1.25: The Celestial Toymaker
In which it’s all just a game, and the production team try to fire Doctor Who.
Broadcast: April 1966
Watched: August 2019
1. The Celestial Toyroom
Can never decide with these ones. I quite like them in a warm bath/effort-free sort of way. It feels like they’d be better with visuals but maybe that’d just demand more attention for something not actually that interesting.
Anyway. It is a change for the series I think – the first god-like being, and the Doctor has encountered him before. It also works like fantasy or a dream, rather than sci fi. Feels like an expansion of the series’ range and cosmology.
2. The Hall of Dolls
More of the same. It is just the same episode isn’t it? Only with less Hartnell, because he’s been turned invisible. Had he stormed off? [One of the occasional interjections, courtesy of James Cooray-Smith: “At one point Hartnell’s contract ended with this story; Wiles and Tosh wanted to have the Doctor, when he came back in The Final Test, be played by a different actor, but BBC Head of Serials Gerard Savoury vetoed that.”]
The bit where Steven saves Dodo feels like it would end in a snog now. We don’t get enough about the fact that our heroes winning leaves other people trapped. And Steven doesn’t care, the selfish prick.
This would be an obvious one to animate wouldn’t it?
3. The Dancing Floor
Dodo flirting with Sergeant Rugg is I think the first instance of the long tradition of Dr Who companions trying to flirt their way out of trouble. Interesting that she can see the opponents as real people but Steven can’t. Perhaps because she, too, is just an unconvincing cardboard cutout.
There are odd moments when it feels like Steven and Dodo are being written as a bickering couple.
I quite enjoy this one as a single story but if you didn’t like the sudden shift in tone it must have been slightly off-putting that all this weird toy stuff went on and on for weeks.
4. The Final Test
This week, we have the video! Actually seeing it, which i have never done before, has told me a number of things.
It looks quite good. There’s a special effect when the Toymaker materialises!
It’s cultural appropriation not racism: the Toymaker isn’t a white actor in yellowface, it’s a white guy dressing up in Chinese robes and we’re meant to judge him for it.
Hartnell being replaced by a disembodied voiceless hand is far weirder and more noticeable than it seems to be on radio.
The sequences in which the Trilogic game moves automatically must have been a right ballache to film.
Still can’t decide if it would work better if we had the tapes.
Ooh Hartnell’s back!
Dodo... It’s the same trick as with Vicki and Steven isn’t it? “We won’t write a character, we’ll just let the actor fill in the gaps.” But this time the actor isn’t up to it.
The cliffhanger of “the Doctor hurts his tooth” is brilliant.
I don’t think the concept of cultural appropriation was on anyone’s radar in the sixties.
A defence of Jackie Lane, if I may. Vicki had two episodes setting up her backstory, Steven was fighter pilot from the future when WWII was in living memory. Dodo was supposed to be lovable urchin who steals the Doctors heart, but the loveable urchin bit was dropped when people rang the BBC switchboard to complain that she would encourage the nations youth to be cockney and insubordinate. So her backstory was generic young woman with plot twist Hugenot ancestry. In the circumstances I think Dame Diana Rigg might have struggled!
Don’t get me started on the Extended Universe treatment of Dodo.