The Quatermass Experiment: Part 1 ("Contact Has Been Established")

"It's one of them things. They dropped one."

This is, sadly, one of only two episodes of this six part serial that I will be blogging; the others don't exist. They will never be found, whatever Philip Morris has been up to, as they were never telerecorded in the first place, which is a shame. Television in 1953 was a very ephemeral medium, all of it live aside from a few pre-recorded film sequences. For repeats, the actors would simply repeat their performances. You saw it once and it was gone.

1953 was a long time ago and looks it; the picture quality, naturally, is rubbish and the long scenes are there because it simply wasn't possible to include more than two or three different scenes. Television was very much theatre with a camera pointed at it. There's a scene break here where the picture fades to black and stays black for what seems like ages.

Nevertheless, this is a superb piece of television scripting and production, dripping with atmosphere, however limited the live performers may be, and a reminder of the brilliance of both Rudolph Cartier and the great Nigel Kneale. This is a world in which science is admirable and scientists great men, but only because science is a desperate and fragile attempt to impose order on a terrifying world in which dark things lurk at the edges, not least human nature. It's refreshing, though, to see the scientific talk isn't being dumbed down in any way. And this is an era, what perhaps we can call the Dan Dare era, when it was possible to imagine Britain as a space pioneer. Sputnik lay four years ahead. To people in 1953 the achievements of the British Experimental Rocket Group were scarcely imaginable.

The plot is simple enough- a rocket has been sent into space, gone missing, but has now returned under mysterious circumstances. There is much tension in this scenario, later to be lovingly ripped off by Doctor Who in The Ambassadors of Death. Only in future episodes will it become apparent that something else has come back with Caroon.

And yet, the real unpleasantness is very much on Earth. A useless civil servant busybody is there to annoy and to serve the plot function of being exposited at, while newspaper columnist Jimmy Fullalove (a very young Paul Whitsun-Jones) exhibits all the cynicism of today's red top tabloids. (And this angle, that of the press,would also come to be lovingly ripped off by Doctor Who in The Web of Fear.)

We also have some comedy working class characters and a dear old lady played by Katie Johnson of The Ladykillers fame. She is truly from another age; IMDb tells me she was born in 1878 and made her stage debut in 1894!

Sadly, as but one more episode exists, we won't get to consider the whole thing. We can only judge the first two episodes, but this at least is a brilliant episode. One more to go, though...

Doctor Who: Black Orchid

Part One

“Medium pace? Slow?”

“Fast.”

“Top hole!”

Another script by Terence Dudley, and I’ve no idea what to expect. Will it be another good ‘un, like Four to Doomsday? Or more drivel in the style of K-9 and Company? One thing’s for certain: he certainly watched Brideshead Revisited on ITV last year. It’s the 1920s, and the BBC does this period even more splendidly than it did the 17^th century in the last story. Everything about this story looks sumptuous. It’s just that its roots are showing rather obviously, what with its being set largely in an aristocratic country house in the ‘20s.

I had to laugh at the TARDIS landing a mere second after it would have been seen by the porter on the platform. Still, it’s a charming setting from the off. So much so that apparently even Tegan has now decided she’s not in such a hurry to get back to Heathrow after all, and wants to stick around a bit. All well and good, but it feels rather sudden.

There’s dialogue about the Great Fire of London which our heroes started at the end of the last story, which tends to deepen the sense of paradox even further- apparently the fire would have happened anyway. Eh? Even if the Terileptils had been left to get on with things? Perhaps we can retcon this to be a fixed point in time, but the only way the fire would have happened anyway is if the Terileptils’ plan was inevitably doomed, which rather does away with any sense of threat.

Anyway, back on topic. Our heroes are unexpectedly picked up by Lord Cranleigh’s chauffeur, and driven away in a rather fab looking car. The Doctor is expected, and is charged with a task of the utmost seriousness; Cranleigh himself is out for a duck, and his team is in the midst of a batting collapse. Can the Doctor save the day?

It’s an odd premise, and above all an odd idea for a Doctor Who story. This is often stated to be the first “pure historical” since The Highlanders, and obviously that’s true in the literal sense. But it doesn’t really belong in the same category as all those stories from all those years ago, being neither a comedy nor a serious rumination on history. I suppose it could be said to be a pastiche, doing for Brideshead Revisited what The Smugglers did for Doctor Syn, but this is no swashbuckler. No, this is a real oddity- not necessarily a bad thing, and this season has shown a commendable variety in types of story. 

There’s a lot of fun with the period, with words like “mater” and “ripping” being thrown around with abandon, Traken being “near Esher” and the party scenes are great fun, with Nyssa at last allowed to let her hair down a bit courtesy of Anne’s scheme. Plus Michael Cochrane’s great, and Tegan’s having fun, and is thus great again.

But after the initial fun of the party stops and the plot starts, it’s all quite slow, with the scenes of the Doctor lost in the priest hole dragging interminably.

Part Two

“Brazil?”

“Where the nuts come from…”

There’s some fun at the start, with Adric being a pig and Nyssa having fun, but sadly things become very tedious indeed as soon as the Doctor is accused of murder. I hate it when the device of our heroes being wrongly accused of things is used as a cheap dramatic hook- it’s lazy, and frustrating in a way which simply isn’t at all entertaining. The story never recovers from this, with the final revelation being that the story may look like Brideshead Revisited but it is in fact Jane Eyre with a touch of King Kong. But the lack of any significant clues early on in the story means the resolution comes out of left field. 

It’s also annoying to once more see pretty much most of the characters in the story being invited into the TARDIS for a short hop back to the house. This sort of thing is starting to become a real problem.

So overall, in spite of some charmingly amusing scenes at the beginning, in the end the story doesn’t really work dramatically. It looks great, but left me feeling rather annoyed with things. 2/5.