Out of the Hitler Time by Judith Kerr

Judith Kerr wrote her extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) in response to The Sound of Music. She was horrified that her son thought the film showed how her own childhood had been. So she wrote the story of nine year-old Anna, who's family fled Berlin in 1933, just as Hitler came to power.

I'd read it before as kid - it's still used in classrooms in the UK and Germany - and remembered the haunting simplicity of it, the way she doesn't quite spell out the dangers the family are facing. We understand the Nazi policy towards Jews from fleeting examples, such as two children who aren't allowed to play with Anna and her brother, and a growing sense of dread because of how Anna's parents behave.

At one point, the family heads from Switzerland to Paris, and a guard directs them to their train. Except, just as the train is about to depart, Anna realises it's a train for Stuttgart. They just escape in time, and the implication is that if they had gone back to Germany, they would not have survived. But worse is the hanging question of whether the guard directed them to the wrong train on purpose.

What's brilliant is how the events are filtered through Anna's perspective, so that we - the readers - often know more than she does about what's going on and what is to come. The family's great friend Onkel Julius insists on staying in Berlin, and that things will work out soon enough... As the situation worsens, we learn he takes solace in going to the zoo. So the true horror of the Nazis is brought home at the end of the book by a letter from Julius. It's a suicide note.

"And then, just before Christmas, the blow had fallen. Onkel Julius had received an official letter revoking his pass to the Zoo. No reason was given. The fact that he had a Jewish grandmother was enough."

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, p. 230.

In the recent Imagine documentary, Hitler, the Tiger and Me, Kerr confirmed to Alan Yentob that this was a true a story, and Julius a real friend of her father's. Kerr's response is extraordinary:

"Apparently, in 1938 they made a law that Jewish families couldn't keep pets and they had to be collected. You weren't allowed to kill your pet, you had to hand it over and didn't know what was going to happen to it. And then in 1942, when they must have had other things on their mind, somebody decided that mixed families - you know, if there was a marriage between a Jew and an Aryan and they'd stayed together - that they couldn't keep pets either. Who thinks of things like that? I mean, why?"

Judith Kerr speaking on Hitler, The Tiger and Me, BBC One, 26 November 2013.

It's this response to the Nazis - not one of horror but of bafflement at the petty needlessness of the cruelty - that really lingers after the end of the book, when Anna and her family reach London in 1936.

The story is then continued in Bombs on Aunt Daisy (originally The Other Way Round (1975)), with Anna in her teens during the war. Again, it's told in sparing, simple prose where she doesn't tell us everything and gets us to puzzle out the meaning.

Perhaps most horrific is the sequence on pages 89-90, where Anna's father asks a doctor friend to supply him with something secret. Anna, overhearing, doesn't quite know what's been asked for, and all we get is her parent's stricken response when she asks them. It's clear to us, though it's never said, that it's suicide pills.

Kerr's good, too, at the mounting dread among the community of refugees in London, listening to the news as Nazi forces trample yet more of Europe. And then, when we can hardly believe that there's any cause for hope, there's this transcendent moment:

"A familiar voice said, 'This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.'

The voice did not quiet sound as usual and Anna thought, what's the matter with him? It had a breathlessness, a barely discernible wish to hurry, which had never been there before. She was listening so hard to the intonation of each word that she hardly took in the sense. Air battles over most of England... Heavy concentrations of bombers... An official communique from the Air Ministry... And then it came. The voice developed something like a tiny crack which completely robbed it of its detachment, stopped for a fraction of a second and then said slowly and clearly, 'One hundred and eighty-two enemy aircraft shot down.'

There was a gasp from the people in the lounge, followed by murmured questions and answers as those who did not understand much English asked what the newsreader had said, and the others checked with each other that they had heard aright. And then the elderly Pole was leaping up from his chair and shaking Mr Chetwin by the hand.

'It is success!' he cried. 'You English show Hitler he not can win all the time! Your aeroplanes show him!' and the other Poles and Czechs crowded round, patting Mr Chetwin on the back, pumping his hand and congratulating him.

His grey hair became untidier than ever and he looked bemused but glad. 'Very kind of you,' he kept saying, 'though it wasn't me, you know.'"

Judith Kerr, Bombs on Aunt Daisy, pp. 98-9.

For all the excitement and danger of the war - including a couple of moments when Anna is nearly killed - the story is really about how life carried on regardless: Anna going to the cinema, studying shorthand, eating a knickerbocker glory, buying her first pair of trousers and falling in love for the first time. She's especially good on telling details about how war intruded into life, such as the early days of the air raids.

"It was curious, thought Anna, how quickly one could get used to sleeping on the floor. It was really quite snug. There were plenty of blankets, and the heavy wooden shutters over the lounge windows not only muffled the noise but gave her a feeling of security. She never got enough sleep, but nor did anyone else, and this was another thing one got used to. Everywhere you went during the day there were people having little catnaps to catch up - in the parks, on the buses and tubes, in the corners of tea-shops. One girl even fell asleep over her shorthand machine at the secretarial school. When they talked to each other they would yawn hugely in the middle of a sentence and go straight on with what they were saying without even bothering to apologise."

Ibid., p. 114.

At the same time, there's plenty on the horror of war - the sudden deaths of young men, the effect on Anna's parents and the awful state of one old refugee who was roundly beaten by the Nazis.

The final book in the trilogy, A Small Person Far Away (1978) is set over a week in 1956, when Anna - now married to a famous TV writer and with a new job as a writer herself - must rush to Berlin because her mum has attempted suicide.

In part, it explores the awful shadow cast by the war. Anna's mother is now involved with a man who's job is to help Jewish citizens seek compensation for all those they have lost - though, as one client Anna meets hauntingly demonstrates, how can anyone be compensate for the loss of all their loved ones? Anna's mother has been working as a translator in the war crimes hearings. But it's not this daily reminder of all the horrors committed by the Nazis that finally gets to her but something much more mundane: her lover has had an affair.

This awful ordinariness, this anticlimax, makes for a very different feel of story. Gone is the childlike sense of adventure and optimism, and instead there's a quiet despair.

It's assumed that, as the daughter, Anna will stay to look after her mother - whatever her commitments to her work and husband. And when her mother wakes, she only has eyes for her son. Whereas the previous books had Anna escaping the best efforts of Nazis to kill her, here the greatest moment of tension is when she's at a party, waiting for her husband to ring.

It's not that the book is such a great leap from the two before. It allows Anna to revisit the Berlin home she fled all those years before, and to tell us what happened to some of the characters we've met in the first two novels. And it ends with Anna flying back to London, let off from her duties to her mother because of the threat of war. The focus is still, during a crisis, to cling tight to those who matter, but that's no longer her mother and brother but her husband.

All the books deal with struggles of the artist - the effects of the exile on her father's writing, Anna's own education as an artist and the sensibility to find even the worst events "interesting", and then her struggles to balance her work with the needs of her family. Each book is written to the level of Anna's age - the first one for children, the second for teens and the third for grown-ups.

But this last book is the least dramatic, most personal and the most unsettling of the three. For all the horrors of the war, Anna's perspective on events and the simple style make the first two books enchanting, whereas the conclusion is hard work. But, perhaps because of that, it's the one I find myself picking over most, days after I finished it.

Doctor Who: 2011

Episode 781: The God Complex
First broadcast: 7.10 pm on Saturday 17 September 2011
<< back to 2010

"Who else?"
Doctor Who: The God Complex (2011)

In The God Complex, the Doctor and his friends are trapped in a sinister hotel that isn’t what it seems. As well as the Minotaur stalking them, there’s the weird matter of the rooms. It seems (at first) that the hotel feeds on people’s fears. Somewhere, there’s a door for everyone, and beyond it the thing you’re most afraid of…

When the Doctor finds a door of his own he can’t resist taking a peek. But his response is quite unexpected. “Who else?” he says with a smile.

What did the Doctor see?

I’ve known a few people try to puzzle this out, assuming it would be the embodiment of his greatest fear. They suggest Daleks or Weeping Angels - or the Taran Wood Beast. There are some other options.

In The War Games (1969) the Doctor admits to his friends why he fled from his own people:

Well, I was bored.

Later, he’s horrified at the prospect of his travels being curtailed: he fears the loss of his freedom, of being forced to conform.

In The Mind of Evil (1971), he battles a machine that uses people’s fears to kill them. It torments him with visions of the Earth on fire and his failure to stop the calamity (events he witnessed in Inferno (1970), written by the same writer.)

In Planet of the Spiders (1974), he must face his greatest fear and return to the arachnid queen, even though it will kill him. But in doing so, he conquers that terror, doesn’t he?

At the end of Amy’s Choice (2010) it’s suggested that his greatest tormentor is actually the voice inside his own head. Perhaps he most fears his own capacity for evil: see his horror of the War Doctor and the Valeyard.

I also like the implied joke from the 2005 series, that Doctor Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf. Why would the Doctor fear Bad Wolf? Rose with golden eyes doesn’t just wield extraordinary powers, those powers threaten to destroy her – and him. But I think the thing the Doctor would find scary is that Bad Wolf suggests that events are pre-destined, that the Doctor is merely fulfilling a role someone else has contrived. His free will is an illusion.

(The trick, in both The Parting of the Ways (2005) and The Day of the Doctor (2013) is that he takes the initiative; but perhaps we could argue he’s been placed in just that position by the all-powerful being. How much is he free to choose?)

I’m not sure that, in The God Complex, the Doctor does confront his greatest fear. Soon after he’s seen what waits in his own room, he works out what the hotel wants from its victims:

It's not fear. It's faith. Not just religious faith, faith in something … Every time someone was confronted with their most primal fear, they fell back on their most fundamental faith.

What does Doctor believe in?

In The Day of the Doctor he explains that when he adopted his name, he also promised to adhere to a code of conduct.

TENNANT DOCTOR:
Never cruel or cowardly.

HURT DOCTOR:
Never give up, never give in.

The words are taken from Terrance Dicks’ description of the Doctor in The Making of Doctor Who (1972) - which I think would make a great title for an episode - and first cited in fiction as the Doctor’s personal code in Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell (1991).

But even if that's what he believes in, it doesn’t tell us what he sees in his own hotel room. Instead, I think the key words in The God Complex are how the Doctor defines the notion of faith:

Not just religious faith, faith in something …

That chimes with his explanation to Ace in The Curse of Fenric (1989):

ACE:
I thought vampires were scared of crucifixes.

DOCTOR:
No, no, it's not the crucifix that frightens them, it's the faith of the person carrying it. It creates a psychic barrier, just like I did.

"Susan, Barbara,
Ian, Vicki, Steven..."

That’s just after he scares off the vampires [or Haemovores] by reciting something under his breath. We can't hear what he says but its clear from reading his lips: the Doctor’s unshakeable, monster-beating faith is a list of his former companions.

(Go see for yourself: the Doctor's act of faith on YouTube.)

In recent years, River Song and others have said it’s a bad idea for the Doctor to travel alone: he’s a better man with his companions. But that's not a new idea - it goes right back to the beginnings of the series. I argued in my 2002 piece that original companions Ian and Barbara,

“serve the purpose of ‘educating the Doctor to maturity and responsibility’”.

When we first meet him, the Doctor can be cruel and cowardly - ready to kill a wounded caveman just to save his own skin. It's Ian and Barbara who change him. The first time the Doctor battles the Daleks it's because that's his only chance of recovering the missing piece of the TARDIS. A year later, because of Ian and Barbara's influence, he dares to battle the Daleks not out of personal gain but because it's the right thing to do.

In that first year of the show, Ian and Barbara make him realise his moral responsibilities in travelling through time and space: he has to get involved in events, to battle tyranny, to fight evil, yet to remain a man of peace… They’re the ones who make him change his behaviour, who hold him to a higher standard.

So who else would he see gazing back at him in his room in the hotel?

Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover
as Jacqueline Hill and William Russell
as Barbara and Ian in
An Adventure in Space and Time (2013)

Next episode: 2012

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

My second Agatha Christie novel is apparently one of the best.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was first published in 1926 - six years after Christie's debut (you might wish to read my thoughts on The Mysterious Affair at Styles). Ackroyd feels quite familiar: a gruesome death in a posh house full of characters almost from Wodehouse, any one of whom might be the culprit. This time, the story is narrated not by the woosterish detective Captain Hastings, but the local doctor.

James Sheppard is keen to stay ahead of his gossipy sister in puzzling out the case. But, like Hastings, he's also caught between bafflement and awe at the antics of the professional sleuth, and is at pains to detail Poirot's methods and theories. Once again, this layering effect - where each piece of new evidence is judged from more than one perspective - encourages us to play along and make our own deductions. Again, there are several dark secrets involved, not all of them leading to murder. Again, the text includes maps of the scene of the crime to make it that much more tangible and real.

Poirot is again a striking, peculiar hero. His fussy, fastidious manner ought to grate, but Christie makes him a figure of curiosity to the other players. The more they comment on his strangeness, the more we come to accept it. Plus there's fun to be had in the way he speaks of himself (in the third person) and what we really might think:

“Hercule Poirot does not run the risk of disarranging his costume without being sure of attaining his object. To do so would be ridiculous and absurd. I am never ridiculous.”

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, p. 95.

His first appearance is characteristically odd: he throws a marrow at Sheppard (p. 21). It's a nicely unassuming entrance. If we already know his name and reputation, that puts us one step ahead of the narrator who underestimates him.

Just as with Styles, Poirot is in the vicinity by chance, having moved into the house next door to the doctor just in time for the murder. In fact, it's surprising that Poirot is never a suspect himself.

I've noticed that Christie likes playing with the "rules" of the detective story - in other whodunnits I know of, she reveals the detective committed the murder, or that all the suspects did it together, or... But I don't wish to spoil things if you don't already know...

Once more in Ackroyd we're given insights into how the great man cracks a case. As he tells us himself, it's all down to:

“Method, order and the little grey cells ... Then there is the psychology of the crime. One must study that.”

Ibid., pp. 81-2.

Psychology is important. I was impressed by what seemed a very modern understanding of post-traumatic shock when Mrs Ackroyd speaks of reckless young Ralph:

“But, of course, one must remember that Ralph was in several air raids as a young boy. The results are apparent long after, sometimes, they say.”

Ibid., p. 122.

(Though, if this is set in 1926, I'm a bit confused by how old Ralph is meant to be if he was a "young boy" during air-raids that started in 1915.)

The Dr - who is much more versed in murder than I am - says the psychological element is what most strikes her about Christie: not merely the whodunnit, but the understanding of people, and why someone might be driven to kill.

It's interesting, then, that we never get inside Poirot's head. He contends that everyone has something to hide and it's just a question of rooting out the whole tangle of secrets to work out who is the murderer. But if that's true, I found myself thinking, then Poirot himself must have something wicked to hide. So what's Poirot's secret? Not the nephew with mental health issues that he mentions a couple of times: that's a lie concocted to get other people to speak.

In fact, we know very little about him - just that he was a famous as a detective. Note that past tense. Given Christie would publish Poirot stories for another 50 years, it's odd to find that he's just retired in this one.

“They say he's done the most wonderful things – just like detectives do in books. A year ago he retired and came to live down here. Uncle knew who he was, but he promised not to tell anyone, because M. Poirot wanted to live quietly without being bothered by people.”

Ibid., p. 65.

Note, too, the off-hand use of “like in books”, to suggest reality. Later, Poirot himself says,

“In all probability this is the last case I shall ever investigate”

Ibid., p. 124.

Last time, I compared Poirot to Sherlock Holmes - and it's interesting that Conan-Doyle also had Holmes retire decades before he stopped writing new stories for him. Why? What does retirement confer on the detective? I suppose there's an advantage to being no longer professional, and less involved in the formal inquiry. That spares the author the heavy lifting of a police procedural.

More than that, an emeritus detective can take a step back from the case and make moral judgments as a private citizen rather than as a public servant. That makes it somehow less objectionable if they then give a sympathetic culprit a chance to escape or to kill themselves before the ignominy of trial.

Whatever the case, it's not to make Poirot a reluctant hero, forced to come back for one final job. The first time we see him in the book, he's hankering after the old days:

“But you can figure to yourself, monsieur, that a man may work towards a certain object, may labour and toil to attain a certain kind of leisure and occupation, and then find that, after all, he yearns for the old busy days, and the old occupations that he thought himself so glad to leave?”

Ibid., p. 21.

A lot of the book is taken up with conversations as different characters give their evidence or share their latest theories. That could get wearing, but Christie skillfully keeps these scenes short and sets them in different locations. I especially liked a sequence set during a game of Mah-Jong, the mechanics of play breaking up all the exposition. The book is itself a game, but again the tone is jarring: at once its comic and light, and then there's a blunt description of a corpse or the ruination of someone's whole life.

If the characters are largely archetypes and ciphers - playing pieces in the game - they can seem a bit glib and inconsequential. That's most telling in the casual racism, such as when a character receives a note from a creditor with a Scottish name.

“They [creditors] are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.”

Ibid., p. 136.

One character, Charles Kent - perhaps because he has spent time in America and picked up peculiar phrasing - even refers to Poirot as a “foreign cock duck” (p. 172).

Speaking of foreigners, we learn that Captain Hastings is not merely indisposed for this adventure but now lives in “the Argentine” (p. 22). That seems rather drastic. Like in a soap opera, it's as if a major character can't just leave the series by moving to another part of town but must go to the ends of earth. In a soap, that strategy explains why that character never appears in the soap again and is barely ever mentioned. In Ackroyd, it establishes that Hastings won't make a sudden appearance or contribute to the solution. Or am I reading too much into it?

It's difficult to say much more about the story without spoiling the ingenious mystery. Unfortunately, I already knew the ending but the reveal is still brilliantly done. Without spoiling things, the ending is bleak and haunting, and I found myself picking over it for days. But for what is set-up as a fun parlour game, this is a cold and cruel story. And, for all his eccentricities, I've not yet warmed to Poirot.

Next on my list: Miss Marple's debut in The Thirteen Problems.

Doctor Who: 1993

After episode 695 (Survival, part 3)
Thirty Years in the TARDIS, first broadcast 29 November 1993
<< back to 1992

It really is bigger on the inside...
Thirty Years in the TARDIS (1993)

What a joy Thirty Years in the TARDIS was - a celebration of Doctor Who that concentrated not on its worthiness but how it made us feel watching. At the time, it didn't look as if Doctor Who would ever return to our screens. It had been off the air for four years, a special anniversary story had stopped production almost as soon as it started, and Children in Need's Doctor Who / EastEnders crossover didn't exactly convince a mass audience that the show deserved resurrecting.

I love Dimensions in Time, but Thirty Years was something to be proud of as a fan. Director Kevin Davies worked wonders to achieve so much more than just a series of clips and contributors: it's full of monsters and special effects, and a sense of Doctor Who not just as something from the past but a series that could still deliver real thrills.

Best of all is a shot towards the end where a small boy enters the TARDIS. Despite what I've said before about Doctor Who no longer being for children, here's one discovering the main wheeze of the series in exactly the way that the audience did in the very first episode. But this time we follow behind him, moving from the police box exterior into the control room all in one single shot.

That magical effect had never been done on Doctor Who before, and wouldn't be done again (or at all in the series proper) until last year's Christmas special:



I think that's extraordinary: the very idea that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside is at the very heart of the show. It's so wildly ridiculous; yet in this trick shot it's there before our eyes.

I remember being amazed in 1996 that the television movie, with its massive budget, failed to include that effect with the other expensive set pieces. I looked out for it in the 2005 series - and then read in Doctor Who Magazine that Russell T Davies had hoped to feature it. There are good reasons why not: it's a relatively simple trick requiring a pair of locked-off cameras, but it requires a lot of setting up. The time it would eat up in a recording day simply made it impractical. (Last year's Christmas special did the legwork in CGI.)

It occurred to me, reading Russell's explanation, that it would be a simple enough trick to do in an audio. All I needed was enough dialogue in the scene to cover them walking from the door to the console, as the sound effects changed. So, entirely for my own self-indulgence, I wrote it into the play I was writing at the time: The Settling, delivered in October 2005.

The scene is Drogheda in 1649, some time after Oliver Cromwell has massacred the town:

MARY:
All names have meanings. I’ll probably choose something loyal to the king. Charles the second, I mean.

DOCTOR WHO:
Here we are.

HE FISHES FOR THE TARDIS KEY.

MARY:
You keep supplies in this? For our journey?

ACE:
Yeah, sort of. So what names would mean loyalty?

AS DOCTOR WHO SPEAKS, HE OPENS THE DOOR AND – ALL IN THE SAME SCENE – THE WOMEN FOLLOW HIM INTO THE TARDIS. NB: THIS IS THE ‘MCGANN” TARIS INTERIOR FX.

DOCTOR WHO:
"Charles", obviously, for a boy. For a girl… "Elizabeth" would say "monarchy". Though it’s also a favourite of the Puritans. Cromwell’s mother, his wife and his favourite daughter are all called Elizabeth.

DOCTOR WHO WORKS THE CONSOLE.

ACE:
That’d be diplomatic, then. [BEAT] Oh yeah. Mary, should’ve warned you about – [this place.]

DOCTOR WHO:
(KINDLY) It’s all right. You’re safe in here.

ACE:
Yeah, but mind the mess. We’ve been redecorating.

MARY:
(AWED) I can feel it! I can feel it all at peace! It’s like... like a church. You worship here?

DOCTOR WHO:
Not exactly. It’s our home. Ace, this is going to be tricky. I could do with your help…

PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.

ACE:
Right.

PRESSING BUTTONS ETC.

Releasing the handbrake…

THE TARDIS DEMATERIALISES.

Doctor Who: How the 
Doctor Changed my Life
cover by Alex Mallinson

(Director/producer Gary Russell suggested it should be the vast TARDIS interior from the TV movie, this being the point when the Doctor redecorates. I wish I'd thought of it first.)

That shot from Thirty Years was also in my mind when I commissioned Alex Mallinson for the cover of a book of stories by first-time authors: How the Doctor Changed my Life.

Why does that effect so get to me? There's a particular thrill when a companion takes their first step into the TARDIS, and finds that an ordinary-looking police box contains a whole impossible world.

In that trick shot, just once in all 50 years of the series, we get to take that step with them.

Next episode: 1994

Dylan and Doyle

I had a lovely weekend in Swansea as the guest of the Dylan Thomas Centre for their Doctor Who Day on Saturday. Saw lots of chums, my friend Chris arrived with a huge box of tiffin, and I got to meet Annette Woollett - who played Adelaide in Horror of Fang Rock.

As well as getting us to witter on about our typing, event co-ordinator Leslie was keen to find a connection between Dylan (the locals all seem to call him "Dylan", not "Thomas", which I found shockingly over-familiar) and Doctor Who. We managed to argue that the series has plenty of poetic language and a poetic sensibility for seeing the everyday from a new perspective... Then there was pizza and whisky.

Despite knowing better than to attempt trains on a Sunday, I plodded slowly home yesterday via diversions and delays, but had a nice old natter with Matthew Kilburn and got some typing done. Then, because there were more diversions and delays in London, I took a scenic route and so passed the house in Tennison Road where Arthur Conan-Doyle lived at the time he killed Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur-Conan Doyle's house
in Tennison Road, south London

Blue plaque on Arthur Conan-Doyle's house

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

I'd forgotten the delicious thrill of a novel by John le Carré.

There was a time when I glutted on his books - and reported all to this very blog. I read The Secret Pilgrim and The Constant Gardener in August 2005, shortly before seeing the film of The Constant Gardener, I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in April 2006, The Honourable Schoolboy the following month and Smiley's People the month after that, The Mission Song in January 2007 and The Looking-Glass War in December 2008. (I also read - and loved - Call for the Dead at some point in that period, but seem not to have blogged about it; and I'd read le Carré in the far-off days before this blog, too.)

His newest novel, A Delicate Truth is all very familiar: an intelligence job goes wrong and is hushed up, but three of the people involved won't let it go. As they attempt to uncover what happened - and who is to blame - the establishment closes around them...

As always, le Carré creates distinct and real characters, most drawn from the country's best schools, all conjured with names and quirks that seem effortless, as if he's copied them down from real life.

For example, former ambassador Sir Christopher 'Kit' Probyn, is diligent, keen and, moving to a new home, deftly learns his new neighbours' names and habits and history, weaving himself into the community. His wife's illness - sparingly mentioned - adds an extra note of grace to a character we quickly warm to, which makes it all the more effective when he's dismissed by his masters as a 'low-flyer' and used in their wretched scheme.

Le Carré's brilliant at building tension as the story plays out. The plot hinges on the privatisation of intelligence work, and the inevitable blunders - and deaths - that result from applying a payment-by-results approach to such uncertain work. The prose is elegant, full of choice detail and often witty, but this is an angry book, the intelligence sector just one further target of a general policy to open up public service to carpet-baggers and zealots. That policy is sociopathic, as he fumes late on (I've redacted the names so as not to spoil the story):

"In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for [character 1], [character 2] even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid. How else to explain the cock-up that was [event]? And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in [character 2]'s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, blood indifference to anyone's interests but their own."

John le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013), p. 296.

As always, there are no easy answers or happy endings, and making a stand against the villains means facing appalling consequences. Le Carré conjures a complex, nasty world, one recognisable from the daily news. But the power of the book is in the simplest of concoctions: good people we feel for, struggling against overwhelming odds to do the right thing.

Doctor Who: 1987

Episode 654: Time and the Rani part 1
First broadcast: 7.35 pm, 7 September 1987
<< back to 1986

The CGI TARDIS
Time and the Rani part 1

The 1986 season of Doctor Who began with a thrilling special effects sequence: the camera panning across a vast spaceship as it catches the TARDIS in a beam of light. This model shot was some of the first visual effects work on the series by Mike Tucker – who is still working on Doctor Who today. (I hope to speak to Mike on this subject another time.)

The 1987 series of Doctor Who also began with a thrilling special effects sequence as the TARDIS tumbles out of control. But this was not a model shot: it was entirely computer-generated by Oliver Elmes and CAL Video – the same team that created the show's new CGI title sequence. Part 1 of Time and the Rani sees the Seventh Doctor's debut but it's also the first time the TARDIS appears as CGI.

I've been thinking a lot about the role of CGI recently, prompted by a comment made by writer Philip Reeve at the Phonicon convention earlier this year. Explaining how he came up with his extraordinary Mortal Engines, he spoke of trying to achieve “the Clangers aesthetic mixed up with an action movie”, and of how much he admired the “hand-made” feel of old children's telly.

On 20 August – 50 years to the day after the first studio session on Doctor Who had made wobbly bits of light for the title sequence – I asked Philip to expand on what he meant.

What sort of hand-made children's telly were you thinking of?
I grew up in the 70s so I'm thinking back to The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and things like that – quite simple children's television – and also Doctor Who in those days. In fact, if you look back at pretty much all television drama of that era, like Poldark or The Onedin Line, it's not trying to compete with film in the way that TV drama does now. It's theatre: filmed theatre. The scenes outside the windows are painted and it's very obvious that people are not sitting in real rooms but sets. That requires the audience to bring a certain amount of imagination to it, which is something that has gone from television now. It just tries to look real.

Is that the appeal of hand-made TV – that the audience is more active in watching it?
Hmm... Yeah, I think partly so. Of course, with children's stuff particularly there's an element of toys coming to life. Children do that all the time anyway with their toys, moving objects around and animating them in their own minds. So I think there's always an appeal to children of little things moving about as if by magic. They very quickly get across that barrier of thinking “This is made of plasticine but I accept it”. That is entirely good, using the imagination children have anyway.

So does CGI take away from that?
Lots of CGI stuff is great: the CGI animation is very good in something like Monsters Inc or whatever – as good as cell or stop-motion animation. It's just a different look. But I am tired of CGI stuff in science-fiction movies. Avatar, for all it's script problems, was extremely beautiful and the first CGI movie which actually convinced me. I just don't see where you go from there; I don't think there's much point pursuing that sort of pseudo-realism. Watching Pacific Rim made me think that I would much rather watch someone in a big monster suit trample nice models than see it being done in pixels.

Have you seen Moon, directed by Duncan Jones?
Yes, that's one of the few sci-fi movies of recent years that actually stands out – because he uses miniatures, I think. It's got this certain feel... When you look at the movies of my era – I'm thinking of Alien, Bladerunner and things like that – when the spaceships or whatever go by you know there's something there. You know it's a miniature but at least it's a real thing.

There's a tactile quality to it.
Yes, a quality of something actually being real. Of course, nobody watching the film thinks “Oh, that's really a spaceship going by”. You assume that some sort of trickery is employed. I just think that it makes it so much more visually interesting. Things like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies had a mixture of miniatures and CGI. I'm not entirely sure what they did but that explains why there's a certain grandeur to the cities and so on, a feeling of these being real things in front of you.

You talked about children animating things anyway, so how much did the tactile quality of old TV encourage you to write and draw stories yourself?
(Long pause) I don't know. It's hard to say, really, because you grow up surrounded by that stuff so I don't know how much it came from within and how much it came from inspiration. Certainly, if I rewatch something like The Goodies or Doctor Who I can see exactly why I thought I could go out and make movies on my dad's super-8 camera because they're very doable. There's a kind of feasibility about them. They haven't got casts of thousands or vast effects. I'm not talking about the special effects so much as the ordinary outdoor scenes of people doing stuff. It was all very achievable – or looked so to me at the age of nine or whatever. I was a movie-maker by the time I was 10 or 11 and I'm sure that was completely inspired by watching things on telly and thinking “Oh yeah, I could do that”. I couldn't – but I almost could.

So how much was your recent Doctor Who e-book, The Roots of Evil, written to have a hand-made feel?
I don't know. As a writer you simply describe things and you're never really sure what pictures will emerge in readers' imaginations. It's kind of a collaboration. I put down the raw materials and it's up to the reader to make it up in their mind. I'm not sure how good their special effects budget is. But in my mind, when I was writing it, I treated it as a nostalgia exercise. I tried to make it feel like the kind of story I would have expected to see in 1978. I tried to go for the achievable sets and effects of that era. I imagined it done with three old tree branches and not much else. But I don't know if that comes across and, to be honest, I don't think it matters. It's aimed at the children of today and I imagine they are brought up on far more sophisticated effects so have a far more impressive picture in their minds than I had in mine when I was writing it. (Laughs) That's fine.

Philip Reeve, thank you very much.

Next episode: 1988

Steven, Leela and Mel

Out in shops now is Doctor Who Magazine's 50th anniversary special - "The Companions".

There's plenty of excitement inside, including three interviews by me. I ask Peter Purves if he's an apologist for William Hartnell, Louise Jameson if Leela was meant to be black and Bonnie Langford if making Doctor Who was more demanding or pressured than other TV shows. ("It was just weirder!" she said.)

Doctor Who: 1986

After episode 653 (The Trial of a Time Lord, part fourteen)
18 December 1986
<< back to 1985

The Doctor on trial again
Tomorrow's World, 18 December 1986

On 6 December 1986, the Doctor was found not-guilty by a jury of his peers in the final - and fourteenth - episode of The Trial of a Time Lord. Twelve days later he faced a new challenge on BBC One, the Tomorrow's World Christmas quiz.

Broadcast live in prime time, it pitted the Doctor, astronomer Heather Couper and Neil Cossons, then director of the Science Museum, against the studio audience, trying to guess the purpose of a bunch of new gadgets. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube but for a flavour of the tone, here's how presenter Howard Stableford introduced our hero:

HOWARD:
The nominated captain of our expert panel is Colin Baker, Doctor Who. Good of you to find the right time to join us.

DR. WHO:
It's nice to be back again because I was on the 50,000th edition when the TARDIS - the prototype - was shown.

HOWARD:
Was I still on the show?

DR. WHO:
No you were pensioned off.

HOWARD:
Replaced, was I?

This achingly BBC banter feels a bit odd when we know that Colin Baker was in the midst of being replaced. He'd been told that his contract as Doctor Who was not to be renewed some six weeks earlier on 29 October, between the broadcasts of parts eight and nine of Trial of a Time Lord. That news seems to have been reported in the press in early December, just before the quiz was broadcast (though I've not found a source).

Doctor Who's producer still hoped Baker would appear in one more story to hand over to his successor: four days after the Tomorrow's World quiz, he commissioned that story and the writers,

"were asked to write their scripts for the Sixth Doctor and include a climactic regeneration sequence ... Any hope of Colin Baker appearing in Strange Matter was lost on January 6th, 1987, when the first installment of an interview with the actor appeared in The Sun. In it, Baker expressed regret at his dismissal from Doctor Who, and spoke scathingly of BBC1 Controller Michael Grade."

Shannon Sullivan, A Brief History of Time (Travel) - Time and the Rani

The Tomorrow's World quiz was Colin's last appearance as the "current" Doctor.

Colin wasn't sacked but the decision not to renew his contract seems like a judgment on his time in the series. The show was in trouble - it had been taken off the air for 18 months in 1985, and then Trial was not brilliantly received by the public - but that was hardly his fault. As the star, he was just the most visible, recognisible person in the frame.

How much control or choice does a Doctor have over the show? We know David Tennant said no to a story set inside JK Rowling's head. Patrick Troughton battled the production team about the burden of the production schedule and got shorter episodes in his final season. Jon Pertwee had the original actress cast as Sarah Jane Smith replaced. In each case, that Doctor had been in the role for some years which gave their opinions more weight.

But generally, interviews with Doctors suggest that while they might have set the tone in the rehearsal rooms and while filming, and put cast and crew at ease, they didn't have the time or clout to affect the programme being made. They weren't involved in commissioning or editing scripts, or the tone or direction of the series. Perhaps their biggest say over their time in the progamme is what they wore as the Doctor; Colin didn't even have that. Few - the Second, Fifth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors - got to choose when they left the series.

That's not to say they were victims. The Doctors all clearly worked very hard to make the most of the material. Like most actors, they'd query their characters motives, reactions and dialogue. They might have rephrased lines, added jokes or asked what the emphasis should have been, or what their character knew or was thinking at a particular moment. Some incredible moments in the series are the result of an actor playing against the apparent meaning of the lines, or playing them in an unexpected way.

So I'm not arguing that actors should necessarily have more say and involvement in the material they appear in. It's not a bad thing in principle, just not always practical - or desired. Rather, I'm interested in the trust that has to exist between the lead actor(s) and those running a show. I've worked on productions where actors haven't liked or understood what we were making, but threw themselves into it anyway (usually after I'd listened to their doubts and tried to answer their questions). The key thing is the right kind of open, creative environment where people can ask questions and suggest improvements, but whoever's in charge has the final say and keeps everything on course.

That clearly wasn't happening at the end of Colin's time in the show: the producer and script-editor - the "showrunners" at the time - weren't talking, the latter left after an argument and the final episode he wrote was dumped in favour of something else. In the confusion, Colin was left asking fundamental questions about his final story - how much of what we see on screen is a lie, how much has the Doctor turned evil and is his companion really dead? It's bad enough that he had to ask, but I think the answers given in each case were the ones needing least effort to work in, not that made a better story.

All he could do - all any actor could do - was show willing and make the best of what he was handed. He did, and lost his job.

Doctor Who continued with a new actor in the lead, a new script-editor behind the scenes and a new, lighter touch. I've heard people wonder how the series might have been if Colin had stayed on. His work for Big Finish has been extraordinary, reinventing the Sixth Doctor, making him quite brilliant. But if he'd stayed in the role back then?

I think we can tell. Watch him in the Tomorrow's World quiz: smart, benign, trading terrible jokes with good humour. Making the best of it anyway.

Next episode: 1987

Doctor Who: 1984

Episode 614: Resurrection of the Daleks, part two
First broadcast: 6.50 pm, Wednesday 15 February 1984
<< back to 1983

The Doctor and Tegan part company
Resurrection of the Daleks, part two

When Tegan - one of the longest-serving companions in Doctor Who - finally leaves the TARDIS, she says it's because something's changed.

TEGAN:
A lot of good people have died today. I think I'm sick of it.

DOCTOR:
You think I wanted it this way?

TEGAN:
No. It's just that I don't think I can go on.

DOCTOR:
You want to stay on Earth.

TEGAN:
My Aunt Vanessa said, when I became an air stewardess, if you stop enjoying it, give it up.

DOCTOR:
Tegan

TEGAN:
It's stopped being fun, Doctor.

Two things strike me about this. First, something was changing in Doctor Who at the time. After the fun of The Five Doctors, the new season began with Warriors from the Deep, where the Doctor is unable to stop a massacre. The next story, The Awakening, is fun but there's something unusually bleak about the human colony in Frontios, the last of humanity dwindling away on some distant backwater. And then there's the bloodbath of Resurrection - by some margin the highest bodycount of any Doctor Who story.

I've read quite a few theories about what's going on: that the Fifth Doctor was a feminised version of our hero, or it's the influence of Blake's 7, or the production team (and audience) were more keen on grislier stories (perhaps after the perceived success of Earthshock). The trend certainly continues after the Fifth Doctor's gone; the Sixth Doctor sometimes seen peripheral to the grotesque events on screen.

But the Doctor wasn't alone. In 1986, Alan Moore wrote an introduction to a grisly version of another children's hero:

"Whatever changes may have been wrought in the comics themselves, the image of Batman most permanently fixed in the mind of the of the general populace is that of Adam West delivering outrageously straight-faced camp dialogue while walking up a wall thanks to the benefit of stupendous special effects and a camera turned on its side."

Alan Moore, "The Mark of Batman", introduction to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, p. ii.

Moore doesn't mention Doctor Who, but cites criticism of other men - Tarzan, Alan Quartermain and James Bond - whose simplistic heroism no longer seemed quite to satisfy. He makes his own case for why that might be:

"The world about us has changed at and ever-accelerating pace. So have we. With the increase in media coverage and information technology, we see more of the world, comprehend its workings a little more clearly, and as a result our perception of ourselves and the society surrounding us has been modified. Consequently, we begin to make different demands upon the art and culture that is meant to reflect the constantly shifting landscape we find ourselves in. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.
We demand new heroes."

Ibid., pp. i-ii.

I don't think that's right. Quartermain first appeared in 1885, so why should he suddenly be found wanting 100 years later? Yes, I know, there'd been criticism of figures like this before then, but in the mid 80s there seems to have been a major shift in how we related to heroes.

I wonder how much it was history: how much did Vietnam and Watergate create anxieties about the traditional hero? (I'm thinking less of Rambo here as The A-Team). And how much was there also a crisis going on in the grand ideological narratives of the 20th Century once the East started cosying up to the West? The James Bond films were well ahead of the game in dealing with detente, but for all Bond is recast and redefined with a harder edge in The Living Daylights (1987), there's a sense that real-world politics are leaving him behind...

But there's another possible reason. Note that all these heroes are white men. So is this discomfort with traditional heroism the result of decades of agitation about sexual and racial politics slowing filtering through into the mainstream?

Adam West isn't necessarily the public's fixed image of Batman. We're now used to - indeed, expect - a psychologically complex Bond and Batman and Doctor, tortured by self-doubt and age and the loss of loved ones.

And if that's the case, how much was Bond and the Doctor both losing their broad appeal in the late 1980s less the fault of particular production decisions as a sign of the times?

Secondly, hang on: Tegan, of all the companions, who spent three years in Doctor Who complaining, is the one to say it's stopped being fun?

Next episode: 1985

Don Quixote by Cervantes/Davis

A page from Don Quixote vol 2
Cervantes/Davis (2013)

As a belated birthday present, I bought myself Don Quixote volume 2, adapted by Rob Davis from the 1615 novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Like the first volume, it's the funny, strange and moving tale of a deluded old man who thinks he's a knight, and the idiot "squire" who follows after him in the hope the delusions prove true. They traipse the countryside looking for chances to be brave and virtuous and generally get beaten up for their trouble.

In this second volume, they must contend with people who've read the first one, as well as characters set on revenge and those just taking the piss. It's a sadder story - as much because of those who take advantage of Quixote as because of his failing health. And yet there are still plenty of laughs.

I've been fascinated by Quixote since an A-level art trip to see lots of paintings in London. We'd done the National Gallery and what's now Tate Britain and were hitting sensory overload as we reached the Courtauld. And there, not on our syllabus, was a portrait by Daumier that's haunted me ever since.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
Honoré Daumier c. 1870
Courtauld Gallery, London

I can think of no higher praise for Rob's adaptation than that its reminiscent of Daumier, the same simple colours and skeletal silhouettes, the same skinny bleakness. He packs character and feeling into simple, quick sketches - Rob's own How to adapt Don Quixote into a graphic novel in seven easy steps gives a fascinating, detailed account of his working methods and the alarming speed at which he had to write it.

I know Rob's work from the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and the Horrible Histories books, and met him very briefly when he signed my copy of Nelson. But as I read the book - and his post on adapting it - I found I had nagging questions. It's a huge undertaking and he did it alone. Quixote has defeated adapters before: Orson Welles failed to complete his movie version; it's eluded Terry Gilliam twice.

(Cervantes also suffered: he based Quixote on his own failures, having been a quartermaster to the doomed Spanish Armada, he was jailed for confiscating grain belonging to the church and then spent 10 years in debtors' prison. After the first volume of Don Quixote was published in 1604, there were bootleg copies and a a fake sequel. He work that into his own volume 2, but died soon after its publication.)

There are inevitable allusions to be drawn: how quixotic is adapting Quixote? Rob very kindly answered my questions:

How much did volume 2 depend on sales / the success of volume 1? 
Rob Davis: The contract was for two books so volume 2 was never dependent on sales. The thinking behind splitting the book back into its original form gave me the chance to get a book out each year, gave the the project greater shelf life and crucially made real the gap between the two halves of the story.

How much is the style influenced by previous depictions of Quixote? I was thinking especially of Daumier.
RD: Very little if I'm honest. I used previous interpretations for reference, but stylistically it's more about my ideas for drawing comics.

You mention in your seven easy steps piece that you used different editions of Quixote, but how much research did you do into Cervantes and the book?
RD: Hard to quantify. I usually make the point that my adaptation is my reading of the book and most of my referencing came from reading different translations or abridged versions. I read a few accounts of Cervantes' life, but the character of Cervantes in my books is really the authorial character he creates in his narration.

Cervantes seems to have ended up mad and penniless after writing the book(s). How's it going for you? :) 
RD: Yep, I'm flat broke and berserk now. Between the two volumes I split from my wife, left my home and children, lost several months in the bottom of a whisky bottle and ran up insurmountable debts. It was a mad book to adapt and therefore my own sanity must be questionable. But I take some pride from the fact that I finished it (unlike Gilliam and Welles). Glad you enjoyed the book, knowing that people are getting something from it humbles me and makes me happy.

Visit Rob's website: Dinlos and Skilldos

Doctor Who: 1983

Episode 602: The Five Doctors
First broadcast: 10.30 pm on Wednesday 23 November 1983 (US); 7.20 pm on Friday 25 November 1983 (UK)
<< back to 1982

The Raston warrior robot decapitates a Cyberman -
for Doctor Who's birthday.
The Five Doctors

A lot of our response to Doctor Who is informed as much by how we first see it - who we're with at the time, the mood we (and they) are in, the stuff going on in our lives - as the programme itself. A wise chum told me he'd realised this about a recent season: his least favourite episodes were all the ones he'd watched on his own.

So a lot of the warm, cosy love I have for The Five Doctors is personal and from context. That first evening it was shown was a big event. I was allowed to stay up late to watch it with my siblings, and they drew the curtains and turned off the lights to make the experience more like a cinema. It was the last Doctor Who story we all watched together as it went out.

When I watch it again now, I still feel a thrill of memory for that long-ago evening, that particular, personal circumstance. But it's not just that. As I've grown up, become a writer and tried typing my own Doctor Who stories, I am ever more in awe of the script.

First, consider the brief given to the poor writer. Imagine you're the one that script editor Eric Saward came to.

You have to write a 90-minute TV movie extravaganza, with five leading actors all playing the main hero - so they get 18 minutes each. They all need to drive the plot, be heroic and have the best lines, and you'll need to consider the potential clash of egos on set. Oh, and the fact that one of those actors is dead.

In addition, the story should feature lots of old monsters and companions. The production team can't confirm availability of some of those companions until very late in the day, but each Doctor will need pairing up with a companion from their time on the show. And lastly, it needs to thrill a broad, general audience tuning in for the special event, as well attempting to satisfy fans. (PS the script editor especially likes the Cybermen.)

Bloody hell, that's a lot to cram in - once you've assembled the cast there's hardly room for a story. In fact, it seems to have defeated Robert Holmes, generally regarded as one of Doctor Who's best writers - if not the best. "The brief was too heavy," Saward later admitted of Holmes' involvement. "He didn't think it would work."

Saward is speaking on Terrance Dicks: Fact & Fiction, a 2005 DVD extra on Horror of Fang Rock. The documentary covers Terrance's time on Doctor Who but especially his ability to step in when things went wrong. When two stories collapsed in 1969, he co-wrote the 10-episode The War Games and saw the Second Doctor off in grand style. He then script-edited the next five years of the show - all the Third Doctor's adventures - taking a series facing cancellation and returning it to rude health. In 1977, when the BBC objected to his Doctor-Who-meets-vampires story (because it would look like it was mocking their big adaptation of Count Dracula), he quickly knocked out one of my favourite stories, Horror of Fang Rock. Basically, he's a good man in a crisis.

Terrance himself is modest about his contribution. He says on the Fact & Fiction documentary that he's often asked:

"'Were you aware you were making classic television?' Our main plan was not to have have to show the test card."

He's rightly proud of this unshowy professionalism and recalls a moment from his time as script-editor. A director called from the rehearsal hall to say there was some problem with the scripts. Terrance called back and spoke to the director's PA.

"I said, 'Tell him to ring me when he's free. And tell him not to worry because whatever it is I will fix it.' ... That just came out and I thought that sounds bloody conceited. But I thought after five years, having hit most of the problems on Doctor Who, I'm fairly confident that I can fix it."

When given the brief for The Five Doctors, Terrance's solution was simple, effective and brilliant. He treats the problem as a sort of game, and makes that game the plot. Just as he has to gather Doctors, companions and old enemies, so does the villain in the story.

I've been discussing this with my chum Jim Smith, who says that "Terrance talked once about a game where you have to take objects out of box and extemporise a story around them. The story does that, with all ingredients brought out like the prestige in a magic trick. He also (perhaps unconsciously) works that image into the story, with Borusa's gloved hands pulling the figurines of the characters out of the box and putting them on the board."

But - without disagreeing with Jim - it's far more clever than that simple game supposes. The Doctors all have their own plots to follow and don't meet up until the final scenes (and a single day's filming) which provides a neat structure for the story but also avoided potential spats between the leading men. There are even separate entrances to the Dark Tower so the Doctors don't bump into one another early.

More from Jim: "I love how the Third Doctor recounts an establishment view of Rassilon, the Dark Times and so on ('old Rassilon put a stop to it') while the Second, a more anarchic and less establishment figure, regales the Brigadier with conspiracy theories of how Rassilon invented and played the game before he banned it and how he may still be alive inside his own Tomb. At least some of which turn out to be true."

The Five Doctors is packed with brilliant moments: the Doctors being chased by black triangles; the fizzing insides of a Dalek; the Doctor running away from his own people at the end. There are nice continuity fixes, too: the fact that a Time Lord can be given a new regenerative cycle when his first one is used up; the Third Doctor meeting the Cybermen (the only Doctor at that point not to have done so). And so much of the dialogue sparkles: I particularly love “I am the Master – and your loyal servant”.

Jim says: "I love that the Master takes his mission seriously. When he rages at the end that 'I came here to help you Doctor, a little unwillingly but I came. My offers were scorned! My help refused!' he's actually telling the truth and no one - not even the audience - believes him."

"Then," Jim goes on, "there's Terrance's use of imagery from Browning's Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came - see from versus XXXI. This seems like a stretch until you remember Fang Rock's indebtedness to The Ballad of Flannen Isle."

Terrance dodges round one of the Doctors being dead by having an actor stand in for William Hartnell - but also, tastefully, starts the story with a perfectly chosen clip of the man himself. Midway into the story, the replacement First Doctor is paired up with the current Doctor which again works structurally as well as practically (there's less of a potential clash with a for-one-night-only Doctor). All the Doctors have great moments of wit, intelligence and courage and get some brilliant lines.

Then, after a draft of the script had been completed, one of the Doctors decided not to be involved. That should have spelt disaster but Terrance fixes things deftly, again using archive footage to fill the gap and also reworking the other Doctors' roles. Watching it that first time, I wished Tom Baker had been in it more but never suspected he'd not been there at all.

If the Doctors get the best bits, the companions are less well served, just tagging along in his wake, asking questions that prod the plot along. I wonder how much that's due to them still being swapped round at the last minute, or to the constraints of squeezing in so many people.

There's an effort to mark out their characters but it's all a bit sketched in and glib. Susan sprains her ankle as if that's something she always did (it isn't; she did it once in The Dalek Invasion of Earth). Jim: "Which was, of course, one of only two First Doctor stories Dicks had novelised. Did he flick through it for research? Or just remember novelising that moment?"

Poor old Turlough fares worst, getting very little to do: he draws a picture, worries in the TARDIS then has to stand still not talking. Jim: "I like his 'Die, it seems' gag. And 'Big, isn't it?' about the bomb. Black humour is key to Turlough, I think. So we get that if nothing else."

There's no mention at all of Kamelion, the robot companion introduced in the previous story.

Other things niggle. It's a shame that the Eye of Orion is clearly the same location as the Death Zone (though that's not an issue with the script). A thrilling scene where the Third Doctor rescued Sarah from the Autons was changed to a cheaper one where she falls down a steep slope; a good fix on paper but the way its shot doesn't make it look very perilous (and again not an issue with the script).

Jim drew my attention to one odd script thing in the scene at UNIT HQ: the sergeant doesn't know who the Doctor is and won't let him in, whereas Colonel Crichton tried to have the Doctor invited to the reunion and failed. So he certainly knows of the Doctor. When the Doctor gets into the office, the colonel dismisses the sergeant and lets the Doctor stay because either he knows who this Doctor is by sight (they've never met, but he may have seen pictures or whatever) or he accepts Lethbridge-Stewart's recognition of him as reason enough. Then at the end of the scene the colonel says:

CHRICTON:
What the blazers is going on? Who was that strange little man?

SERGEANT NOT-BENTON:
The Doctor?

CHRICTON:
Who?

Which, as Jim said, completely reverses their positions/knowledge. On the DVD commentary at this point, Terrance says the joke wasn't his but Saward's. And it's not in Terrance's novelisation of the story, either.

Whatever the case in that scene, Saward clearly helped improve the story overall. He suggested that it was too obvious if the villain turned out to be the Master. He also thought the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane needed to face one more obstacle before reaching the Dark Tower. To answer that, Terrance came up with the one new monster in the story, in a scene that typifies what makes The Five Doctors so brilliant.

The Raston warrior robot is a budget-conscious creation - a non-speaking actor in a simple costume. Its sensors are primed to detect any movement, on which it fires arrows and bladed discs. Again, it's making a game of the problem: the Doctor and Sarah Jane end up playing Blind Man's Bluff.

DOCTOR:
Freeze, Sarah Jane. If you move, we're dead.

And then a troop of Cybermen arrive...

Cor. No wonder this scene was most often used to promote the story. Simple, cheap and thrilling, it is perfect Doctor Who.

Next episode: 1984

Doctor Who: 1981

Episode 553: Logopolis, part 4
First broadcast: 5.10 pm, Saturday 21 March 1981
<< back to 1980

The death of Doctor Who
Logopolis, part 4

I was four when Logopolis was first on TV, five when it was repeated. I didn't see it again for a decade and yet this story, in which Tom Baker's Doctor dies, haunted me for years.

Watching it again, I'm struck by how complicated it is. Logopolis is all about the heat-death of the universe being held back by pure mathematics - numbers so powerful that they warp reality and can't be processed in a computer. It's about as high concept as you get, and I'm still not entirely sure how much it makes sense (I struggle with physics at the best of times).

But that never bothered me as a child. I never expected to understand Doctor Who anyway. It was a grown-up show, watched by my elder brother and sister (who seemed part of that grown-up world though they weren't yet in their teens) that I was allowed to sit in on so long as I didn't speak. If it presented a strange and dangerous universe, governed by unfathomable rules, that was how the world seemed to a child anyway.

Then again, what do you actually need to know to follow the story? That the Master is a baddie and up to something bad, and the Doctor is trying to stop him. Everything else, all the natter about block transfer computation and the properties of bubble memory, were - to this child, anyway - so much hand-waving between the running around.

Yet it was still compelling. Doctor Who rarely addresses the TARDIS itself in any great detail, and Logopolis makes the experience deeply unsettling. It is full of extraordinary moments that linger long in the memory: the TARDIS landing inside itself, with the police box prop stood inside the control room; the ivy-shrouded cloister room where the Doctor can brood; the TARDIS shrinking with the Doctor trapped inside; the radio telescope looming over an alien town. The TARDIS's cloister bell, warning of disaster, works so well it's still used in the series today.

My chum Matthew Michael has written intelligent things about Logopolis and points out the best of cliffhangers is a striking visual moment: the Doctor shaking hands with the Master. The Doctor siding with his mortal enemy is all the more disturbing because the Master here is a monster, not the softly spoken charmer as played by Roger Delgado. His monstrousness is underlined by him killing close relatives of two companions (Nyssa's dad Tremas and Tegan's auntie Vanessa). He chuckles to himself as the Doctor falls to his death.

There are oddly silly bits, too, like the plan to open the doors of the TARDIS while it's under water, or Tegan's getting lost in the ship being played for laughs. But the general tone is muted, and that's largely down to Tom Baker. For all the apparent hard science in the script, the story packs a punch because of how it feels. The Doctor's weary resignation as events unfold is so out of character, it feels so wrong, that it utterly enthralled this small boy.

Next episode: 1982

Doctor Who: 1978

After episode 491 (The Stones of Blood, part 4)
22 November 1978
<< back to 1977

Frank Bough interviews Tom Baker
Nationwide, BBC1, 22 November 1978

In the early evening of 22 November 1978, the BBC's live news magazine Nationwide (basically, The One Show but without the view out the window) celebrated the 15th birthday of Doctor Who. It was, in the best traditions of a show about a rackety time machine, a day early.

Nationwide spoke first to the show's original producer, Verity Lambert, and then to actress Carole Ann Ford, who'd played the Doctor's first companion (and granddaughter), Susan. Then presenter Frank Bough spoke to Mary Tamm - the Doctor's current companion, Romana. Finally, he turned to Tom Baker, who sat brooding beside him.

What happens next is fascinating. You can watch it as an extra on The Stones of Blood DVD or, ahem, on YouTube. Tom seems in a garrulous mood, or bored, and his answers brusque, even combative.

Frank:
Of course, you are Doctor Who aren't you?

Tom:
Well, yes I am. I am.

Frank:
I mean, all the time - aren't you?

Tom:
Well, I mean I'm not as benevolent as... Doctor Who is not really an acting part but I mean I'm not as benevolent as the character and as kind as the character and even-tempered as the character. But yes, it's just me. That's all I suppose.

Frank:
But you have to be Doctor Who all the time, I'm told. People regard you totally where they see you as Doctor Who and nothing else. Do you see that?

Tom:
Well I don't have to be Doctor Who any more than you have to be Frank Bough!

Frank:
Yes, but I am Frank Bough!

Tom:
Yeah, I know you are. I'm Doctor Who because I only have a fictional image.

Frank:
But I don't have a fictional image. I am me.

Tom:
Of course you do. People don't really believe you exist. They only see you on the television. I mean, I see you at cricket games and things like that. But it's true, people have a televisual impression of you as they have of me. In my case, of course, I play a heroic figure whereas you're associated with rather terrifying -

Frank:
They want to talk to me about sport but they want to regard you as Doctor Who. Now, can't you stop being Doctor Who and become Tom Baker occasionally?

Tom:
Well, of course I can. I do that at home or I do it in the bar with Mary Tamm or somebody like that. But the point is when I meet anybody who's interested in Doctor Who there's no point in presenting Tom Baker because they find Tom Baker very dreary.

Frank:
Tell me a bit about how people regard you and the effect you have on the audience, who are convinced you are Doctor Who. What sort of way do people behave when they see you?

Tom:
Well, I mean mostly the reaction is one of cheerfulness and happiness because they associate me with the children being vastly amused by me or interested in what I do as the character of the Doctor. And they also ascribe to me - such is the gullibility of the public and the potency of television – they ascribe to me all the virtues of Doctor Who. For example, I don't need anything boring like a bank card, for example. I don't even need money now because people make the assumption because I play this benevolent fictional character that I am, you know, that my probity is totally beyond question.

Frank:
So you have to work very hard – if you're not very nice as Tom Baker then you have to be very nice as Doctor Who when the occasion demands it.

Tom:
Ah ha! Yeah, it's not difficult. I get on all right with people – superficially.

Bough failing to appreciate the difference between his real self and his televisual image would ultimately cost him his career. Wikipedia quotes Paul Connew, formerly of The News of the World, saying that the 1988 sex and drugs scandal,

"caused a sensation at the time, given Bough's public image as the squeaky clean frontman of breakfast and sports television."

It's fascinating to see Tom address the power that television gives him over members of the public in the light of the awful revelations about other TV stars of the time. Television was much more influential back then - with fewer channels, fewer alternatives to telly, and bigger, less media savvy audiences. Tom clearly saw the impact of that influence in his daily dealings with the public - and he took his responsibilities to them seriously.

He was certainly no angel - his autobiography is candid about booze and sex and being difficult on set - and yet he tried not to let children see him with a cigarette or beer, or being ordinary and dreary. Even when adults spotted "the Doctor", he tried not to disappoint them by merely being himself. It's striking that Bough seems amazed he'd make that effort.

Playing the Doctor is more than just an acting job, it also involves a public-facing role: you're expected to charm and entertain children off-screen as well as on, there are conventions, signings, charity things. Even years after you leave the role, it's the first thing people will mention. There are all the many people who, thrilled by your adventures, feel kinship, ownership, entitlement (look at how I blithely refer to my childhood hero as "Tom", when I've met him fleetingly a handful of times...).

Is it different from other leading roles? I suspect the presenters and stars of children's TV are the ones most likely to cause offence by not appearing as they seem on screen. But I'd love to know from David Tennant, for example, how much his dad's job as Moderator of the Church of Scotland, served as a model for how to conduct himself as the Doctor. Tom, after all, was once a monk...

Next episode: 1979