Read Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) for Free Online

that’d still be their first impulse in that phase of the programme.) The sight of the Dalek city in the distance is the first thing in Doctor Who that is meant to inspire awe – but in spite of that, only the Doctor has the slightest interest in exploring the thing. It’s as if the Doctor alone understands the sort of TV series he’s appearing in – it’ll be a great deal safer every week if no-one bothers to get involved in an adventure, but it’ll be a duller show for the audience to watch. Much has been made of how Hartnell’s Doctor is a darker, more selfish character for the scene in which he sabotages the Ship just so he can have his own way, but I think that viewpoint misses the tone completely: it’s actually very funny, Hartnell playing his concern for the TARDIS breakdown with very mock sincerity, and giving us a delightful little chuckle as we fade to the scene change.
    And the upshot of all of these attempts to avoid the alien city is that it makes it all the more threatening. It’s nothing more than slanting corridors and whirring doors, but Barbara’s panic as she loses herself amongst them is tremendously well played by Jacqueline Hill, and very credible: you really believe that within minutes of venturing into the unknown, she’s fallen apart. Which builds up all the better to that stunning cliffhanger – again, what we see isn’t any more impressive than the cheap sets, but by now we so share our characters’ dislocation from the ordinary, the sight of a wobbly sink plunger represents something truly terrifying.
    It’s also an episode in which William Hartnell fluffs a lot of his lines, as he becomes increasingly wont to do. But I find it curiously moving that his biggest stumble is in the scene where he asks Barbara to talk to his granddaughter – it’s a confession that he needs someone else’s help, and his first real attempt to talk to Barbara on an equal level. The awkwardness of Hartnell at that moment, intentional or not, is very real and very touching.
    T: Well, this episode is very evocative for me. I remember a visit to Longleat where I gawped at the book The Early Years in the shop. It oozed class: it had big black and white photos and design drawings, and – most importantly – it was about “old” Doctor Who. I’d yet to see any of the episodes shown before I was born, but anything broadcast prior to about 1976 (except, of course, The Gunfighters) was officially regarded as Good Doctor Who. So imagine my delight when I was searching our old house for things to do one day when everyone was out (or Mum was busy in the garden), and I happened upon a copy of the aforementioned book hidden in a cupboard in a plastic bag, obviously set aside for a Christmas gift. I’d guiltily go back to that cupboard in the ensuing months, reasoning that if I looked at the pictures but didn’t read the text, I was somehow not cheating. And so the images of these stories – The Cusick Stories – became extremely familiar. When I finally watched the episodes, there were very few things on screen I hadn’t seen in massive close-up or drawn from every angle.
    So I hope it’s with no disrespect to Mr Nation when I say that it’s not really the dialogue that strikes me with this episode; it’s what we see, and most evocatively, the sounds we hear that fuse to make the titular dead planet such an evocative place. The visuals of this story hit you first – asked to create a jungle, a ledge with a view to a sprawling city below and the corridors of that city itself (and to fit them all into a cramped BBC studio), designer Ray Cusick doesn’t flinch. He’s aided by a curious visual effect (one which I previously thought was just a symptom of bootlegging, but which the VidFIREd-DVD reveals as a deliberate production decision): an overexposed lens used for those early moments in the jungle gives everything a curious, blasted quality.
    And yet, I feel as if sound-designer Brian Hodgson is the