In honour of the return to TV of the classic series Doctor Who, which will be seen on CBC on April 5, I present Nine Days of The Doctor - Day 4.
Tom Baker 1974-1981
Companions: Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen), Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter),Leela (Louise Jameson), Romana I (Mary Tamm), Romana II (Lalla Ward), Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) Teegan Jovanka (Janet Fielding).
Comments: Baker may well be the best actor to portray the Doctor. He had been nominated for two Golden Globe awards for his portrayal of Rasputin in Nicholas & Alexandra and there had been talk of an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the same role. Baker is certainly the only "Doctor" who has also done full frontal nudity, in Pasolini's Canterbury Tales. He spent six years in a monastery (from age 15 to 20) before becoming an actor. At the time that he got the part of The Doctor he had been working as a labourer on building sites for about six months. This may help to explain why he stayed so long in the role, twice as long as any other actor.
Baker's Doctor was all hair and teeth, with an extremely long scarf (supposedly knitted by Madame duFarge; in fact the BBC gave a knitter a selection of balls of wool and told her to knit a scarf, she just knitted until all of the wool was gone) and a large floppy hat. In terms of character, Baker's Doctor borrowed a little from Troughton and Pertwee. He was a scientist but not as immersed in it as Pertwee's character - you never really saw him working with test tubes. From Troughton he took a bit of the cosmic clown aspect although his humour was a drier droller wit (a product of the writers of course, which in this period included Douglas Adams who later created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Baker's Doctor was quite funny and was frequently underestimated by his opponents, to their cost.
Baker's companions were initially the damsel in distress type, although able in their own way and at least paying lip service to the notion of Women's Lib. Sarah Jane - who carried over from Pertwee's time as The Doctor, was a capable young woman who somehow was always stumbling into peril despite or perhaps because of her experiences with the Doctor. That said, Elizabeth Sladen is generally considered the best companion by many fans. And of course her male counter-part, Harry Sullivan, seldom fared much better. Leela on the other hand was rather child-like in that there were two types of people, friends of the Doctor and people to kill. Even then she still required frequent rescuing. As for the two Romanas, they too were Time Lords (well Time Ladies if you want to be technical) but like most of their race had little knowledge of the universe around them. Again, the companions are people to be rescued and vehicles through which explanations can be given. About the only companion that this couldn't be said of was The Doctor's robot dog, K-9.
Most of the conventions about the character were set by the time that Baker became the Doctor. They were mainly amplified on in this period. For example it had always been established that the inside of the TARDIS was larger than the outside but during Baker's period it was shown to be not just one or two extra rooms, it was gigantic including a cloister (complete with bells), an auxiliary control room, and a "bathroom" that rather resembled an Olympic sized indoor swimming pool. There were two visits to The Doctor's home world, Gallifrey, which depicted it as a rather sterile authoritarian world - no wonder The Doctor found it so boring that he left.
It was during Baker's period that Doctor Who achieved cult popularity in the United States, to the point where Marvel Comic began publishing a Doctor Who comic book. Baker's decision to leave the series had a rather odd basis. He had fallen in love with Lalla Ward, the actress who played the second version of Romana for two years (and was 17 years younger than him). When she left the series he himself stated that he didn't really feel like continuing with the series. They married in 1980 after she left the show. They were divorced in 1982.
In honour of the new series of Doctor Who which will be debuting on April 5 on the CBC I present Nine Days Of The Doctor - Day 3.
Jon Pertwee: 1970-1974
Companions: Liz Shaw (Caroline John), Jo Grant (Katy Manning), Sara Jane Smith (Liz Sladen).
Comments: It was fated that Jon Pertwee would become an actor - his father Roland was a distinguished playwright and actor, and his older brother Michael was also writer and an occasional actor as was their younger cousin Bill Pertwee. As a young man he counted Laurence Olivier among his friends. Nonetheless he was expelled from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts for refusing to play the role of the wind in a play. As a naval officer in World War II he was assigned to HMS Hood and was reassigned off the ship just before she sailed for her fatal battle with the Bismarck. Pertwee put his experiences in the Royal Navy to good use in the long radio comedy The Navy Lark which ran from 1959-1977. Until Doctor Who, Pertwee was primarily known as a comedic actor and created the role Marcus Lycus in the stage production of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum which in the movie was played by Phil Silvers while Pertwee was relegated to the minor role of Crassus.
Pertwee's Doctor was the first to be seen in colour. The show was seen both on the 420 line Black & White BBC1 and the higher definition Colour BBC2 until the transition to the new system was completed. He is also the only one for whom all of the episodes exist although a few episodes exist only in Black & White. While Troughton's Doctor was a "cosmic clown" in a ragged coat and baggy pants, Pertwee's Doctor is a man of Science albeit a man of science dressed as an Edwardian dandy complete with red velvet coat. Pertwee's Doctor is much more active than either Hartnell's or Troughton's, thus the companions were relegated to the roles of "damsel in distress" and people to whom the Doctor can reveal details of the plot. This is particularly true of Katy Manning's character Jo Grant. The Doctor is constantly pulling her out of difficulties. Liz Shaw on the other hand tended to be more of an equal partner. Like Pertwee's Doctor, she was a scientist even though what the Doctor knew was far beyond her understanding. This wasn't to say that he didn't have a mystical side, simply that it didn't escape very often.
For the first two years of Pertwee's time as Doctor, the stories were primarily Earth based although no less science fiction because of it. The Time Lords had exiled the Doctor to Earth after the first Troughton episode and only occasionally allowed him to leave the planet until the episode The Three Doctors which marked the 10th anniversary of the series (it also marked the last time William Hartnell appeared as the character he created). This allowed the emergence of two major characters in the show, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (Nicholas Courtney, who holds the distinction of appearing with seven of the eight actors to play the Doctor - he missed the ill fated Paul McGann, while his appearance with Hartnell was as a character called Bret Vyon in The Dalek Master Plan) Captain Mike Yates (Richard Franklin) and Sergeant Benton (John Levene) representatives of the international military organization UNIT. The Pertwee era also introduced the character described by the Doctor as "my best enemy", The Master, played by Pertwee's close friend Roger Delgado. Indeed it was Delgado's death in a 1974 car crash in Turkey that led Pertwee to give up the role, which he felt wasn't fun anymore.
In honour of the return of Doctor Who to CBC on April 5, I present Day 2 of Nine Days of The Doctor
Patrick Troughton 1966-1969
Companions: Ben Jackson (Michael Craze), Polly Wright (Anneke Wills), Jaimie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines), Victoria Waterfield (Deborah Watling), Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury).
Commentary: When it finally became clear even to William Hartnell that he couldn't continue as the Doctor, his choice for a replacement was Patrick Troughton. Troughton was a veteran character actor who had done a number of TV series including playing Robin Hood in a 1953 series as well as being the Player King in Olivier's 1948 Hamlet. The question became how to replace the tall and white haired Hartnell with the short and dark haired Troughton. The answer that the writers came up with was to simply change the actors right in front of the audience. Thus was born the Doctor's ability to regenerate. When a member of the Doctor's race reached the end of their life they had the ability to regenerate and acquire a new body. The new body had a new voice a new way of thinking and a new taste in just about everything. Thus, Troughton wasn't locked in to Hartnell's portrayal of the Doctor as a doddering old grandfather type, he could recreate the Doctor in his own image.
It's difficult to right much about the Troughton period in Doctor Who because most of it is lost. Of the 21 serials that Troughton did, only about six survive in more than fragments. Virtually all of the fourth and fifth seasons don't exist except for one episode Tomb of the Cybermen which is Deborah Watling's first real episode as the Doctor's companion. (The only episode in which we ever see Ben and Polly is the Hartnell episode The War Machines in which they are introduced and we see very little of Polly in that. Virtually all we know about the Troughton period therefore is his interactions with Jamie and Zoe. What we can see from these episodes is that the show has become a lot less studio bound. They do a number of location shoots. This also results in the episodes being a lot less difficult to watch since they don't appear to be filming them off of the monitors anymore.
The Doctor that Troughton created owed a bit to Charlie Chaplin, although Troughton called him a bit of a "cosmic clown". He wore baggy clothing and was nowhere near as authoritative or decisive as Hartnell's Doctor. He is still eminently effective in dealing with his opponents however. Unlike Hartnell's Doctor, Troughton didn't need his companions to fulfill the action parts of a particular episode. The male companions - which really means Frazer Hines as Jamie since he appeared in the second Troughton serial and was there through to the end of the Troughton period - were relegated to the role of holding younger male viewers. Troughton's period as the Doctor also saw the last of the historical episodes as a regular feature of the series. It became almost exclusively science fiction after the serial known as "The Highlanders".
When Patrick Troughton decided to leave the series at the end of its sixth season they needed a way to take him out of the series. The producers decided to reveal a little more about the Doctor and introduced the concept of the Time Lords. The Doctor was a renegade Time Lord, one who believed in intervening rather than just watching. As part of his sentence for breaking the Time Lords' laws, Troughton's Doctor is forced to regenerate.
Since the new series of Doctor Who will debut on the CBC On Tuesday April 5 I now present Day 1 of Nine Days of the Doctor.
William Hartnell the First Doctor 1963 - 1966
Companions: Ian Chesterton (William Russell aka Russell Enoch), Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), Susan "Foreman" (Carol Ann Ford), Vicki (Maureen O'Brien), Steven Taylor (Peter Purves), Katarina (Adrienne Hill), Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh), Dodo Chaplet (Jackie Lane), Polly Wright (Anneke Wills), Ben Jackson (Michael Craze).
Commentary: They say that your favourite Doctor is the one you were first exposed to but I may case it isn't entirely true. As I related in the frist post I made in this blog, my first exposure to Doctor Who occurred whenthe CBC foolishly decided to replace The Bugs Bunny Show with Doctor Who in January 1965 (I actually thought it was earlier, but I looked it up). It wasn't well received, at least not by me and apparently not by a lot of people because the show was moved to a Wednesday afternoon slot in April 1965 (which wasn't seen here in Saskatoon) before the CBC pulled it in July 1965, having aired the complete first season.
Hartnell's period as the Doctor was the foundation for the show in that it established most of the conventions of the series as well as creating several of the most memorable villains. In the first episode, the Doctor's ship (in BBC memos of the period it is referred to as a spceship) is dubbed the TARDIS and we learn that it travels in time and space and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. We also meet the principal characters: the Doctor, his granddaughter Susan who has adopted the name Foreman (from the salvage yard where the TARDIS is currently resting) both of whom are exiles from their home world, and school teachers Ian and Barbara. We also learn that the TARDIS isn't exacly operating properly when it fails to change from a Police Call Box into something fitting its surroundings. As the Hartnell period continued we will learn more about the Doctor, although they won't introduce the idea of "Time Lords" or "Gallifrey" until much later.
Casting in the series was regarded quite seriously. Hartnell, an actor who had been working in films since the 1930s and had come to prominence primarily for playing Army sergeants (in both serious films like The Immortal Batallion and comedies, most notably Carry On Sergeant) was 55 when he took the role. He was intended to be something of an irritable grandfather type, while Susan was meant to give the children in the audience someone closer to their own age to relate to. Hartnell had a notoriously poor memory for lines, cause in part by a medical condition that he was dealing with, but this was actually built into something of an endearing character trait by making the Doctor slightly absent minded. The addition of Barbara was quite literally meant to give adult males someone to look at (the show aired immediately after a sports show called Grandstand) while Ian was meant to be both someone for boys to admire and to do most of the adventurous and physical stuff that Hartnell might not be capable of. It is a common thread throughout Hartnell's period to have a younger male companion as well as a female companion.
The stories in this period were meant to be split evenly between historical adventures and science fiction stories. The first serial 100,000 B.C. dealt with cavemen, while the second serial introduced those murderous creatures the Daleks. It turned out that the science Fiction stories, particularly the four serials involving the Daleks - two of which were turned into technicolor movies starring Peter Cushing - the most popular in the series. Although not yet totally abandoned, the historical adventures became fewer in the latter part of Hartnell's years on the series.
The Hartnell episodes can be difficult to watch from a technical perspective. Some of the costumes are ludicrous (notably those in the Web Planet serial, particularly the "ant suits") while the sets are scarcely impressive. A lot of this has to do with the notorious parsimony that was forced on the producers. Verity Lambert's team was supposed to produce the show on a budget of 2,500 pounds per episode - or else. Based on conversion rates of the period that's roughly $7,000 an episode, admittedly in 1963 dollars. There's also the fact that they were forced to shoot just about everything in studio because they were shooting direct to video tape and particularly in the early period you shot in sequence and with a minimum number of retakes. It took a lot to get the BBC to reshoot a scene because at the time video tape wasn't easy to edit. Picture quality can also suffer - someone on the TV newsgroup recently complained that the Hartnell eisodes looked as though they shoot the show with a security camera. In fact episodes were shot on video tape in the 405 lines of resolution system then used in Britain. For export the episodes were filmed off of the monitor. It was not a system designed for great resolution. Or for retention of the episodes. Only 17 of the 30 serials from the Hartnell period still exist in a complete enough form to be broadcast. Others exist in partial form.
