Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Full Furry Jacket

This is a bit late, but what with Star One, hair-touching and a bad case of Avonian flu (Strain H1-Star-1 according to Dr Querry) I feared for my sanity. A cocktail of buttercup syrup, ibuprofen and paracetamol seems to have sorted me out though – possibly.

I thought this was a cracking episode. The casual opening scene, where the Doctor and crew dismiss Salamander’s hideous death as they chomp on a sandwich, sets the tone, and things progress nicely via inexplicable webs and cranky fake old men until the Doctor loses his mind and recklessly follows an obviously dangerous cable. Did they not have public information films on Gallifrey? No child in Britain would have followed a bomb cable down a dark tunnel, and expected some kind of random webby substance to conveniently muffle the explosion. Oh no – they would naturally have expected to be gorily decapitated by the blast and their twitching corpse fried on the live rail.  Because the PIFs said so.

But it’s Camfield’s episode. He directs the action wonderfully, and really gets the best out of the legendary underground sets. More importantly, you can believe the soldiers are really in the army, and this and the early UNIT stories make the most of that shadowy paramilitary organisation before they became the ludicrous Boys’ Brigade outfit skipping around during the worst excesses of Pertwee’s era. Camfield would surely never have let their hair get quite so long for a start.

Hold on a minute – time for a quick dose of Day Nurse. That’s better.

All of that aside, I have been a fan of this episode ever since I saw the clip of Silverstein’s death during the Did You See? item in 1982. Afterwards, I re-read the Target novelisation, and imagined that the whole series had been directed like a Universal horror film from the 1930s. Now I realise that Camfield was ramping up the gothic for just that one scene, but it’s a great set piece, and demonstrates that when those making it could be bothered, Doctor Who could handle a host of different styles not only in the course of a series but in the course of an episode. There’s even a suit of armour in shot at one point.

Day Nurse doesn’t seem to be working. I obviously need Night Nurse after 6pm. Mmmm!  Feels different this time.

It’s obvious that Doctor Who played a big part in Stanley Kubrick’s life and work. Look at the evidence. Kubrick’s crew on 2001: A Space Odyssey got in touch with the Who production team about Camfield’s work on The Daleks’ Master Plan, and therefore the detail-obsessed Kubrick would obviously have kept an eye on Camfield’s subsequent work on the series. And so is it entirely fanciful to suppose that when the K man decided to ditch Wendy Carlos’s score for The Shining he remembered a brief but brilliant scene in The Web of Fear that also used Bela Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta so effectively? Get Andrew Pixley on the phone.

Was Kubrick a Doctor Who fan? I like to think that somewhere in his rambling mansion in St Albans, the great Stan had a huge bank of televisions picking up TV channels from around the world, including all UK regional variations of course. Maybe Kubrick was a secret Gus Honeybun fan, in addition to having a yen for the Doctor’s thrilling adventures. In fact, he almost certainly had an assistant (who looked like Dr Strangelove complete with wheelchair) who busily recorded every Doctor Who adventure for Kubrick’s vast archives. Kubrick even modelled his later appearance on the Yeti in The Web of Fear.

 

Hold on – this is how rumours start. I don’t want to be responsible for Kubrick’s widow being harassed by Ian Levine and the army of sinister individuals on the Missing Episodes forum. Though a fitting punishment would be to strap a fanboy to a cinema seat, pin open his eyelids and force him to watch The Sensorites and Time and the Rani for a week. Without the eyedrops. Viddy well my brothers. Any Night Nurse left?

I've Started Something

There is nothing worse than starting something that you cannot finish. This is the major problem when watching any story that has missing episodes, especially one where only the first episode exists. I know that you can get the story on CD so you can carry on where you left of after watching the first episode, but it just isn't the same, is it?

The Web of Fear has a fantastic first episode, which builds up really nicely and it is such a shame that the rest of it has been junked. Like a lot of Patrick Troughton stories not much happens in the first episode, it just, sort of, builds up nicely over the course of the story's length and often they don't really kick in until at least episode three, but there is a lot of atmosphere and building up of the plot there to keep the viewer interested.

I am not to sure about the opening scenes where the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are writhing around on the floor. I always remember this was quite an embarrassing scene to watch, especially when there were other people (or non-fans) in the room and, of course, if you hadn't already seen the previous story then you would have no idea why they were all writhing around on the floor, especially if you walked in at that very moment. 

There are quite a lot of great moments in the first episode: the scene in the museum where the curator is cut down by a yeti to the strains of Bela Bartok; the scenes in the underground when the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria are exploring; the scene with a cobwest infested newspaper seller who falls to the ground when Jamie taps him on the shoulder (as copied very well by Kevin Davies for Thirty Years in the TARDIS); as well as some cringe-inducing moments: the opening TARDIS scenes where Troughton desperately tries not to cop a feel of Debbie Watling (well you would, wouldn't you?); the "what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this" exchange between Captain Knight and Anne Travers.

Like the majority of Troughton stories this is very atmospheric and you can tell just by watching this episode that here you have a director who has a bit of flair about him rather than the usual static camera shots favoured by a lot of the directors of the day (and Peter Moffatt in the eighties). Douglas Camfield is definitely one of the best, if not the best, directors ever to have worked on Doctor Who and this story is one of his triumphs.

Also kudos must go to the set designer who so convincingly replicated the London Underground that the authorities thought they had actually filmed there! The acting on display in the episode is pretty top notch as well with particular praise going to Jack Watling as the ageing, blustering Professor Travers and to Pat Troughton giving his always-excellent performance as the Doctor.

As this is a sequel to the earlier story The Abominable Snowmen you do have to have a bit of knowledge of that story to really appreciate the opening episode of this adventure, but not that much that you couldn't work out what is going on in this story if you hadn't.

I always liked the story, from when I read the target novelisation of the story when I was at middle school, and was rather miffed when I discovered that the majority of the story was missing, but was glad that at least one part survived. I guess that if the story was complete it may not be considered to be such a brilliant story as it is at the moment (like Tomb of the Cybermen which was a classic until someone went and found it and discovered that it was only average), so part of me is glad that the story is mostly missing, but another part of me wishes I could watch the whole thing in its glory, rather than just watch an episode, and then listen to the soundtrack of the rest. It just isn't the same. 

"The Yeti strikes him down with a single, savage blow..."

Note: Owing to me not being able to download the original episode (despite trying to for the past week, grr), I've listened, and subsequently reviewed, the audio version of the episode. This explains my somewhat harsh review of it.

Well, that wasn't exactly great. I'm sure if the rest of the serial existed I'd be more impressed, but as it was I thought it was boring and hard to follow. This from what is claimed to be the best Troughton story.

The introduction, in which the group escape from Salamander's (is that spelt right?) 'demise', doesn't inspire confidence. The next section, in which it's explained how Travers brought back a Yeti robot sans control unit, makes little sense as well. And then to top it all of, the TARDIS gets stuck in space. It's rather hard to follow on audio, but I tried - and failed.

I had hoped the episode might pick up a bit near the end. Alas, however, it didn't really, and the cliffhanger, in which the tunnels gets blown up with the Doctor still in them, isn't all I hoped for. I'm sure if I could watch the rest of the serial it would all make sense and I could see what people were talking about when they call Web of Fear great, but as it is I can't see what all the fuss is about.

The Velvet Underground

Following on from The Enemy of the World, the Doctor and Victoria start with a little horseplay on the floor of the console room. Whilst Jamie clings onto the roundels of one of the non-photocopied walls of the console room. Two companions, both in short skirts, one male one female. Playing to both the gallery and the stalls. Once they get the damned doors closed it's all hands to the pumps (and slacks and stay-pressed flares) as the TARDIS whisks them away on their next adventure.

The Web of Fear - Episode 1

But before we can get there the main feature is interrupted by a 1950's B movie horror film that crashes headlong into the action. With three protagonists who don't appear to have any bearing on the main feature. There's Julius Silverstein, Anne Travers and Professor Travers, her dad. Boy, it's a good job we don't see any parent-child action in modern day Who. Julius appears to have fallen directly out of an edition of Crackerjack where a goofy bit part actor is employed to be made a complete ass of at the expense of children's humour. The jarring styles between the TARDIS scenes and these filmed inserts is quite startling. The silver control sphere that Travers has re-awoken appears at the window, like a Dickensian urchin pressing his filthy nose up against the windows of the great house at Christmas staring in disbelief at the spread on the table, and then smashes through the glass like a chav coked up on wicked strength Lambrini going at a bus shelter with a brick trying to impress a cluster of bling-encrusted slappers.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS encounters a web. A web... Of fear. Didn't Star Trek do this around the same time? The Tholian Web? Isn't it? There's still not a vast amount happening, so instead we catch up with a TV man who's interviewing random army officers. This TV man is so hateful he'd probably be the sort of wanker who, if he was around in this day and age, would have a bluetooth headset permanently glued to his ear. A twat of such magnitude that a good night out would always be capped off with a rendition of "Uptown Girl" at a Karaoke bar followed by crying himself to sleep in a lonely bedsit.

The TARDIS, having escaped the clutches of the fearsome web, by use of a prototype joystick device, materializes in the London Underground system for a quick round of "Mornington Crescent" (or, as it was called then, "Totter's Lane"). NF Stovold was, at this point in time, a struggling BBC staff writer who went from production to production helping out wherever needed. He used the settings of the London Tube as the basis for what was to become a long running palour game on the BBC Radio 4 show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. Such was the baffling complexity of "Totter's Lane" that only Stovold himself was able to play - and he would be often found rocking backwards and forwards in a dark corner of the studio mumbling to himself. One such exchange was recorded for posterity by a lazy sound engineer who was supposed to be recording the audio from the mics on set. Stovold was recorded alternating between a high pitched voice and a lower pitched one as he appeared to be playing a game out by himself:

Sense-Sphere... Skaro...  Dido... Vortis... Mondas... Vulcan... Telos... Marinus... Totter's Lane

And indeed the Mondas-Vulcan-Telos series of moves was known as "Playing a Fear", but is banned from most modern codes of "Totter's Lane" because of the unpalatable memories it evoked of a mighty European Cup clash of "Totter's Lane" players in Stuttgart '69.

Back in the Tube system and we discover that it's broad daylight and, in some social commentary about the future of the traditional newspaper industry (or something), an old paper seller's covered in cobwebs. The B feature actors come crashing in on the main feature as Professor Travers gets a little peeved at the smarmy reporter. And yet more wet army officers as in evidence as an experienced staff sergeant - think William Hartnell's stunt double from The Army Game (he even stifles a belch and/or fart at one point and ballsed up his lines at the same them) is seen with two drips of considerable magnitude (who'd be lucky to pass basic training if all it entailed was lying around on pillows all day) laying cables in the tunnels. Then, for reasons that might never be fully explained, the Yetis covered the boxes on the platform with webbage and then they light up for no...

The Bumper Book of Made-up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about part one of The Web of Fear: This story inspired a young Tim Berners-Lee to later create the World Wide Web after his first attempt at computer network, which emulated the WOTAN machine, was an unmitigated disaster.

Stuck on you

Back in the dark days of the 70s, when the only way to relive Doctor Who was through Target novelisations, I got The Doctor Who Omnibus for Christmas - 1977 if memory serves. This was a hefty hardback volume containing three novelisations: The Space War (Frontier in Space), Revenge of the Cybermen, and The Web of Fear.

I could just remember Jon Pertwee's Doctor - my first memory of Doctor Who is from The Planet of the Daleks - and Revenge of the Cybermen was an adventure I could dimly remember (it was only a couple of years old at that point, but you know what it was like at that age - a fortnight was a lifetime ago).

The Web of Fear novelisation was my first toe in the water of the series' dim and distant past. I'd seen a clip of Troughton on Nationwide, and not been entirely impressed, but I loved this story. It was atmospheric, tense, and it had the wonderful character of Evans, who so impressed me that I named my favourite toy soldier after him and made him the hero of all my games from that moment on. I wanted to be him, and I wanted to be Welsh - a capital offence in Yorkshire, so I kept it quiet.

There's something a little sad about having your fantasies ripped away from you. In my mind's eye, Frontier in Space was a real epic spanning the whole galaxy with (spoiler alert) the Daleks right at the end, somewhat teasingly (and coincidentally leading into that first-remembered story of mine). When I finally saw it, it was a little disappointing to say the least.

I've got used to that now - I can't have been alone in wishing Tomb of the Cybermen had remained lost to us forever - but this one remaining episode of The Web of Fear manages to live up to almost all my expectations. Only the very opening, with the TARDIS trapped in the web, fails the imagination test, but the rest of it meets or even exceeds it. The squashed closeness of the characters, the underground (which to a boy from York was something rather exotic and unknown), the constant threat from the invisible enemy that we, the audience, knew - giving us a rare advantage over all the characters.

This, if given the choice, is the story I would have picked if someone had held two boxes over a fire and said 'Tomb or Web, which will you save?'

I have the audio version of this story on CD, but I've never listened to it. When I saw the single episode again recently I wanted to dig deep in the taped-up box that's followed me from city to city as I've grown up, and that I know contains that original omnibus along with all my Target books.

I think we're wrong to link the TV series with the high incidence of writing as a career of Doctor Who fans, myself included - I put it down to Target, and to Terrance Dicks in particular.

It's high time these books were reprinted - there's a new audience out there who would hoover them up with a passion. They're sometimes the best way to experience the original series, you know.

(Images from 'On Target')

World-Wide Web

‘If you remember the sixties then you weren’t really there’

I’m not sure who first came up with the above phrase, but whoever it was certainly never intended to paraphrase my difficulty in analysing the decade of Doctor Who which began and ended before I was even born. As Paul Hayes said last week, there are all too few examples of this era which you’d put up against the Potters and Play for Todays of this period and say ‘Come on then…’ And while I’ll always recognise the importance that the sixties played in forging Doctor Who’s iconic status, as a seventies child it’s always lacked something. To use a technological analogy, it’s like trying to wax nostalgic about Betamax when all you’ve known is DVD.

But given the scant visual record we have to consider here, ‘The Web of Fear’ certainly bears consideration for that most over-used of Who critics’ euphemisms, classic. Funny, seeing as the story doesn’t have the most auspicious of starts. Tying up the loose ends of ‘Enemy of the World’, we open with the Doctor and Victoria in a somewhat compromising position, seemingly ‘spooning’ on the TARDIS console room floor. Soon even Jamie’s joining in and we’re given some of the finest - not to mention suggestive - examples of actors-pretending-to-hold-on-despite-not-really-having-to cavorting ever seen in the series. Then there’s Troughton’s plaster to consider (pre-empting his successor-bar-one’s ability to sport a facial wound without any plausible on-screen explanation). And while we’re at it, hasn’t the TARDIS console room got a lot smaller since last week?

Never mind that, it seems the actual plot’s starting. We’re in a museum where a rather familiar hairy beastie is hanging around just waiting for his cue (and for once this era it isn’t Fraser Hines). It seems that the venerable Professor Travers has mislaid one of the Yeti’s activation spheres and is imploring the poorly-accented curator to let him have the creature back that he sold to him thirty years previously. Naturally he refuses; only for the aforementioned behemoth to come to life - as warned - once the Professor has made his curmudgeonly departure. The result? One dead curator and a nation’s children huddled behind a sofa. Bet he wouldn’t have had that trouble on E-Bay…

Back to the TARDIS and - having righted the ship’s vacuum-induced turbulence - the Doctor and co have found themselves in another sticky mess (insert spooning-based innuendo here). Having apparently materialised (a light flashing on the console to thus indicate, you see) the ship is caught in some kind of cosmic cobweb which the Doctor takes all but a minute to escape from (well, there are five more episodes of this to go, you know). And we’re finally in the (rather effective) studio sets which London Underground bosses were apparently dismayed to mistake for the real thing. Nearby, it seems that Professor Travers’ portents of doom have some currency, as London has been brought to a standstill and more webbing than even Peter Parker’s alter-ego could produce in an average day is enveloping the area.

The authorities’ solution is to become a tried-and-tested formula for the show over the coming half-decade: send in a bunch of clueless soldiers, mix lightly with the barkers ranting of a scientifically-inclined do-gooder (usually the Doctor, but here Professor Travers largely takes his role), throw in an irritating Alan Whicker-type journalist who’s sure to die a justifiably horrible death and sauté with a dollop of action-oriented direction courtesy of Douglas Camfield. Bring to the boil and serve immediately (or when six episodes have elapsed, if sooner).

Those underground sets really are convincing, aren’t they (Jamie certainly thinks so, trying to fry himself for added authenticity). And it’s only when we switch from the Doctor and co to the army operations centre that that old bug-bear of Who - the clash between studio and film footage - rears its ugly head. But even that’s not as jarring as Deborah Watling’s beyond-cliché performance as the whiny, permanently-on-the-point-of-screaming Victoria. Cute as a button maybe, but about as far from Billie Piper-style female emancipation as you can get.

But with hindsight, what strikes you most about this episode is how it contains pretty much all the elements that would later become a backbone of the show’s format: the alien invasion, the pseudo-UNIT army, the (shock horror) clever female scientific advisor. Writers Haisman and Lincoln would be well within their rights to suggest that this story pretty much sealed Doctor Who’s future for the next five years.

Which leaves me to ponder just one further question (one sure to be answered if I could be bothered rooting out my copy of the story’s soundtrack): just why are the Yeti paralysing Earth with an invasion of giant cobwebs..?

(‘The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts’ has this to say about ‘The Web of Fear’ Episode 1: during the first take of Fraser Hines jumping down onto the electrical lines, Patrick Troughton yelled ‘BANG!’ at the top of his voice and a recording delay was hurriedly scheduled for Fraser to change his kilt)

Web Swinging

I’ve always found it difficult engaging with those lonely ‘only surviving’ Doctor Who episodes. It’s like opening a Kinder egg second – you take off the wrapping, taste the chocolate, ever in the knowledge that there prize has been removed from the centre. What’s the point in getting excited about a four part story when three quarters is missing? Particularly if it’s only the first part that remains – the episode that doesn’t really give anything away, poses a few questions and introduces characters you don’t have time to get to know (save the regulars). We don’t even get the benefit of a returning character and monster from a previous adventure, thanks to the BBC policy of junking most of the Troughton era.

So what do we have to play with here? Well of course there’s good old PT, who is marvellous. Impish and amusing, he really does shake off the cobwebs of Hartnell with his energetic performance. The old rascal even tries to cop a feel of Victoria while they struggle to hold on to ‘something’, the saucy beggar (or should that be cosmic hobo). Jamie is also great to watch – not that he really gets to shine in this episode, even when he fetches the Doctor and he not so magic torches – I thank you!

Part one wastes no time in showing us the yeti, which is unusual – while people would have been familiar with the furry beasties in The Abominable Snowman, it’s not as if they had to do a reveal so soon. Fair enough if the story had been called Web of the Yeti, but Web of Fear could have been about terrifying spiders. Either way, while the episode does try to remain Gothic, the creatures are never in the shadows long enough to be truly spooky and they look rubbish. They looked rubbish before and they look rubbish here – at least in The Five Doctors they had the sense to show us glimpses – I mean, Troughton’s coat is more sinister. And they sound really annoying, like a smoke detector that has gone off the rails.

The production values of this episode are pretty strong – it looks like an ITC production screaming out to be in colour. It also draws of course on the BBC’s very own Quatermass and the Pit, thanks to the underground setting. It’s all very Tooting Beck isn’t it? No of course it isn’t Jon. Sorry, I’m struggling to feel much for this episode – it’s in entirety I may think completely different, but I’m not interested in recapturing some of the magic through audio releases and telesnaps. All or nothing dammit! I found more fun in spotting lookie-likies in the supporting cast. Look closely and you’ll see Knight is really Terry Jones, Chorley is a young Harry Hill, the staff sergeant is Enoch Powell and the bloke at the desk is Nigel Planer. I tell you, they is!

As for the webs of fear – not so much for the Doctor, but for a good dose of Mr. Sheen. He could have given those Phantasm balls a good polish too. In summary then, the whole is hopefully better than the some of its part. It’s not a bad episode and I’m sure it’s not a bad story – the elements are hinted at that this was a corker, but as it stands, I just can’t get fired up.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about The Web of Fear: the sandwich being eaten by Troughton was preserved by BBC archivists, but thought lost by 1974. It was however returned to the BBC in 1981 and turned up again in The Five Doctors, this time being munched by Richard Hurndall.