Tag Archives: William Hartnell

Doctor Who — The Three Doctors (1972-1973, directed by Lennie Manye)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

For the tenth season of Doctor Who, the BBC knew that they needed to start things off with a bang.  The first serial of season ten, The Three Doctors, brought together the first three actors who had played the Doctor.

A crisis was needed to explain why the Time Lords would decide to break their owns laws by bringing the Second Doctor and then the First Doctor out of their respective time zones.  Writers Dave Martin and Bob Baker came up with a story about the Doctor’s homeworld having its energy drained through a black hole.  If Gallifrey is destroyed then all of time and space will unravel.  (Everyone who has seen an episode of the original Doctor Who knows the drill.)  The villain is Omega (Stephen Thorne, who also played Azal in The Daemons), the first Time Lord, who has never forgiven his fellow Time Lords for abandoning him in an anti-matter universe that looks like a quarry.  The story is silly in the way that Doctor Who often could be but I think anyone watching will understand that the story is not that important.  Omega, the black hole, the energy blob that is sent to Earth to capture the Third Doctor, all of it was really just an excuse to bring back Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell.

Hartnell does not get to do much.  He was in increasingly poor health when he returned as the First Doctor and was also suffering from memory problems.  Sadly, this prevented him from sharing the same physical space as Troughton and Jon Pertwee.  Instead, it’s explained that the First Doctor is caught in a time eddy and can only communicate via the TARDIS’s viewscreen.  Even if he isn’t physically present, the First Doctor reveals himself to be the smartest of the three Doctors.  When he isn’t scolding the Second and Third Doctors, he’s figuring out how to enter Omega’s universe.  It’s not always easy to watch Hartnell looking frail and clearly reading some of his lines from cue cards but, even when ill, he still had the natural authority that he brought to the first two and a half  seasons of Doctor Who.

Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee are a delight to watch.  Their bickering is one of the highlights of the serial and both Troughton and Pertwee appear to have really enjoyed their scenes together.  The show also gets mileage from including the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and Sgt. Benton (John Levene) along with the three Doctors.  I’ve always enjoyed how both of them come to accept the strangest of things with barely a shrug.  This is the episode where Benton enters the TARDIS and, when the Third Doctor asks if Benton’s going to point out that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, replies, “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

The Three Doctors is hardly a perfect Doctor Who adventure.  (If any adventure needed the presence of the The Master, it was this one.)  It is, however, a tribute to the men who played the first three Doctors and the role they all played in making the show an institution.  The Three Doctors was also the final acting role of William Hartnell, who passed away two years after the serial was broadcast.

Doctor Who — The Time Meddler (1965, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today, everyone knows the origins of the Doctor.  We know that the Doctor is a Time Lord and a native of the planet Gallifrey.  We know that the Time Lords had a policy of not interfering with other civilizations.  They could travel through time but they were never to change history.  We know that the Doctor, even after stealing the TARDIS, remained true to that belief while other renegade Time Lords did not.

It wasn’t always like that.  During the show’s early years, the Doctor was meant to be a very mysterious figure and it was implied that he himself had invented (rather than stolen) his TARDIS.  It wasn’t until nearly two years into the show’s original run that we met anyone else from the Doctor’s home planet and that we finally got to see a TARDIS that could actually change shape.

All of that happened in The Time Meddler, a four-episode serial the originally aired from July 3rd, 1965 to July 24th.  In this episode, the Doctor’s TARDIS materializes in Northumbria in 1066.  With Ian and Barbara having recently returned to their own time, the Doctor (William Hartnell) is now traveling with Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) and Steven Taylor (Peter Purves), both of whom come from the future and who are much less argumentative than either Ian or Barbara.  Finally, the Doctor has companions who are not only happy to be there but who are willing to do whatever he says.  Though the Doctor tells Vicki that he will miss Ian and Barbara, he does seem much more relaxed in this serial than in previous ones.

The Doctor’s arrival is observed by The Monk (Peter Butterworth), a mysterious figure who doesn’t seem to be surprised at all to see a blue police call box materialize in 1066.  A time meddler who it is implied has met the Doctor before, the Monk is plotting on changing the course of history by wiping out King Harald Hardrada’s Viking invasion fleet, therefore leaving Harold Godwinson and his troops fresh and fully armed so that they can then defeat William The Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.  The Doctor is captured early on by the Monk, leaving Steven and Vicki to deal with the suspicious locals.

The Meddling Monk was truly a great creation.  As played by Peter Butterworth, he wasn’t so much an evil-doer as he was just someone who thought it would be fun to change history.  (I’ve always disliked the theory that the Meddling Monk was an early incarnation of The Master.  The Master was always evil while the Monk was basically a prankster.)  Peter Butterworth gives an amusing and energetic performance as the Monk and the highlights of the serial are the scenes between him and Hartnell.  They both bring out the best in each other and Hartnell, who could often seem testy while acting opposite the younger actors who played his companions, truly seems to enjoy playing opposite an actor who was basically his equal in both skill and experience.

This episode is best-known for being the first episode to introduce another member of The Doctor and Susan’s race.  It was also the first episode to feature a TARDIS other than the Doctor’s.  (The Monk’s TARDIS works, which reminds the viewer of just how broken-down the Doctor’s vehicle actually is.)  It is often overlooked that it was also one of the better “historical” episodes.  Doctor Who was originally envisioned as a show that would teach younger viewers about history.  Unfortunately, the purely historical episodes were often dry and uninvolving.  This episode teaches about the Battle of Normandy but it also livens things up by giving the Doctor a worthy adversary.

It can be difficult to judge Hartnell’s time as the Doctor, just because so many of his serials are either incomplete or totally missing.  For viewers who are used to a younger and friendlier Doctor, Hartnell’s Doctor can seem rather grouchy.  The Time Meddler, though, features William Hartnell at his best and is one of the highlights of Doctor Who‘s early years.

Doctor Who — The Daleks (1963-1964, directed by Christopher Barry and Richard Martin)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

It’s easy to forget that Doctor Who was originally meant to be an educational show for children.

When the BBC’s Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, first developed Doctor Who, he envisioned it as being a show in which an eccentric old man known as the Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan, would travel to past eras and meet actual historical figures and witness great events firsthand.  Accompanying them would be two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, who would make sure the kids at home understood what they were watching.  While Newman allowed that, in order to keep the kids watching, there would be occasional episodes that would focus more an adventure than learning, he also said that the show would not feature any “bug-eyed monsters.”

The first serial, An Unearthly Child, stayed true to Newman’s concept.  After stumbling across the TARDIS while investigating the homelife of their newest pupil, Ian and Barbara found themselves traveling to pre-historic times with The Doctor and Susan.  Susan was played by Carole Ann Ford while Ian and Barbara were played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill.  Playing the role of the Doctor was veteran actor William Hartnell.  Hartnell was 55 years old when he first played the Doctor but he looked and came across as being much older.  He played the Doctor as being a crotchety old man, one who resented being saddled with two new companions and who could be quite rude to those he considered to be his inferior.  This was early in the series so there was no talk of Time Lords or anything else that Doctor Who fans now take for granted.   Susan even took credit for naming The TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine that, on the outside, appeared to be a blue police call box.

An Unearthly Child introduced the UK to the Doctor.  It got respectable ratings and reviews.  Viewed today, it’s also pretty boring and it’s easy to see the limitations in Newman’s original concept.  Hartnell plays the Doctor as being so ill-tempered that it was a surprise that he didn’t just jettison Ian and Barbara into space.  (I used to watch Doctor Who on PBS with my father.  The first episodes that we got were the Tom Baker years, followed by the Peter Davison and the Jon Pertwee episodes.  It was only then that PBS started showing the Hartnell episodes.  To go from Baker, Davison, and Pertwee to the grouchy Hartnell was indeed jarring.)  If the show had continued in the style of An Unearthly Child, it probably would not have lasted for more than two series.

Fortunately, the second serial changed everything.

Written by Terry Nation and originally called The Mutants, the second serial introduced The Daleks, the shrill-voiced cyborgs whose cries of “Exterminate!  Exterminate!” made them almost as popular as The Doctor himself.  Squid-like creatures who lived in tank-like robotic shells and who spoke in electronic voices, the Daleks lived on the planet Skaro.  Centuries of nuclear war against the Thals had left the Daleks mutated and trapped in their shells but they were still obsessed with exterminating all of the Thals and eventually conquering the universe.  With their robotic exteriors, the Daleks were bulky and often moved awkwardly.  (The recurring joke is that all the Doctor has to do to escape the Daleks is find a staircase.)  But because the Daleks were so relentless and so determine to exterminate everyone who wasn’t a Dalek, they were still intimidating.  Writer Terry Nation based the Daleks on the Nazis, a comparison that was undoubtedly easy for British audiences in 1963, less than 20 years after the end of World War II, to see.

A seven-episode serial, The Daleks premiered on December 21st, 1963 and ran through February 1st, 1964.  While the serial was airing, word spread about The Daleks.  The first episode was watched by six million viewers.  The seventh and final episode was watched by ten million.  Four million people were brought to the show by The Daleks.  Sydney Newman may not have wanted bug-eyed monsters on Doctor Who but no one could argue with ratings like that.  While the First and the Second Doctor would still have a few strictly historical adventures, The Daleks paved the way for the future of the series.  The Daleks would return many times.  The cavemen from An Unearthly Child were never seen again.

The Daleks opens with TARDIS materializing on the planet that will later be identified as Skaro.  The Doctor and Susan want to explore.  Ian and Barbara are upset because they want to go back to 1963.  (Ian and Barbara always annoyed me but, of all the companions on the original series. they probably did have the most realistic reaction to being swept up in the Doctor’s adventures.)  The Doctor flat-out lies about needing to get mercury to repair the TARDIS and uses it as an excuse to explore a nearby city.  Soon, The Doctor, Ian, and Barbara are the prisoners of the Daleks while Susan meets the peaceful Thals in the forest.  The Daleks and the Thals have been at war for centuries and it has destroyed their world.  The Doctor tries to broker a peace, which just leads to the Daleks killing even more Thals.  The Doctor can be excused because this was his first meeting with the Daleks.  The Thals should have known better than to trust the people who specifically decided to become cyborgs because they didn’t want to ever have to stop fighting.

Seen today, The Daleks holds up fairly well.  At seven episodes, it runs a bit long and, for those of us who grew up with Tom Baker and Peter Davison in the lead role, William Hartnell’s Doctor takes some getting used to.  The nonstop bickering between The Doctor and Ian gets old quickly.  The Thals are almost too naive to be believed.

But the Daleks themselves remain a brilliant creation and, even when seen in grainy, black-and-white, it is easy to understand why they became a phenomenon.  Their relentless determination to destroy and exterminate make them intimidating but what really stands out about the Daleks is how forthright they are about what they want.  It’s not just that the Daleks want to exterminate you.  It’s that they’ll tell you that they want to exterminate you, as if it’s the most reasonable desire that any creature could have.  (One reason why The Thals are so unsympathetic is that they keep falling for Dalek tricks, despite the Daleks being pretty honest about their hatred of the Thals.)  From the minute that the Daleks make their first appearance, cornering Barbara in their city, they give Doctor Who a jolt of energy that it very much needed.

This serial ends with The Doctor convinced that the Daleks have been destroyed and will no longer be a threat.  Of course, The Doctor had never been so wrong.  The Daleks would return and Doctor Who would never be the same.

 

The Fabulous Forties #26: The Way Ahead (dir by Carol Reed)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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The 26th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was the 1944 British film, The Way Ahead (or, as it was retitled when it was released in America, The Immortal Battalion).

Directed by Carol Reed (who was five years away from directing the great The Third Man), The Way Ahead is a British propaganda film that was made to boost the morale of both a weary British public and the army during the final days of World War II.  Usually, when we call something propaganda, it’s meant as a term of disparagement but The Way Ahead is propaganda in the best possible way.

The film follows a group of British soldiers, from the moment that they are conscripted through their training to their first battle.  (In many ways, it’s like a more refined — which is another way of saying “more British” — version of Gung Ho!)  As usually happens in films like this, the newly conscripted soldiers come from all sections of society.  Some of them are poor.  Some of them are rich.  Some of them are married.  Some of them are single.  In fact, when the film first begins, the only thing that they all have in common is that they don’t want to be in the army.

As they begin their training, they resent their tough sergeant, Fletcher (William Hartnell), and are upset that Lt. Jim Perry (David Niven, giving a very likable performance) always seems to take Fletcher’s side in any dispute.  However, as time passes by, the soldiers start to realize that Fletcher is looking out for them and molding them into a cohesive unit.  Under his training, they go from being a group of disorganized and somewhat resentful individuals to being a tough and well-organized battalion.

Though they’re originally skeptical that they’ll ever see combat, the battalion is eventually sent to North Africa.  However, their ship is torpedoed and, in a scene that remains genuinely impressive even when viewed today, the men are forced to abandon ship while explosions and flames light up the night sky.  By the time that they do finally reach North Africa, they are more than ready to fight…

The Way Ahead plays out in a semi-documentary fashion (it even features a narrator who, at the end of the film, exhorts the audience to stay firm in their commitment) and it’s a fairly predictable film.  If you’ve ever seen a war film, you’ll probably be able to predict everything that happens in The Way Ahead.  That said, The Way Ahead is a remarkable well-made and well-acted film.  The cast is well-selected (and features a lot of familiar British characters actors, some making their film debut) and David Niven is the perfect choice for the mild-mannered but firm Lt. Perry.  Even though I’m not a huge fan of war films in general, I was still impressed with The Way Ahead.

And you can watch it below!