It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed? Part 4a: Out On The Wiley, Windy Moors We’d Roald And Lizan And Screens

Doctor Who: The Daleks' Master Plan (BBC1, 1965).

Back when It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed? took at look at Doctor Who‘s third series from 1965 to 1966 – which you can find here, incidentally – much was made in the introduction of just how much of it is now missing, and correspondingly how difficult it is to make many observations about the various individual stories with any degree of assured accuracy. It was also titled ‘Last Train To Trantis/Sentreal’, a KLF-skewed pun on the name of two characters featured in – as far as we know – Mission To The Unknown and The Daleks’ Masterplan, which was almost certainly a joke that seemed funnier before it was actually typed out. It would be faintly ridiculous to suggest that there was any degree of surprise to the fact these two details are not entirely unconnected, because The Daleks’ Master Plan is actually part of the actual second series of Doctor Who and given that it ran for a whopping twelve episodes and crossed over heavily with Mission To The Unknown it stood substantially more than a one in nine chance of being referenced with obscure wordplay in the associated title, but it is worth reflecting on how, even despite there being three episodes of it in existence at that point, The Daleks’ Master Plan still seemed somehow more lost to history than The Massacre, of which not one single second survives. Large stretches and key moments from its narrative were missing, with scant scope even for making educated guesswork about what they may have entailed, and two short-stay regular characters who fell by the Dalek-instigated wayside were represented by one unrepresentative episode apiece. Now, thanks to the sterling efforts of the celluloid-rescuing charity Film Is Fabulous – whose excellent work you can find out more about here – we have two further episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan to enjoy; the opening instalment The Nightmare Begins, and third episode Devil’s Planet. As neither of these were around when we very first took a moderately irreverent look at The Daleks’ Master Plan, and there is so much in both episodes that nobody could even really have guessed about without seeing them – for example the Doctor still wearing Zephon’s hood at the start of Devil’s Planet, the incredible model shot of The Spar going into some sort of cosmic hyperdrive, The Doctor, Steven, Katarina and Brett effectively being called upon to don Mr. Munnings’ visor from Trumpton in order to safely examine the nabbed Tarranium Core and the gaggle of desperate criminals incarcerated on the appropriately named planet Desperus resembling some sort of unholy cross between a tribe of feral Noel Edmondses and eighties power metal band Manowar – that it seems only fair to give them their own celebratory sidebar instalment of It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed?. Incidentally, if you feel like thanking me for my efforts and getting something enjoyable into the bargain, you can find a very old feature on Mission To The Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan in my published anthology Well At Least It’s Free here, and frankly I would be delighted if you saw fit to laugh yourself senseless over just how wrong some of my educated guesswork was. Although that said, I sincerely hope certain individuals who got unaccountably irate over one of my observations slash insistences are ravenously consuming their words right now…

Great One Don’t Leave Us!!

Those of you who have been following It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed? will no doubt be more than aware that it is a longstanding contention of mine that anyone who glibly dismisses Katarina on the basis that she ‘doesn’t count’ evidently does not have the faintest shred of awareness of or interest in how television actually worked in the sixties; and if you are about to glibly dismiss this observation in and of itself, then I would direct you towards my more extensive pursuit of the argument here. In some ways this long-held assumption of her lack of worth and relevance is understandable, as for many years all that remained of Katarina’s incredibly brief sojourn in the TARDIS was fifty seven seconds of essentially wordless struggling with a captor in an airlock, but with the return of The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet we now effectively have seventy five percent plus of her total screen time and frankly it is no small pleasure to discover that this contentious standpoint regarding her relevance to Doctor Who‘s frequently rotating regular cast is largely borne out. Even when she is not speaking, Katarina is heavily involved in the surprising amount of on-screen activity and is the frequent recipient of close-ups, William Hartnell and Peter Purves both interact with Adrienne Hill in a manner that at least very heavily suggests that they considered her to be – no matter how fleetingly – the ‘new girl’, and perhaps most tellingly of all she gets the establishing shot in Devil’s Planet in the same sort of manner routinely afforded to Barbara, Susan, Polly and probably every single one of the rest of them too if anyone actually bothered to sit down to work it out. More to the point, we also get to see a lot more of Katarina as an actual character, and she not only comes across as more likeable and endearing than anyone could ever have predicted back when she really only existed as a handful of publicity photographs, but also enjoys a charming and atypical rapport with The Doctor, and in retrospect it does seem a shame she was so casually discarded for dramatic purposes. Mind you, at least we actually had some photos of her.

Stop – Look At Lizan

Along with the Physician from The Reign Of Terror, Dom Issigri, Marc Cory – although there is a case for arguing that technically we see him in The Nightmare Begins – Achilles and Menelaus, Lieutenant Sorba and pretty much everyone in The Massacre including William Hartnell in his dual role as The Abbott Of Amboise, for many years overexposition-toting Mavic Chen-disagreeing space monitor types Lizan and Roald topped the list of characters from the black and white era where nobody has any idea what they looked like thanks to lack of any known remaining visual material. While we still can’t say for certain whether Marc Cory was wearing his Space Security Service uniform or not – although don’t discount the possibility of some James Cooray Smith number-crunching giving us as close to the answer as we are going to get for the moment – we do now have the endearingly clunkily chatting duo resplendent in their Out Of The Unknown meets Moon Zero Two shift dress slash tunics, and while there are no real great surprises and they probably look more or less how most non-viewers will have imagined them anyway, it is still very much welcome to have one more question answered and a reminder that there’s hope for finding out exactly what the ‘Chatty Cheddar’ in Barnaby Spoot And The Exploding Whoopee Cushion looked like yet. Then there’s the not inconsiderable matter of what provoked their own sadly Cheddar-less Chen-debating chatter…

Insights And Global Interviews On The Crucial News Stories Of The Day With ‘Interviewer’

Lizan, as she both persistently affirms herself and is chortlingly mocked for by Roald, is keen to redirect the output of the equipment that they should rightfully be using to monitor signals from Space Security Service agents to catch the News on Channel 403, where Mavic Chen is due to outline his upcoming holiday plans for the benefit of the intergalactic viewing millions. Roald, on the other hand, wants to catch the ‘Venus-Mars Game’, yet despite somehow having over four hundred channels to choose from but no capacity for watching more than one of them at once, Lizan gets her way and they tune in to witness the Guardian of the Solar System revealing more or less absolutely nothing whatsoever. How this momentous moment in interplanetary broadcasting history was represented on screen was always one of the biggest, if not necessarily the most enthralling, mysteries surrounding the mislaid instalments of The Daleks’ Master Plan; even aside from the script and dialogue making it sound like it was veering between Panorama and Loose Women from one line to the next, there was no real indication of whether Michael Guest’s charmingly named ‘Interviewer’ actually appeared on screen or not. Perplexingly, the rediscovered visual evidence bears this confusion out virtually to the letter, with the cutaways to ‘Interviewer’ lending proceedings the gravitas of Newsnight while the jocular tone and swirly studio backdrop would be more at home on an edition of The One Show. Not exactly appointment viewing that would have you glued to your armchair. Although it probably depends which armchair…

HÅRTNEL – Chair, Black And White

The Magnetic Chair used to immobilise Bret Vyon – as it was invariably and consistently referred to as in pretty much any and every Doctor Who-related publication ever without exception – was yet another longstanding if low key unanswered question about The Daleks’ Master Plan. What did it look like, how exactly did it ‘immobilise’ Nicholas Courtney on his very first visit to the TARDIS set, and was it essentially just any old chair that the props department had pulled out of storage in the hope that William Hartnell using the word ‘magnetic’ a couple of times would do the the viewer-related heavy lifting for them? Although it is still spectacularly unclear where it came from and how it was hefted into the console room – especially considering that Steven was still at least partially incapacitated at that point – it does appear that the chair was specially made, and in a sufficiently futuristically ergonomic design style for it to actually somehow look like it is emanating a powerful magnetic field through sheer deployment of curved translucent slats alone. However, despite unquestionably looking thrillingly and/or terrifyingly futuristic in 1965, it now resembles nothing more than one of those chairs you will invariably walk past in Ikea and briefly find yourself imagining a good sit down in before clocking that it has the sort of price tag that would lead you to question who would or indeed could purchase it and why. Just imagine if it had stayed tantalisingly out of shot, though…

Don’t Carry On Screamers-ing

The other great remaining outstanding visual mystery concerning The Daleks’ Master Plan – well, apart from those cricket commentators in Volcano, but nobody even really knows for certain if they were even seen in vision or not so that particular circular argument-occasioning detail is probably best remaining an outstanding visual mystery for the moment -was what the Desperus Screamers, the purportedly bat-like wraiths haring out of the foliage that the escape-intent prisoners exercise such great caution in averting, actually looked like on screen. On this occasion, however, we did at least have something at least halfway approaching a photograph of them, depicting a couple of the indistinguishable convicts scrambling for cover as something resembling a very long party streamer with a negative rendering of the head of Howler from Drak Pack attached very aimlessly streaked down towards them. Which is why it comes as a n0t inconsiderable surprise to discover that we actually saw virtually nothing of them; a rattle of leaves, a twirl of fabric and it’s left to sunken-eyed ‘shocked’ reactions to do the rest of the work. We can only assumed that Douglas Camfield took one look at the completed prop, which more than likely resembled something that would have been rejected by Play School on ‘Useful Box Day’, and wisely elected to show it as little as possible. Meanwhile, as we are already on the subject of what doesn’t appear in the two rediscovered episodes…

Stopped – The Creatures!

When Day Of Armageddon, the second episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan, turned up in 2004, one of the major talking points was the fact that it finally featured the Daleks’ eccentrically dressed egomaniacal co-conspirators The Delegates in all their table-jumping glory. Although several of them get dialogue of some description, the lion’s share of the storyline was afforded to kale-bonced cloak-sporter Zephon, whose commitment to waiting outside the conference room until they had reached what he considered to be the optimal moment to make a Mary J. Blige-level entrance led to him being overpowered by The Doctor, who nabbed his cloak, infiltrated the assembly and hightailed it with the Tarranium Core, with the hapless Zephon screeching ‘STOP THE CREATURE! STOP THE CREATURE!’ in what can only be described as tepid pursuit. When The Daleks catch up with the seaweedy spanner in their works at the start of Devil’s Planet and issue a summary extermination, most observers and reconstructors have not unreasonably assumed that this takes place in the conference room and in front of the other Delegates; after all, the original script more or less states that this is exactly what happens. Instead, and almost certainly on account of practical constraints, the heated exchange takes place in a Dalek control room heavily featured elsewhere in the episode, and Zephon is the only one of the assortment of oddities who puts in an appearance. Presumably they just didn’t consider it worth their while forking out for yet another redesigned Celation.

So, that’s The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet, and although any passing members of Team Warrien may still find themselves desperately hoping for validation, what a tremendous feeling it is to be able to pencil in a little more of Doctor Who‘s tantalisingly lost history. Or at the very least to make some sarcastic jokes about Zephon.

Anyway, join us again next time for… well, who knows. A Bargain Of Necessity?

Buy A Book!

You can find a suitably epic-length look at The Daleks’ Master Plan from before we had The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet, and plenty more about black and white Doctor Who besides, in Well At Least It’s Free, a collection of some of my columns and features. Well At Least It’s Free is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. You could always employ Lizan and Roald as the new Nescafe Couple while you’re at it.

Further Listening

You can find Toby Hadoke – who played his own not inconsiderable part in bringing The Nightmare Begins and Devil’s Planet back for all of us to enjoy – on Looks Unfamiliar here and here.