Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) by Robert Shearman, Toby Hadoke Page A

remote planet, but on Earth; the singing sands are genuinely eerie. And it’s a reminder that at this point in the series, much of the true wonder comes from history rather than just science fantasy. When Susan looks up at the sky and bemoans the fact they’re not exploring distant galaxies, it sounds almost odd and irrelevant, quite rightly so – and within minutes, she’s marvelling at the beauty of the Gobi desert.
    And it’s this push-pull effect of Lucarotti’s writing – that he invites us to stand back and be a slack-jawed tourist one moment, then realise how much danger we’re in the next – that gives this instalment its edge. It’s an episode about nothing more grand than sand and water – swords are drawn, but only in jest, and a king is killed, but only on a chessboard. And yet, there’s such an earnestness to the real-world threat of thirst that the closing minutes, in which Ian persuades Marco to gamble all on a sprint to a distant oasis, are brilliantly tense. What’s so remarkable about the confidence of this story is that, only two episodes in, it feels so tonally different from what we’ve seen before, so much more magisterial somehow. Doctor Who has become a road movie of sorts, and, set as this story is to run for seven episodes, you can somehow sense that this adventure could be the basis for the entire series. Had Sydney Newman come up with the idea of a group of contemporary people travelling not through time and space in a police box, but journeying to Cathay alongside Marco Polo, then I think the premise would have sustained itself for quite a while.
    William Hartnell has only one line this episode, but you hardly notice his absence because Mark Eden (playing Marco) and William Russell effortlessly take on the lead roles. (I love the explanation for the Doctor being missing from the action – he’s usually unconscious or captured in stories to come, but here it’s because he’s sulking, which is delightful!) Carole Ann Ford is very good this week too. In this story alone does a writer think back to that strange girl in the classroom who didn’t quite add up – the one who knew the future and was a scientific genius, but still danced to John Smith and the Common Men on her transistor radio. The portrait of Susan as a mixed-up kid who can fantasise about the metal seas on Venus, but so desires an identity that she’s fallen in love with sixties England, has been rather left by the wayside; she’s been reduced somewhat to a girl who’ll scream for her grandfather. But it’s really very endearing here that she’ll dig that crazy desert in her sixties slang. It all sounds unreal and self-conscious, of course, just as Ace did with her toecurlingly unlikely eighties yoof speak 25 years later – the difference here being that it’s meant to be.
    T: The marvellous soundscape created for the titular sandstorm is reminiscent of the Radiophonic Workshop’s unnerving crepitations in Quatermass and the Pit (the only programme to have ever rivalled Doctor Who in my affections). It’s uncanny the way the elements themselves become the threat, and the consequent moaning, roaring, screeching aural assault suggests something alien and dangerous just as much as anything we encountered on Skaro. Ian’s line that “it sounds like all the devils in hell are laughing” is wonderful, and underlines my previous assertion that John Lucarotti is cleverly making the past not so much another country as another planet. Fandom has always considered Lucarotti as a writer of evocative historicals, but he’s far more sophisticated with the brief than is generally accepted.
    No, there’s not an awful lot of incident in this episode, but it still works because Lucarotti is cunningly engaging in an exercise in mood. The manoeuvring of the chess game between Ian and Marco, the lurking shadows in the threatening night-time, the horses acting uneasy – all of this builds up the sense of menace and impending