Free Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) by Robert Shearman, Toby Hadoke Page A

dimension?” in the first episode if he’d followed it up by immediately screaming at a bit of shrubbery and tripping over a hillock.
    Then things get even stranger when the English countryside appears on the scanner, and I react with twenty-first century aloofness at the basic technology being employed by the production. “It’s obviously just a photograph,” I think smugly to myself. “It’s just a photograph,” the Doctor says on screen. What ? This is becoming metatextual in my head now. I pour the remainder of the whisky down the sink.
    And so everyone goes to bed and the Doctor is doing something crafty at the controls, the camera jauntily highlighting his nifty hand acting (he’s got very expressive digits – see, I told you this Smith bloke has what it takes). Someone then grabs the Doctor by the throat, and as the credits roll, I can’t help but think, “What the hell was that all about?” – but I say that as a positive rather than a negative. One of the many things I love about about Doctor Who is how there’s an episode to suit me no matter what mood I’m in: action-adventure, SF epic, knockabout comedy, morality play... the series can be (and has been) all of these. And sometimes, just sometimes , I might want to watch a bunch of people being chucked in at the deep end and asked to pull off what’s possibly the oddest 25 minutes ever committed to television – and when I do, I’ll watch this.
    January 7th
    The Brink of Disaster (The Edge of Destruction episode two)
    R: On the one hand, this is much better because you feel at least that the actors have read the end of the script before coming to the set this week, and so have a reasonable idea of what to work towards. But it’s also much worse, because what they’re working to is so determinedly anticlimactic. “We must all work together,” says the Doctor, and that’s a reasonable moral – but it’s also the same one the band of travellers employed escaping from savage cavemen, or in defeating alien mutants, so it doesn’t have appreciably more dramatic value now that they’re pitting their wits against a stuck button. It’s been argued that this is the story where the regulars throw off their suspicions towards each other and through the mystery become friends – and you can see the value of doing a story like that – but in fact, the earlier two adventures have done their jobs too well and already achieved it.
    The one thing that really works, though, is in watching how William Russell, Jacqueline Hill and Carole Ann Ford all snap back into their previous personae at the story’s end, but that William Hartnell resolutely doesn’t. He takes the Doctor on an extraordinary journey in this instalment, having seemed rather bewildered by the last. He seizes upon the Doctor’s capriciousness and cruelty early on – he positively looms over Ian threateningly as he sneers at him to get up off the floor. And this is in marked contrast to his new defining of the Doctor as a cuddly grandfather by the story’s end, where he awkwardly tells Barbara how valuable and clever she is, or tells Susan that he fears he’s going round the bend. This is by way of an extraordinary monologue given while the Doctor is darkened against the central console, in which he describes the birth of a solar system – it’s melodramatic, it’s over the top, and it ends with the Doctor giggling at the cosmic implications of it all like a lunatic, but it works because it feels incredibly alien. It’s not an easy scene to watch, and I have friends who deride it as Hartnell at his hammiest, but that sequence seems like the bridge between the brusque Doctor of the early stories and the loveable old eccentric he’ll now become. Hartnell also fluffs a lot this week – most amusingly, at the episode title itself. (“We’re on the brink of... of destruction!” he says, forcing William Russell, rather charmingly, to repeat the mistake back at him.) But you can