we discover that the Old
Girl’s not sure Doctor Sullivan is the right sort of chap to be looking after
the Doctor, we are assured that he’s a first class fellow, and, as they head
off to the Brig’s office for some form-filling, we learn that whilst the
Brigadier also considers himself to be a little old-fashioned, Sarah knows that
he’s a bit of a swinger, which back then probably meant that he’d get his
groove on after a couple of G and T’s at the Officer’s Mess.
At least we hope so.
The Doctor, lurking in the
corridor, carrying his boots and wearing a long night-shirt and black velvet
jacket ensemble, watches them leave and, to a certain amount of funky music,
sneaks into the UNIT Lab and happily spots the TARDIS only to – less happily -
find it locked.
In an almost direct parallel
to a similar scene in his predecessor’s opening story, he frantically starts
looking for the key, only to find it hidden in the best and most natural place
possible, one of his boots.
And so, with the Doctor about
to flee – and perhaps meddle unwisely with a far distant super-computer or
twelve – we meet Lieutenant Harry Sullivan as played with such mastery by the
lovely and much-lamented Ian Marter.
The sparkle between the two
actors is immediate as they discuss definitions of sickbays and infirmaries,
and which one of them is the more bona
fide of the two doctors in the room. To prove his fitness, the definite
article karate chops a wooden brick without saying “Hai!”, runs on the spot,
borrows Harry’s stethoscope to check both of his hearts, and has a good old
look at his brand new face in a handily placed shaving mirror, so it is his reflection
that dismisses his old nose without transforming into a photograph of Jon
Pertwee.
But still, he couldn’t stand
there chatting all day. He’d got things to do. Super-computers to
mind-scramble, and so on. His exasperation and frustration at how to prove how
well he is leads to a beautifully choreographed skipping routine with the two
actors nose to nose as Tom rhythmically chants an old skipping song.
It’s no surprise that
Elisabeth Sladen thought that she’d need to “up her game” with this magical pair
around.
Moments later, the Brigadier
and Sarah return to find Harry locked in a cupboard and the TARDIS making its
dematerialisation noise, meaning that Sarah has to bang furiously on the doors
to get her first proper scene with this brand new new Doctor.
And it’s beautiful. All, in a
portent of future times past, about hating goodbyes, the fact that he can’t
leave because the Brigadier needs him, and reminding him that he’s still UNIT’s
Scientific Adviser, and a final dawning recognition of his friends that would
be mimicked and turned back-to-front in Peter Capaldi’s opening scenes half a
lifetime or so later.
And all with Harry still
lurking at the bottom of that cupboard.
Without two “Robot” scenes to
indicate the passage of time, Terrance Dicks might have just have written an
almost perfect ten-minute minisode to introduce a new Doctor, because these are
ten minutes of sheer poetry.
This scene is bracketed by the
two Robot raid scenes, the second of which involves an electric fence, a
security guard trying to read his newspaper, a flimsy looking plank failing to
secure a door, an exploding telephone, and the fear-filled, metal-armed, throat-grabbing
death of Dalek-performer-in-chief John Scott Martin adding to his on-screen
death tally, but – surprisingly to me because I remembered him as being the
first victim - making it alive through far more of episode one than he did in
The Green Death as season-and-a-bit ago.
Rifling through some orange
plastic storage boxes, some electronic parts are taken by a metal-limbed
creature or creatures unknown, whilst the ominously sinister and slightly
bleepy and electronic music starts to become rather catchy in an unlikely to
ever bother the Pop Charts all that much kind of a way.
Back at UNIT HQ, Harry
Sullivan enjoys a bit of business checking his own heart with his dodgy
stethoscope, as the Doctor dresses for action four times over, in a possibly
deliberate attempt to make his eventual costume seem relatively normal after
the relatively sober lordliness of the Pertwee look.
The costume is eccentric,
yes, but also instantly iconic, and the genius of Dicks is that, after the
Viking, the King of Hearts, and the Harlequin, and some delightfully
characterful silent-movie face-acting from Tom, it actually seems rather tame
in comparison despite the hat and scarf, in a manner that a straightforward
reveal might not have been.
In fact the reveal is almost
a throwaway. It isn’t dwelt upon. Immediately it seems to be saying “I am the
Doctor and this what I wear now, get used to it” and the viewers, still riding
this whirlwind, probably already have.
And so, with a fizzing,
crackling sense of urgency, and no time to lose, this completed new Doctor
bounds into action, and off on location to investigate not the daisiest daisy,
but the squashiest dandelion.
Starting off in the
background of a two-shot featuring Harry and the Brigadier we find the Doctor
examining a dandelion with a jewellers lens in his eye, and I genuinely think
that the “By my calculations of the resistance of vegetable matter this
dandelion has been stepped on by something weighing a quarter of a ton” speech
is THE MOMENT that Tom became cemented as the Doctor for me, and I still
utterly adore that moment to this day.
Some people will try to tell
you that Tom Baker’s tenure only really begins with “The Ark In Space” but I
think that such people are dead wrong. Tom as the Doctor begins right here,
right at the beginning of “Robot” and he is so instantly and completely “THE
Doctor” in this that it’s suddenly very difficult to imagine anyone else
playing the part.
Another adorable moment
follows when the Doctor seems terribly pleased to have deduced that the Top
Secret list on the Brigadier’s clipboard represents the components of a Disintegrator
Gun, and it can be no coincidence that the nose tap that follows was mimicked
by The Curator in the fiftieth anniversary special nearly forty years later.
Who nose…?
Sarah, meanwhile, arrives at
the ThinkTank and we get to meet shifty old Jellicoe – who immediately signals
by his shifty manner that “things” are “afoot” – and Miss Winters in her
glasses and beige power suit, who immediately undermines the sisterhood by virtue-signalling
her way to some dodgy moral high ground at Sarah’s assumption of a masculine
director in what – at the time – was a male-dominated culture.
For the put-down alone, we
immediately dislike her.
As double acts go, Hilda
Winters and Jellicoe don’t really match up to some of the great pairings
created by Robert Holmes over the years, but they’re suitably devious and memorable
enough I suppose, and “Jellicoe and Winters” would make a great name for a
shop, wouldn’t it?
An ex-Mrs Dennis Waterman,
Patricia Maynard, plays Miss Winters in her only appearance in the series,
although she’s been in practically everything else.
Formerly Sergeant Osgood in
“The Daemons”, Alec Linstead plays Jellicoe, a slippery customer who isn’t even
worthy of a first name. In a later appearance in Doctor Who he would simply be
a head, but if you want to get ahead, call Alec Linstead.
Meanwhile, in a UNIT Land
Rover somewhere near to where the last break-in occurred, Tom lollops on the
seats as the very antithesis of what Jon Pertwee might have done in similar
circumstances. There’s a little bit of Holmesian deductive reasoning when he
works out that, if he is right, and – as he says in a slight hark back to his
Pertweeness - he invariably is, the next thing they will be looking to steal
will be a focussing generator.
So now we all know how to
build one.
The Doctor explains that
their perpetrator might not be human and how they ought to think about locking
the next door before it is broken into, which leads to a “Greyhound Leader”
call sign moment from the Brigadier [KLAXON!] as he puts the word out to
protect Emmett’s Electronics which, in a strange moment presumably designed to
warn the audience that the next location might prove disappointing, he
describes as a “smallish” factory which, on some level, you rather hope might
have been International Electromatics.
Meanwhile, back in the grounds
of the ThinkTank, a place where ladders hang on high external walls just in
case you might need to make a quick exit, Sarah’s chat mentioning – Oops! I
probably shouldn’t have mentioned knowing about that - a Disintegrator Gun
seems to upset Jellicoe so much that his dreadful suit starts to curl, possibly
because he hasn’t any hair which can, or possibly from the shine of sweat
pouring off him.
Meanwhile Sarah pops uninvited
into a restricted area, which is found to be empty. She makes a pointed mention
of Professor Kettlewell who seems to have departed ThinkTank after all of that
“fuss in the press” we learn very little more about, although she has to be
saved when she slips on a patch of something oily on the floor that has
presumably not slipped from Jellicoe’s now extraordinarily shiny head.
Over at Emmett’s, the
military are guarding the factory in a full UNIT force of about six. Standing
with the Doctor and Harry in a Land Rover - looking for all the world like a
jigsaw I still have in a box somewhere - the Brigadier’s description of the now
“impregnable” surroundings sounds like he’s been casing the joint for weeks,
although we’d never suspect dear old Alistair of being behind such skulduggery,
would we?
The Doctor’s reference to the
Titanic disaster – which, we’ll come to know one day, was nothing to do with
him – is illustrated by a “Glug! Glug! Glug!” as he sinks down into the front
seat of the Land Rover.
Of course, it is the Doctor
who points out the Brigadier has left one direction very much uncovered, and,
as if on cue, a massive saw-tool thingy bursts through a nearby floor, alerting
a guard, who fires off his machine gun to no avail, and gets well and truly
deaded for his trouble by a metal-limbed creature or creatures unknown.
It’s a hard life in UNIT.
Tom, like a great big ball of
boundless new energy, dashes off in response, losing his hat as he goes, but
it’s all to no avail. The very large rat has successfully escaped from a place
into which it was until recently believed a very small cat could not get into,
although it’s rather a nice touch that the Doctor measures off the depth of the
tunnel using his brand new scarf.
Missing out on all the
life-threatening Action (Not By Havoc), Sarah has left the ThinkTank and has
gone on to visit one Professor Kettlewell, a short scientist with the most
astonishing hair, as played by Edward Burnham, the actor who played the
Professor Watkins once employed by the largish electronics firm International
Electromatics, back when the Doctor was short of stature and Beatle-cutty of
hair.
He plays him with an air of
disillusioned distractedness and we instantly love him and his peculiarly
eccentric ways as he does a bit of business with an electronic gizmo, and
wishes Sarah Jane “good day” as he tries to get rid of her after she
cross-examines him about his “wild” earth-saving theories, which don’t actually
seem quite so wild these days.
However, his manner changes
after she’s departed, and he retrieves a sandwich from the drawer of his filing
cabinet as if to emphasise just what a lovable old absent-minded and probably
quite harmless professor he really is.
Sitting in her mustard yellow
two-seater open-topped sports car, like the racy go-getter she most obviously
is - because maybe she’s a bit of a swinger, too - Sarah realises that she
still has some time left on her special ThinkTank Pass for now slightly less
favoured journalists, and suddenly she is, for one last Terrance Dicks scripted
time, very much the Sarah Jane Smith, intrepid girl reporter, of the Jon
Pertwee era.
Meanwhile, Benton, the Brig,
Harry and the Doctor are examining a great big hole in the ground, the other
end of the tunnel out of the vault and whilst the Doctor suggests knowingly –
because, let’s face it, he’s already worked it all out hasn’t he? – that the
perpetrator might not need to breathe, they discover some huge rectangular
footprints which suggest an adversary of the sort of stature that might just
weigh a quarter of a ton in the right shoes.
And that’s the last we see of
any of them for this episode, because for the remaining few minutes it’s pretty
much all about Sarah. As she uses her obvious charms to get her way back into
the ThinkTank using the old “Left My Notebook Behind” ploy.
As the guard goes off to
check she sneaks in, clambering over a wall and making her way back to that
“Positively No Admittance” door she barged through during her visit, and, as a
phenomenon in a powder blue suit, huge chunky heels, and that blasted white
hat, she checks the slippery patch on the floor and gives it a bit of a sniff,
just as she is discovered by, hey, guess what…? A Robot.
Not - yet – a GIANT Robot,
but a Robot nevertheless.
Well, we have been waiting
for one of those to turn up ever since we noticed the story title in the Radio
Times.
Interestingly, then, and
perhaps because she might be slightly more familiar with the audience than the
new Doctor is at this point – after all there was still the risk that nobody
would actually give much of a damn about this wildly eccentric NotPertwee yet –
it is Sarah who gets to feature in the first cliffhanger of the series as the
eponymous Robot is finally revealed, although not, as yet, in all its full-frontal
magnificent glory.
We do get a glimpse of its
massively impressive head, burning brightly red with internal lamps and
polished to the very shiniest of sheens that makes even Jellicoe’s pale in
comparison.
And, in that “Point Of View”
effect we’ve already seen several people murdered to, we close on a close up of
Sarah’s face as the killer Robot – for with this effect we realise this must be
so - closes in on her…
Crash in end titles on a
lovely little piece of television that completely reinvents the entire world of
that eleven year old institution that is Doctor Who in just twenty-two and a
bit minutes.
Once upon a long ago, back in
the days of video, I decided to a complete Doctor Who rewatch and, like the
philistine that I am - possibly because of having just bought and watched “The
Tom Baker Years” (although I can’t be certain of that) - I decided to start
with Tom and close the loop – should I get there – with Jon.
And I hope you’ll agree, it’s
a cracking place to start.
