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The Unlikely Start
'This is boring', said Alexandra and Matthew, when I showed them this a few years ago, reminding me that when I first saw it, in 1979, it did seem remarkably slow, even by Power of Kroll standards. I just mention this for any twelve year olds that might be reading.
The weight of the following years makes all of the first episode really very moving - in a way never envisaged in 1963 - rather as if the fluttering of a butterfly were captured on film just before it caused all the office blocks of Capitalism to collapse, destroying all within. And it's highly intelligent; the weirdnesses of Susan all point to her being a very clever tourist to this planet, rather than just an odd product of an eccentric older relative, and her 'the Decimal System hasn't started yet' is poetry, in hindsight at least.
The mystery deepens; a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane (ah, back to the sinister location of Scene 1) and then the strange, oddly hostile grandfather and the police box.
And in they go. Lummee.
It's all played so beautifully straight, that's the thing; nobody seems remotely aware that any of this could be funny - I mean, it's all in Black and White.
And then the thing at the end of Episode 1, the Police Box really does take off and disappear, pull back from London and Earth, and there's a camera pointing down its own monitor, and then we're somewhere else - definitely not Coal Hill - and a big shadow falls across the land.
It's a good job that the first episode is so magical, because the following three are really quite... challenging.
To be fair, it can't have been easy to write, and it feels rather as if Anthony Steven hadn't quite thought through how difficult a Stone Age vocabulary might be. How, for instance, do you translate 'Imagine'? 'The way I see things when I sleep'. Hmmm.
Caveman politics, it transpires, is just like any other kind, only less refined and rather nastier. Morally there's very little between Za and Kal, and while the latter kills the old woman, there's little to say that Za wouldn't have done much the same thing - and what about the Dr looking very like being on the point of finishing Za off with a stone? Ever likely Za locks them in the Cave of Skulls as soon as he gets the secret of fire out of them. I think that the four are darn lucky to get away with the skulls and fire trick, and that it's a good job they don't fall over any more dead animals on the way back to the TARDIS.
The choice of two schoolteachers is an interesting one, and points me towards the HG Wells story 'The Country of the Blind', which proved the fallacy of 'in the country of the blind, a one-eyed man is king'; in this 'country of the ignorant' the educated are not kings and queens but, ultimately, fleeing fugitives.
Does it look good? Yes, I suppose it has to be said that it does. Obviously it's in a studio, and civilisation is at so basic a stage that there's no need to worry about such niceties as Art Deco wallpaper or Louis XV chairs; a cave and a jungle is all it needs and they look properly convincing, and there's no sign of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini fighting dinosaurs. I don't fancy Hur much, I have to say.
If it had gone on like this, I doubt they'd have got to a second series, but we all know what happened the following week.
Daleks
The allusion to Country of the Blind may be a touch abstruse, but that to The Time Machine in this is blatant. The Thals are the Eloi and the Daleks are the Morlocks (the two names even sound the same). The other half sets the ideas of the growing anti-nuclear movement (1963 was the year of the Aldermaston March) against the ghost of WWII, rather in the manner of the school playground argument that generally starts with the word 'Eerr'.
'Eerr, if fighting's wrong, what you going to do if the Nazis come?'
Once beyond this seminal piece of philosophy, it becomes a Terry Nation adventure yarn, and rather better for that; forbearance and tolerance may be excellent virtues, but they're really not nearly so good as courage and fortitude when it comes to telling a good story and Mr Nation was never backward in that; here he gleefully mixes flavours from H Ryder Haggard, Where Eagles Dare and Flash Gordon to create a highly enjoyable romp with a neutron bomb at the end. That'll answer all the beatniks and peaceniks then; the way to avoid nuclear war is to brave the Lake of the Mutations and leap over the very deep chasm.
This is the first time we see the Dr come up against an alien creature, and as such it's a special moment - how much does he reveal he knows of extra-terrestrials to the humans? The answer is 'very little'. And the Daleks are marvelous.
It's easy to see why they became such an instant hit. Terry Nation's Nazis in tanks, Ray Cusick's design, and Peter Hawkins and David Graham doing the voices - it all comes together as a thoroughly disconcerting whole - a thing nastier than the sum of its parts.
And it's not - quite - inhuman; it's got tone of voice and body language, admittedly the tone starts at pre-emptory and goes way beyond ranting hysteria, and the physical message may start at inscrutable and end at psychotic - it's never funny or kind. It's quite surprising just how interesting such malicious atonal evil can be.
After all this, it's perhaps little wonder that the Thals are a little bit dull.
The design is beautifully realised; the petrified jungle looks great, along with the creature made entirely out of metal, and the Dalek city seems like a direct extension of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, odd angles, very unsettling - the horror of being stuck in a hostile alien maze created by a German Expressionist on some very bad LSD.
It's also, note well, a much better, much more grown up telling of the tale than that told in the movie.
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