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

doom magnificently. I’ll take this over any badly orchestrated fight scene or a randomly generated piece of jeopardy involving a pesky space door, because the writing is so skilful and the characters are so real.
    Derren Nesbitt continues to purr his way through his role as Tegana – he lays his nastiness out in the open but stops short of being too blatant, almost as if he’s willing everyone involved to accuse him of being a baddie. It’s most beguiling and, strangely, rather civilised. Tegana is a sneaky, manipulative presence who smiles, and murders while he smiles.
    I don’t think we’d ever get a story like this now. It’s not a criticism of New Who at all – it’s just that this adventure belongs to its period. But then, I’m not sure I’d want them to do it now either – Marco Polo exists (or rather, frustratingly doesn’t on video) as a period piece and a very fine example of its genre. And, indeed, of sixties television.
    Five Hundred Eyes (Marco Polo episode three)
    R: I agree with you, Toby, that one of the joys of watching this series in order is how there’s such a strange variety of styles on offer. Doctor Who still hasn’t worked out what it wants to be yet. There’s a glimpse here of a road not taken, I think – the series as educational children’s programme. We get a science lesson about condensation, and a story about the Hashashins which almost feels like the sort of insert you’d get in a magazine programme like Blue Peter. What’s great is how well these little bits of instruction are dropped in. The demonstration of how water is produced by temperature change is very clever, and the fact that Marco doesn’t respond with the cooing interest of a schoolchild – but instead the fury of a man who thinks that the travellers have tricked him – is spot on. And Ping-Cho’s mime dance is extraordinary, not because Zienia Merton has the grace of a ballerina (if she does, the telesnaps aren’t telling), but because all the action stops so the characters can sit about and watch a performance of a history lesson. The Doctor wants to get to the TARDIS with his new key, Barbara wants to tell Ian about her suspicions of Tegana – but then everyone seems to turn to camera and say, “Now we’ll take a short break whilst we have this word from our sponsor, the Education Board.” It’s absolutely splendid, full of charm and only adds to the richness of the setting. It’s as if we’re reading a history book, and are being sent to the back of the volume to read a particularly interesting footnote.
    And so it should come as no surprise that the plotting is influenced by children’s literature too. I rather love the idea of Barbara going off to the very caves where all the villains have chosen to meet and chat about their nefarious plots. It’s all so wonderfully Enid Blyton, you can just see the Famous Five getting mixed up in a similar scrape. But that’s where Doctor Who and its strange shifting tone leaps up and bites you – just as you recognise the genre, you cut to a sequence where Barbara is tied up on a cave floor, the painted faces of dead bandits staring down at her, as Mongols giggle about her and mime they’re going to slit her throat. That never happened to the kids on Kirrin Island.
    T: This is, I think, as close to Sydney Newman’s view of Doctor Who as we’re ever likely to get – and Lucarotti here fulfils the brief perfectly, carefully placing the “educational” elements into his script with elegance and panache. One is expected to pay attention to things like plot when reviewing television, but if an episode has no plot and yet still manages to entertain, move and excite the viewer, then it’s done its job. The history lessons here aren’t the patronising asides like the safety lessons at the end of Inspector Gadget, but they augment the story and the characters in an interesting way. Marco needs to have the process of condensation explained to him – and so